1/4 Acre Homestead #1: Worm castings & plot planning
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 8 фев 2025
- We typically take as much of a homesteading/farming break as we can from Thanksgiving through the 2nd week of January. Now it's the 3rd week of January and time to start getting going again.
In this video, we take you behind the scenes and show how we begin prepping for seed starting. We then give you a seat to our entire 1/4 acre plot planning session so you can hear our thought process behind why we put everything the way that we did.
Thank you for showing the thought process and the brainstorming around the plot planning. I kinda geeked out on that. The proper placement is more than just "getting in where you fit in" but it is also living with it. The logistics of moving around in the space and "servicing/maintenance". Only question I have is around the laying chickens sharing space with the pigs. Is the thought that piglets that grow up around chickens will leave the chickens alone when the pigs get older? Anyway, great work and I am so excited to see this progress. Thank you and keep up the great work!!
I'm happy to hear the planning section was helpful! Regarding the chickens & pigs, yes - if we put mature chickens in with the piglets from the start, the piglets should get accustomed to them (when they're too small to catch & eat them) and then leave the chickens alone as they get older. We've only had a couple pigs (out of 80-100) eat chickens over the years, most of them leave the chickens alone. The problem is, the chickens get accustomed to the pigs too and will sometimes get a little too comfortable, no longer guarding against them. Pigs try to eat everything. Eventually, you're likely to have an aloof chicken get eaten by a curious pig. But.. It's really nice to have the chickens in with the pigs because they keep the flies down.
@sunsethighwayfarm that is so cool. I didn't even think about how they would help with the flies!
I love your seed storage container idea!
Love the thought process. We started out with a similar chook run (chicken run) until we saw someone who used their chickens to tractor up the used seasonal veggie beds after each harvest. We divided our veggie beds into two sections. One we are planting in and one that the chickens are in. We plan to switch the chooks over every 6 months so that they can scratch up the old beds and poop everywhere. Meant we could gain some extra space back while utilising the chooks digging power. Hopefully it works!
Could you lay cardboard and woodchips down for walkways instead of mowing? That would mean your walkways can be smaller, giving you more growing room?
Thank you! That's a cool way to put your chickens to work in the garden! I'm a little too particular about the garden to allow the chickens in - they spread the compost everywhere and force me to re-establish the beds over and over which I don't really want to do. Instead, we shovel the compost from our chicken runs into a wheel barrow and spread it on the garden beds by hand 🤪
We may do cardboard and wood chips eventually but we will start with weed barrier. We have a very thick bunching grass that grows right through cardboard and wood chips so we have to kill it with something stronger before we can use cardboard. But.. we are going to shrink down the walkway to 4'!
@@sunsethighwayfarm Nice! Looking forward to following your journey!
We have a fruit fly issue in our part of the world so we are hoping that by allowing the chooks into our old vege patch that they will potentially dig up any fruit fly larvae.