New Baby Chickens - Dual Purpose Animals

We have the cutest little critters in a bin right now, and we have already built a house for them. All 8 of them have names and they are all (hopefully) females. They are the chicks that we bought from feed stores in the last 3 weeks.

Why are chickens important? How do they help with gardening?

Chicks can do some really good, helpful things for the gardens. They can till gardens and they can also produce chicken manure which is great food for plants.

The neighbors have chickens and those little birds are over here all the time. They love our yard. I am glad they come over and I provide food for them to eat while they are here. They also serve as a natural insecticide as they spend hours looking for bugs in the ground. At first, that sounded gross to me. I'm eating an animal that eats bugs. So, therefore I am eating bugs. Well, maybe in a sense I am, but bugs provide good protein for the chickens.

The chickens also till our yard. There are places where the soil has been seriously turned over. I have to give the credit to the neighborly chickens for that.

I just used up a bag of chicken manure that I had. Probably won't have to buy that anymore!

Ginger, our Rhode Island Red

The chickens already have a section of the yard fenced off for them. They can roam that part of the yard and mow our lawn for us! The grass will be good for them to eat.

What a neat cycle in nature God made. We all are made from the 'dust of the ground'. We eat plants that grow out of the ground. Chickens do as well. Then they have the whole yard to use for their bathroom and the grass gets fertilized by their waste products. That helps the plants to grow and we eat those plants and the cycle continues.

This will be their new home in a couple of weeks. The weather needs to warm up some more and they need to have a full body of feathers to keep them completely warm before they can live here.

Of course, I almost forgot, one of the best things chickens give us is their eggs. Eggs are full of nourishment. Don't listen to the Old School of nutrition that says eggs give hardening of the arteries. New studies have been done and have found how powerful the nourishment is that we get from eggs.

Most eggs are either white or brown. Some are speckled. I opted for getting two chickens that will give either blue eggs or blue/green eggs. Some eggs are large. A few are huge. And then some are just small or medium. Most of the eggs I will get will be large.

There is a 98% chance that all my chicks are females. And they don't need a rooster to produce eggs, unless one wants fertilized eggs.

Huge Sweet Potato

I was digging in the garden today and felt a rather large sweet potato buried in the dirt. Actually, I was pulling out weeds by the roots, and found this sweet potato. Had to get a shovel to dig it out with.

As I work with cleaning out the garden bed, I get a little produce here and there. Here is a compilation of what I collected recently.

Am ready to pull up some of the carrots. I planted 3 different colors. So far the yellow has definitely done the best. The purple did ok. The beets really didn't grow well, for some reason.

I have a few snow pea plants that are bearing fruit right now. Not much though. What can you expect from 4 or 5 little plants?

Lemon tomatoes are growing ok. They had brown spots on them, but that might be due to the cold weather we have had this year. The plants made it through the cold, but the tomatoes that were on the plants did not do all that great.

While I was at Tractor Supply yesterday, I picked up some strawberry plants. Most of the last strawberry plants I had died. I have 2 or 3 that are still alive. What I didn't realize was that in the package (which is labeled non-GMO), there are 20 strawberry plants. Now I have to find places to plant them.

All of the squash plants I planted died. They all seemed to have some kind of virus and all appeared to die from the same thing. I planted cucumbers in a new garden bed and will see how they do.