Ladies and gentlemen, we have compost! If you are going to keep urban chickens, maintaining a good composting system is pretty important. We clean our coop out once a week by raking out the old straw and laying down new, fluffy straw. The old stuff needs to go somewhere and it is filled with fabulous manure. The city yard debris bin would be a terrible
Preparing the Vegetable Beds
During a break in the rain showers, I spent an afternoon outside turning compost. We have one of those black dome compost bins that we fill and turn throughout the year. The food trimmings combined with the used straw from the hen house make the perfect combination. But after three years of composting, I have taken very little out of the bin. While preparing the
The Great Sheet Mulching 2007 (Part III of III)
Okay, I am tired of sheet mulching. I am going to pretend this is the final chapter of the project, but in reality I still have another load of wood chips coming this week so I can finish spreading a more presentable mulch material over our brown, soggy leaf layer. I think the neighbors would probably appreciate that. The City of Portland delivered collected leaves
The Great Sheet Mulching 2007 (Part II of III)
I knew I would be doing all of the sheet mulching alone this weekend. I also knew the weather forecast was rain all weekend. To say I haven’t really been looking forward to this weekend would be an understatement. However, I had two gigantic heaps of wood chips on our front yard and someone had to move it. Saturday morning got rolling and I made
The Great Sheet Mulching 2007 (Part I of III)
Our plan is to sheet mulch our entire front and backyard. We want to eliminate all of the grass in our yard and replace it with fruit bearing trees/shrubs and beneficial insect attracting plants. Here is a quick recap of why we don’t want grass: Labor intensive – I want to spend my weekend leisure time putzing around the in garden, not mowing my lawn