Something's I've come to notice with the TSC chicks... The cuckoo Marans
Morning Elly!
So I saw you want to learn permaculture, cooking and poultry breeding. I can tell you from my own experience, you do not need an official class to learn any of those subjects. Also from my own experiences, I can tell you being self taught on a subject is very rewarding. It can at times be difficult, but once you grasp a subject that you once where clueless too, nothing can stop you.
Cooking would probably be the easiest and fastest to learn, especially with the internet. Plus you already have a rather good understanding of plants that can be eaten. Do you have a favorite style of food? One "good" thing about cooking is you can more or less see the results instantly (gardening and breeding are not an impatient persons hobbies). Youtube is great at teaching yourself just about anything, but there are TONS of cooking shows.
Plant breeding is one of the most fun and difficult things I've done. Anyone can make a cross just like in chickens, but to make something you are proud of takes a lot of work, and likely a lot of failure first. In my opinion, observation is one of the best tools a breeder can have/use. Sometimes the subtle differences are the difference between good and great. Plants are not chickens and chickens are not plants, but breeding is breeding. If you want to have a good understanding of breeding, I would suggest you read up on Mendel's Law. https://hobart.k12.in.us/jkousen/Biology/mendel.htm
As mentioned, chickens are not plants, but Mendel's Laws will greatly help you understand genetics. In plant breeding, it is basically the holy grail of information. The site I posted will help educate you, but to have a better understanding of it, I would suggest finding a good book. IF I can find my book (don't hold your breath) I'll send it to you, but I've not seen it in a few years.
Permaculture... Well to me that's just landscaping with edible plants. Fancy gardening if you will. It's not a subject I excel in in general, lol, my garden is not really fancy. You already grow a lot of food though, so it should be a rather easy subject to play with. If you'd be interested, I can make a list of the seeds I have. Some won't do well in your climate, but I'd be more than willing to send you any of the ones you like. I can't really help much on the subject of permaculture, but I can put some genetics in your stash to help get it started. None are GMO, most are heirlooms, and some are pretty rare.
I really hope you pursue one if not all 3 subjects. They do all kind of go hand in hand with each other. The permaculture can feed you and the chickens. You can breed and harvest the chickens. Then you get to cook them all! Sounds like a good skill set to have.
They are also all subjects that you can learn without the use of a classroom.
If you are ever interested, a lot of top colleges (including a few Ivy League Universities) offer free pre requisite classes. They are not for college credit, more of a prep class, but they are taught m]by college professors, available online, and free. If you would be interested in that, I'll find the relevant links to go forward with it.
When I was younger than you, I wasted a lot of my education, and have spent the better half of my adult life trying to make up for it. You still have plenty of time to take advantage of. Read, read, read! I wish I had taken that advice when i was your age. You do not need a university to tell you, you are smart.
Morning Trim!
Sorry for the long delay in response, I am by no means trying to ignore you, I've just had a lot of conversations to keep up with in the last few hours.
Thank you for the encouragement!
I really appreciate it!
I'm going to be doing some research on the internet this winter when I get some time.
My brother and I actually tried to start a food forest in the duck's pen this last spring. We planted a variety of wild edibles native to our area, including wild currants, gooseberries, bullberries, plums, and service berries.
We also have a bunch of squash growing in there too, but the ducks are eating it all for the most part.
We were thinking that maybe the two of them would work together - the ducks eat the pests that attack the plants and also the ducks would fertilize the plants and in return we would get fruit and berries that we could eat.
Well, I guess you could say it kinda got strategic utter neglect, if you know what I mean.
With 2 acres of vegetable gardens having to go in at the same time when we were trying to work on that, it got neglected. I kinda lost hope that we'd ever get anywhere with it after awhile, but after talking to you about it, it's getting me excited again! On the subject of learning how to breed poultry, I can't truly experiment with that with my birds on my own because I have my parents controlling me too much, there.
I already have to worry about if I'm even going to be able to feed them properly and that's bad enough.
All the best to you and yours and thank you for the encouragement!
I will definitely be researching some of those things this winter, I'm pretty sure.
Have a great day!
Elly
