Putting Chickens To Work As Compost Sifters

April 2, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 5 Comments

All of our animals have jobs that we feel they have to do to contribute toward the success of our little homestead. Sailor, our dog, keeps the deer and raccoons away. The cat, Willa, is our mouser. The bees pollinate our crops and produce honey. The worms produce beautiful fertilizer. Even the guinea pig, Gusteau, provides pellets that can go directly into our garden.

Sailor the water dog works hard to tree coons and send the deer bounding away from our gardens.

But it’s the chickens who are the true workhorses on our property. Of course, their eggs are a staple in our diet. But we use their chicken yard as a closed loop composting system where our weeds go in, the scratch them up, add their own fertilizer, and we excavate the yard throughout the year for the beautiful fertilized compost they provide. But here’s one more thing they do for us: The produce a perfectly-sifted specialty compost that we can scatter around our lawns and gardens that rivals any commercial compost out there.

Here’s how it works. Their yard is penned in by 2-inch chicken wire, and it’s placed up on a hill where the backside of the hen yard has a 3-foot slope behind it. The chickens, daily, dig and scratch near the fence, constructing their dust baths and looking for tasty bits to peck at in the yard materials we throw inside.

As their scratching activity breaks down the organic matter we throw inside their yard, their scratching serves to sift and push the small composted materials through the wire fence, which acts like a sieve. On the outside of the hen yard, we have a slope of pure black, composted and perfectly-sifted humus fertilizer, ready for the gardens and lawns.

All I have to do is show up with a bucket every few days, and collect the fluffy sifted compost to use around the property. Thank you, girls, for your hard work! We appreciate your efforts and contribution toward making the world’s most beautiful sifted compost there is.

My Zero-Work Perennial Vegetables

April 1, 2016April 1, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 10 Comments

I love my perennial veggies. My whole food garden, each spring, is designed around the little edibles that emerge, many as new unplanned-for surprises.

Corn mache is among the first edibles to appear in the garden. I let them go to seed each spring so they can come up around the garden next winter. If you haven’t tried corn mache, it’s a hearty salad green you’ve likely seen in fancy restaurants. It can be eaten as part of your raw salad or you can stir fry it. We also throw it in smoothies for an extra jolt of green veggie vitamins.

Jerusalem artichokes: Plant them once and you’ll get them year after year as you’re sure to miss a few tubers during harvest. These can be harvested all winter long.

Walking onions: These are one of my favorite perennial veggies for the garden. They’re an heirloom variety of onion that produces a long scape with an onion flower on the end that turns into a bulb. Just let it reach for the sky and then bend over and plant itself right into the earth again, walking its way around your garden. This is why my garden changes design each year. I modify the shape and configuration of beds based upon where the onions have walked and where other vegetables have reseeded themselves. I simply weed around my perennial food.
You eat the walking onion greens, which are a full-bodied onion flavor, very strong, and can be used as an onion substitute in any recipe.

Chives, Garlic, Shallots: Chives are a perennial, so just plant a row and they’ll reappear each spring. Put them in your perennial beds, too, as their beautiful allium-family purple-blue flowers add color to every garden. I also leave a few garlic and shallot heads in the garden to see if a few will sprout the next spring, and of course they always do.

Brassicas: Here’s a confession — I have kale plants in my vegetable garden that are 2 and 3 years old. They look like dinosaurs but I just keep pinching them back and they keep producing leaves and little flower heads which are perfectly edible. They’re like mini broccolis and go beautifully in a frittata. Letting a few flower, too, adds color and pollen/nectar for our honeybees.

Arugula: You never have to replant arugula if you plant it once and let it go to seed. Just watch those seeds sprout next spring, thin them out, and you’ll have a hearty rocket salad in no time.

Strawberries: As in all berries, they’re a fruit of the earth that will come back year after year. The photo above shows how I’ve left some arugula in with the strawberries to commingle with each other this season.

Swiss Chard, Kale, Collards: I put chard in the same category as my kale and collards. If I just let them go to seed and sprinkle all of the seeds around, a few hardy plants will come forth in the spring. Here’s a beautiful specimen that volunteered itself this spring, right in with some corn mache.

You never really need to buy kale, collard, or chard seeds if you just let them go to seed and replant themselves.

