Hip Chick Digs

Up the street from our apartment in Brooklyn is a community garden I have admired for awhile called 6/15 Green. Several community gardens are located throughout the New York area and it is always a delightful surprise to see them tucked in between tall buildings. This one has some fruit trees and many irregular-shaped garden [...]

[Read more →]

A garden is only going to be as good as its soil quality, which is why we gardeners are obsessed with building better soil. Many of us are not blessed with perfect soil where we have planted our gardens. We also do not have the luxury of an endless gardening budget, allowing us to bring [...]

[Read more →]

I have been learning a lot about various composting methods over the last few months, mostly from my volunteer hours at the Urban Farm. I personally use both a bin compost system and vermi-compost system (i.e. worm-composting) on my own little urban homestead, but for major operations I was introduced to the “earth tub“. This [...]

[Read more →]

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. [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]