Chicken update!

Our chickens are getting so big. But it will still be a couple months before they lay eggs. They’ve been eating a lot of food lately, and our lawn cannot keep up. We could feed them more grain, but ideally we want the chickens to eat more of what is in our yard.

We removed the sod in a plot in our backyard and planted pasture seeds from Peaceful Valley. The seeds will grow into plants that the chickens will eat. One day we put the coop over the pasture and there was nothing but dirt the next day. So we’ll wait another month for the plants to fill in the plot. This chicken pasture is perfect because it uses a lot of space and we do not need to mow the lawn in that spot any longer.

Wild Edibles

Harvesting food from the wild gives us a great satisfying feeling. It makes me feel like I’m standing in my ancestors’ shoes. We enjoy learning about what foods we can eat and cannot eat. One example is berries. Black raspberries grow like weeds in parts of Wisconsin. Picking black raspberries brings back many memories from my childhood, and I couldn’t wait to share those memories with Eric.

My uncle owns some land in northern Wisconsin which supplied great berries this year. We only had at about fours hours of picking time, so we picked as fast as we could. We fought back thorny bushes, biting ants, and fears of black bears….but it was worth it. We gathered about seven pounds of berries. We had enough berries to make 12 half-pint jars of jam and a few berries went into the freezer for later.

-M