Mint: Mint always comes back, and you’ll likely have to whack it back a bit to prevent your whole garden from becoming a mintpalooza. Ours moves around a bit, but we let it stretch its legs because we’re perennial plant nurturers, and let our veggies do some walkin’ so they find their favorite spots to thrive.

Potatoes: It goes without saying (but I’m saying it anyway) that when you plant potatoes, you’ll have them for life, in the same bed you originally planted them in. There will always be little taters you somehow missed during your harvest. And they’ll reappear next year to bring a smile to your face in the spring.

Asparagus: Another favorite. If you make the effort to dig a trench and get your asparagus planted, it’ll bring you joy each year once the plants are established.

Sorrel and Miners’ Lettuce: Two more heirloom category veggies that will rock your world. My friend, Rebecca, has these all winter long in her garden and she gladly shares her bounty with us. I never bother to plant them since she has so much to share. Check out her sorrel and miners’ lettuce pesto.

Rhubarb: Rhubarb is a vegetable, so I’m including it in my list of perennial veggies. Plant it once, and you’ll thank yourself for years to come. Rhubarb is versatile!

The welcome site of spring blueberry blossoms

So, enjoy your no-work perennial veggies. Your fruits, too, will come back year after year if you give them what they need (prunings, compost, water and love.) Our lives are so enriched by the blueberries, raspberries, kiwis, apples, plums, figs, blackberries, and gooseberries that ripen each year on our property. Veggies can, and will, do the same if you nurture them and allow them to find their sweet spot in your garden to flourish.

Chickens Love Pond Algae

April 1, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 5 Comments

We have a pond. Starting in the early spring, the algae on the surface blooms and spreads its bright green color around the pond, stunning us with iridescence. But at mid-point in the summer we decide to slow down that spread of green and harvest the algae for our compost and chickens. This spring we’ve taken some algae earlier, and the chickens are thrilled.

They just love it, and it’s excellent green-matter, apparently full of nitrogen, for the compost.

It’s a good day for the chickens when we feed them algae. At first they hesitate, not so sure about all the tiny “leaves” connected together by tiny filaments. But then the algae is consumed en mass, every last morsel ingested by our egg-layers.

The more we feed our chickens the fruits from our land, the less we spend on the pricey organic soy-free whole grain layer mash they’d otherwise consume. What special foods do your hens consume?

Algae-Enhanced Eggs.jpg Photo © Liesl Clark

Algae-enhanced eggs are delicious

DIY Stone Pillars & Planters

March 30, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 7 Comments

We simply have too many rocks in our soil. When we harvest potatoes, there are many false alarms on harvest day as perfect potato-shaped rocks are procured from the soil rather than spuds. So when we cleared a new spot to add planting space to our veggie garden this summer, we had a pile of waste as a result — rocks. What to do with the rock pile? I thought about giving them away in our local Buy Nothing group (yes, I’ve seen people post that they want rocks on our neighborhood Buy Nothing group), but then the hoarder in me took over and we chose to make stone pillars instead. It’s quite easy, but there are a few tricks you’ll need to know about to pull this artistic gardenscaping off well.

First, you’ll need chicken wire. Make sure your chicken wire holes are not too wide for the size of your rocks.

1) You’ll need to cut a rectangle of chicken wire out, about 2.5 to 3 feet high (depending on how high you want your pillars to be) by 4 to 5 feet wide. Wrap the wire around, into a cylindrical shape and hook it together with the wire ends you’ve created in your wire-cutting process. Make sure you leave no wire ends poking out anywhere as those could be a hazard for passers-by. You now have a cylinder cage for your rocks.

2) Then, start filling your chicken wire cylinder with rocks! The trick is to place your largest spuds, I mean stones, on the outside of the wire so they block the smaller ones from falling through the mesh. My son and daughter love filling the pillars up with the stones they bring in on their wheelbarrows.

3) Fill until your cylinder is full, brimming with stones to give a pretty fieldstone pillar affect to your favorite spaces.

Now, Make Stone Pillar Planters!

We love our pillars around the pond so much, and found we had plenty more rocks to deal with, so we created 2 more pillars with the added feature of a planter inside. Here’s how:

Fill your stones only 1/3 of the way up your chicken wire cylinder. Then, add a gallon or half gallon plastic or clay pot inside so the pot’s rim is flush with the top of the chicken wire cylinder.

