Chickens, chickens everywhere!
Last year was our first year gardening, and we learned quite a few lessons the hard way. What kind of foods to grow. The amount of foods we should plan on. How much space we actually need to grow the things we will eat. Most importantly perhaps, was how much we needed to safeguard against our chickens eating everything we planted. When we first moved to the Tri-Cities area, we had no intention of becoming gardeners or chicken farmers. We made some incredible friends right away that were very focused on creating homesteads for themselves, so their infectious attitude about self- sufficiency bled over to us. We threw up some raised beds, as we live on a slope, and bought a bunch of moo-poo to fill them with. We planted everything we had ever enjoyed from a grocery store with very little regard for space or how much of it we would eat. Our yield in the first year was sufficient, but we had too much of some foods and not enough of others. And the chickens… This year we adjusted quantities and safeguarding against our winged scavengers, and I would say, really figured a lot more out. Next year we will expand the garden again, and we feel much more confident about how our base of knowledge will help us work towards the self- sufficiency goal.
