181–190 of 879 posts
Build vs buy. You can be me and build an in-house flock, pay $100/mo in feed, $500 for a livestock guard dog, $100/mo for dog food, $500 for a solar electric fence, and then $500 for a few coops, etc. It'll pay off before I'm dead, I think! -- right? Right?!
And you aren't even factoring in a keeper/guardian, that's a full-time wage.
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I'm fortunate the prior owners have most things setup. They were older so some of the maintenance around trimming is behind, but I am learning. My problem now is, I don't know what to do with all the oranges. I've been giving them to the local restaurants in town, but I don't think they even want any more. Good problem to have I guess :) Next up is learning how to make marmalade.
You should have a deep chest or big standing freezer away from the kitchen for long term storage .. somewhere cool that it can do fine in for six hours+ if you lose power. Oranges, yep - marmalade (castor sugar + other stuff, and jars) OR skin | cut away peel and pulp, save juice and freeze for later in the year; drinking ot adding to cakes, etc. Lazy cooking == slow cookers once every two weeks or so, make a lot of…
I also have to say how awesome it is when I'm cooking and need a lemon so I walk outside and pick one off the tree. Harvesting and pressing olive oil for the first time in the coming fall will be interesting.
> Keep that up and you'll be living like a 1930's off grid veteran in no time ;-)
The house is old enough and lacking enough modern features that it already feels a bit like 1930s haha
Thanks for the conversation!
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Past generations of my family used to name animals that they raised for meat after dishes they could end up in. There are practices people can engage in to distance themselves from the animals they interact with. But also some people who raise animald for meat hire a person to collect them for slaughter in part because of the emotional toll involved. As to your last question.. I think you might be confused? People do…
> People don't like to kill in general. I used to believe this. Then I came up with a twisted question to ask people (I am fun at parties) The question is something like, if you had to come up with a name for someone to kill within twenty four hours can you do so? The conditions are you get a full and unconditional pardon. It won't be held against you at all. If need be, we will even arrange it such that the person c…
Your question is like a game, and people you ask will most probably treat it as such. People 'kill' in videogames, but most would not like to actually kill in real life.
The US chicken market (not necessarily eggs specifically) was in the Morgan Spurlock documentary follow up to "Supersize me", and it looked like the chicken "mafia" controlled the business.[3]
[1] https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/search?query=eggs&inpu... [2] https://groceries.asda.com/search/eggs [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me_2:_Holy_Chicken!
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I've had chickens for probably 15 years now, starting with 3 and ending up with about 20 (mixture of hybrids, pedigrees and rescued battery/farmed hens) and 2 geese. This happens a lot with chickens. Chickens are a gateway drug to more chickens. If you have a few chickens, they take about as much looking after as a rabbit - keep their food and water topped up, and clean them out once a week. I agree that you won't ma…
Is the paperwork in the UK (I'm assuming you're UK-based, hence £) particularly onerous? I heard things were getting more complicated if you just wanted a few chickens in your garden.
[0] https://www.gardenersworld.com/how-to/maintain-the-garden/ke...
As someone who once built a large coop [1] then just bought a pre-built shed for the 2nd coop, it's definitely _not_ the _monetary_ solution. You will probably lose money overall for quite some time. I'm still probably underwater. BUT, there are definite upsides: - Chickens are very sweet animals, and are quite intelligent. You will grow to love all the silly things they do. You can pet them, they are super soft, and…
Definitely it's not about the cost and convenience. And I haven't seen it discussed much, which tells a lot that the HN-ers are city dwellers with little experience in the countryside life. But the biggest, nastiest, deepest problem with anything animal is ... shit. Animals produce shit and lots of animals produce loads of shit. And chickens don't have the notion of "this area is for eating, this one's for shitting",…
Yes. I volunteered at a Raptor conservancy. Fantastic animals and being trusted to help fly them in a display was one of the best things I've ever done. It made up for all of the poop cleaning. At least owls have the courtesy to cough up pellets containing the little bones of their prey - it reduces the poop volume and the pellets dry into hard nuggets that easy to pick up (and fun to pull apart later). Black Kites were okay-ish - most of their poop ended up on easily cleanable wall sheets behind their (outward facing) perches. But vultures. yeech. They are fascinating from a social perspective and some were very playful - pulling on your bootlaces until they were knotted, for example, but their poop is gross and voluminous. They also can use defensive projectile vomiting if they feel threatened, which is as (un)pleasant as it sounds.
But overall, great animals to be around.
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> But the culls are smaller, and so the impact lessened. The problem becomes more distributed. Presumably the risk of spread of bird flu to humans increases though, due to the increased amount of contact. And then the increased risk of mutation leading to human to human transmission. Bit wild to me that we don't seem to be taking this very seriously other than "o no my eggs" given we just had a pandemic a few years a…
Arguably all the awful and crazy politics around COVID-19 has led directly to the scenario of people really not willing to take new pandemics seriously.
As someone who once built a large coop [1] then just bought a pre-built shed for the 2nd coop, it's definitely _not_ the _monetary_ solution. You will probably lose money overall for quite some time. I'm still probably underwater. BUT, there are definite upsides: - Chickens are very sweet animals, and are quite intelligent. You will grow to love all the silly things they do. You can pet them, they are super soft, and…
> I'm told the eggs taste way better, I don't really notice it because I really only eat my own eggs, but perhaps I just got used to them At 2 years old my son could blind taste test tell the difference between my neighbor's chicken's eggs and store bought eggs. He refused to eat eggs (still doesn't) until we convinced him to try one of the eggs from our neighbor's chicken's. He liked that egg. Every time we've tried…
She eats her eggs and asks for more. If we run out and I fry up some store bought ones, she refuses to eat them - even when I don't tell her where they're from.
Same goes for chicken meat from the grocery store vs. pasture raised broilers from another neighbor.
When it happened the first time it was something of a canary-in-the-coalmine situation for me.
As someone who once built a large coop [1] then just bought a pre-built shed for the 2nd coop, it's definitely _not_ the _monetary_ solution. You will probably lose money overall for quite some time. I'm still probably underwater. BUT, there are definite upsides: - Chickens are very sweet animals, and are quite intelligent. You will grow to love all the silly things they do. You can pet them, they are super soft, and…
Some other downsides: - The smell… Chicken crap is horrible. Our neighbour has chickens, we have flies. Lots of black flies. - Bye bye garden… My dad has two chickens (did I mention the smell?) that free roam and absolutely tear up everything looking for a tasty bite. - Can’t eat the eggs This isn’t necessarily a chicken problem but mostly a problem with chemical industry. We’ve had a lot of PFOA/PFAS contamination a…
Though like many discussions about microplastics today, where "higher levels", and what microplastics, cross over into actual health issues is vague.