Fill in around the outside edges of the pot with stones and completely cover up the pot from the outside, all the way to the rim of the pillar.

Then, plant your favorite flower in the pot as you would any planter!

8 Rhubarb Uses

March 28, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 10 Comments

First rhubarb leaves of the season.

Rhubarb has a 4,700-year-old history, its origins coming from a couple of remote regions in Tibet. I’ve simply known rhubarb as a weird-looking sour stalk with an enormous leaf that makes its presence known in many North American gardens around Mother’s Day when we bake our family favorite: strawberry rhubarb pie. As far as fruit pies are concerned, nothing compares.

Is rhubarb a fruit or a vegetable? It’s actually a veggie, but in this country it took a court case to establish rhubarb officially as a fruit. According to Wikipedia, “Rhubarb is usually considered to be a vegetable; however, in the United States, a New York court decided in 1947 that since it was used in the United States as a fruit, it was to be counted as a fruit for the purposes of regulations and duties.”

And it’s a versatile “fruit” at that. Aside from dessert (and using it as an umbrella), what else can you do with this weird plant?

1) Put those leaves in your compost. They’ll break down quickly.

2) Hair Dye: Rhubarb root and leaves can be used for hair dye. One recipe here will give you a pink look, the other a beautiful brown.

3) Pot Cleaner: If you want to give your pots an added shine, use rhubarb leaves and the stalk, too. The high oxalic acid content in the leaves renders them toxic, so take care to not ingest them. But they’re fine to handle and use on your pots.

4) Insecticide: The rhubarb leaf is quite toxic. Even insects steer clear of it. Here are 2 recipes to keep your plants bug free.

5) Juice: Try your hand at making rhubarb shrub. What? Shrub. It’s an American classic. And it’s bubbly and tasty. You’ll see.

6) Make a rhubarb liquor! I just chop up my extra rhubarb and put it in a jar with about a cup or so of added sugar and some vodka. Cover it for at least a month, shake it every few days. The longer you let it infuse with rhubarb flavor, the better. You’ll end up with a pink and yummy sweet and sour hooch for your favorite martini.

Drink only a drop at a time. This rhubarb hooch is strong!

7) Juice it! I can vouch for the fact that a few tablespoons of fresh rhubarb juice, mixed with carrot juice, orange juice and pomegranate juice is absolutely amazing.

Strawberry rhubarb yogurt muffins, Photo: Liesl Clark

8) Just keep it on hand, chopped up and in the freezer, for all of your baking needs. We throw bits of in all of our muffins throughout the year.

That’s ice, not sugar, on our stash of frozen rhubarb.

What rhubarb uses can you add?

Why I Never Buy Trash Bags

March 27, 2016March 27, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 15 Comments

A friend of mine recently asked me what to do when she had something stinky in her trash, like meat packaging. She often has to empty her smelly trash and waste a whole plastic trash bag because her bag is only half full.

I responded, a bit sheepishly, telling her to just skip using bin liners/trash bags altogether. We haven’t used or bought trash bags in years. What’s the point of using them if your trash is headed to a landfill anyway? Why send it all wrapped up in yet another piece of plastic that won’t ever disappear from the planet?

Here’s what’s in our trash bin, just outside the kitchen. 1 family’s solid waste for a week. The Magic Markers are about 10 years old, but they’ve finally bit the dust.

We generate very little trash and since we compost all of our organics, our solid waste is truly solid and clean dry waste. It’s mostly made up of plastic packaging for a few things our kids just love, tortilla chips, the occasional clamshell strawberry holder, pens, plastic bottle caps. It all goes into our trash bin that’s in our laundry room, away from our everyday lives because when we throw things away, very occasionally, we truly want the children to work hard to throw it “away,” whereas the compost and recycling is all in the kitchen.

Where we throw things “away.” It’s around the corner, trash bag-free! We can remove the black plastic circular bin and wash it. Looks like it needs a good wash, ahem.

We fill a large trash can about once every 3-6 months. Neither does our kitchen bin need a tall trash bag, but we also don’t line our trash can with a plastic bag either. The clean dry waste just gets packed into the can and it’s taken to our transfer station when it gets full. Why pay for weekly pickup when you only generate a handful of plastic each week? I’m amazed, always, to see that it’s 100% plastic in there, as our textiles, shoes, organics, metal, wine corks, and batteries, which make up the rest of our trash, are all recycled.

My friend, Lissa, could throw her old styrofoam meat trays and attendant plastic packaging in her freezer until she accumulates enough trash to fill her trash can. Then, she can dispose of her trays, stink-free. She could also take a container to her favorite store where she buys meat and ask the butcher to put the meat right in there for her. No need for the store’s packaging. I’ve done it a few times here on Bainbridge Island at our local store, with no problem. But we don’t eat meat very often any more, if at all.

I talked to a local garbage worker once about whether they cared if the trash was all in plastic trash bags or not. He said it didn’t make a bit of a difference to them, because they throw the trash into the maws of the truck and a crusher then smashes it down inside the truck. The filled plastic bags often break open anyway, with the help of the crusher.

So, think about going plastic-trash-bag-free. It’s yet another form of plastic you can easily eliminate from your shopping list and garbage can. Wash your trash can out every so often. In Europe, most people I know don’t use a bin liner. It’s time we took heed and followed suit, to reduce our plastic footprint.

Are you willing to give it a try and let your waste get all naked and go trash-bag-free?

10 Toxic-Free Home-Made Easter Egg Ideas

March 26, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 10 Comments

1) Toxic-Free Magic Marker Dye: I’ll start with my favorite because it’s so easy and does 2 things in 1. It dyes your eggs but also revives your tired out Crayola or other toxic-free magic markers. Do visit our article about it to read the full instructions, but all you need is some warm water in a glass with a splash of distilled white vinegar. Put your markers head down into the glasses, grouping them by color (we have tons of magic markers because we collect those that our school throws out and simply revive them.) That’s it! Let the eggs soak in there for as long as you wish. The longer the darker the color. If you start by making polka dots or designs on the eggs with white crayons, you’ll get a lovely design on your eggs where the wax won’t allow the dye to do it’s magic. When you’re done, pull the markers out, cap ’em and they’ll work again for you for quite some time!

2) Natural Dye: The above dyes aren’t all that natural and you wouldn’t want your child eating the ink from a magic marker, but since they’re labeled non-toxic we figure using them to dye our eggs is probably still better than using chemical food coloring. But, by far, the best option is to make your own natural dyes. There are lots of articles available on the subject. We tried it one year and liked some of the colors, but not all.

3) Kombucha Natural Dye: This recipe is similar to that above except you’re using kombucha vinegar.

4) The Ultra-Natural Easter Egg: These colorful eggs are laid as Easter eggs directly from the hens! Find yourself a dozen eggs from heritage breed hens and you’ll see that Easter egg colors can come naturally. And, Rebecca is right, brown eggs can be colored for Easter, too.

5) Sienna Easter Eggs: This beautiful technique requires onion skins and some natural items from outdoors like ferns and grasses. It leaves a beautiful sienna or sepia color on your eggs with the imprint of your fern, flower or grasses. Gorgeous.

6) Silk Tie Tie Dyed Eggs: Reuse a silk tie and tie dye your eggs.

7) No-Dye Decorating: Creative egg decorating is another great non-toxic alternative. Non toxic glue and some cute art supplies are all you need.

8) Use an Egg-Bot! This totally frivolous machine (a robot actually), if you use it with a non-toxic pen, might just wow your neighbors when you hide those eggs on the fenceline.

9) Put a ribbon on it: Wrap a ribbon around your egg and glue it down with non-toxic glue or wrap your egg in yarn with glue. These eggs look beautiful.

10) Modpodge: I’ve modpodged eggs in the past with pretty tissue paper and a light solution of sugar water that dries overnight.

Do you have any ideas to add?

Chapstick Tube Turned Salt & Pepper Shaker

March 21, 2016March 21, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 6 Comments

We went on a backpacking trip last week and decided, at the last moment, to not bring our salt and pepper shakers because of the added weight. Luckily, we didn’t miss them due to the foods we had chosen to bring with us, but for the future I was looking for that perfect DIY salt & pepper container.

The finished Dermatone tube my husband handed to me this a.m. was all I needed to get my DIY juices going to make our own little camping condiment container. The steps, you’ll see, are quite easy:

1) Find yourself a used-up Chapstick tube.

2) Remove the inner plastic cup that holds the lip balm and should be at the top of your tube. Simply turning the tube upside down and banging it on the table should do the trick.

3) Boil the tube and lid in water for 2-3 minutes to sterilize it and get rid of the remaining goop inside.

4) Remove the sticky label if you’d like on the outside of the tube and write with a permanent pen the name of what you’re stashing inside: “Special Herb Blend” or “salt & pepper” for example. We chose to put the salt & pepper together due to weight constraints when we’re in the mountains.

5) Add your condiment of choice inside. I used our favorite Celtic sea salt and freshly ground 3-color pepper.

Voila!

Here are a few other trash hacks you can do with a chapstick tube:

Use it to hold any pills you might need on a trip.
Make a mini travel sewing kit out of it.
Put some emergency cash inside your tube as a hideaway.
Condom stash?

Non-Toxic Magic Marker Easter Egg Dye

March 20, 2016March 20, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 2 Comments

How did our little hackers dye their eggs for Easter the last few years without producing waste or buying new? With dried out colorful markers! We thought they were at the end of their life, so we threw them upside down into glasses of water, added a splash of vinegar, and….presto! Easter egg dye.

After soaking the eggs in the watery dye for 20-30 minutes, they came out beautifully. And an unexpected added bonus? The markers work perfectly again! All they needed was a few minutes at the spa for a soak. Caps are back on and they’re back in the marker bag with their friends.

Happy Trash-Hacky Easter.

25 Trellises From Your Trash

March 19, 2016October 23, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 3 Comments

Branch trellis constructed by our friend Pema from Nepal.

A Curly Willow Stick Trellis Built By Our Friend Pemba Sherpa Photo: Rebecca Rockefeller

Trellises are about as easy to come by as planters. Almost anything that’s upright and has a few arm-like features can be climbed upon by plants. This list will definitely get you thinking about what you can place in your garden for vertical fun:

1) Sticks are the original trellis. If you have sticks available, place them in a tripod-like structure, like a tipi, or if your sticks have many branches, just sink one stick into the ground with many branches for your peas or other veggies to climb upon.

2) Bike Trellis: Line up a few bikes, or bike parts, and you have a colorful trellis for your plants. Imagine peas growing on this cute bike fence…

3) Patio Umbrella Trellis: A broken patio umbrella can have a second life as a trellis. I have one in my garden now.

4) Bamboo and String Trellis: For your more delicate vines a bamboo frame for string is a beautiful trellis.

5) Tipi Trellis: With some long sticks, you can make a tipi trellis that serves to hold up your veggies and vines while providing a great green space for the kids.

6) Wagon Wheel Trellis: Wagon wheels make pretty trellises for climbing roses.

7) Old Window Frame with Chicken Wire: Use an old frame as a trellis with chicken wire attached.

8) Step Ladder Trellis: An old step ladder is an easy trellis to set up.

9) Bike Wheel Trellis: The photo here says it all. It’s a bike wheel totem trellis.

9) Wooden Coat Hanger Trellis: With an accordion-style wooden coat hanger, a few pencils and a paint stirrer, you’ll have a trellis.

10) Screen Door Trellis: Like the old window frame, an old screen door frame works beautifully as a trellis against your house.

11) Ski Trellis: Use skis to set up a trellis for your raspberries.

12) Bookshelf Trellis: An interesting book shelf partially buried in the dirt could make a nice trellis.

13) Sawhorse Trellis: A sawhorse or 2 can make an instant garden trellis.

14) Old Chair Trellis: Use an old wooden chair for a trellis.

15) Stretch of Picket Fence Trellis: If you have a length of picket fence, try using that as a trellis.

16) Rain Pipe Trellis: Our drain pipe on our house is serving as a trellis, and the clapboards, too. Some plants can climb anything.

17) Fence Trellis: Just use a section of your fence to allow a flowering climber, like clematis, take over.

18) Chicken Wire Trellis: Don’t think I need to explain that one.

19) Ladder Trellis: An old ladder can hold up grape vines. You can add some bright paint to give it some pizazz.

20) Barbed Wire Trellis: If you’re handy like this Etsy artist, try making a barbed wire trellis. They’re beautiful.

20-25) Read our original post on DIY trellises for 5 more ideas including a headboard trellis, a baby crib trellis, and innovative stick trellises.

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