Michael Cox

Flipping this round... why do gradual?

Most of the major permaculture designers would be advocating for earth moving in the early stages of a project as part of improving water retention in the landscape, building fertility, and creating microclimates. Terracing, building swales and ponds are all excellent investments in the land.

How much could you get done if you hired a skilled bulldozer driver and machine for a day? I think it would be a lot.

Timothy Norton wrote:Personally, I love spending time with my chickens but a lot of that time is just being among them.

How much time do you spend, in a day, doing the things that need to be done for your chickens?

I will collect eggs daily as well as checking in on the water level/feed level.

I say five or less minutes. My setup is pretty hands off.

One day a week it might be fifteen minutes as I clean and fill food/water/supplement containers.

Very similar - although it's more like 10 minutes just because our coop is a little walk from the house.

I looked into this a while ago as I had a very similar question. Why can't we just use bits of old mushroom mycelium from a grow bag to inoculate another grow bag? My understanding is that the mycelium grows vigorously when fairly freshly developed from spawn, but after it has reached maturity and fruits, it loses vigour and is slower to colonise and develop, and more prone to being outcompeted. This is why commercial growers bother with maintaining cultures of spawn to rather than reuse their mature colonised grow bags.

Can you make this work in practice? Yeh, probably - your results are likely to be it and miss, but if you are tossing the used logs or grow bags anyway you have nothing to lose. I tried this a while ago by burying a spent grow bag of oyster muchrooms in a pile of fresh woodchips. Nothing developed.

A word of warning on your graphs - AI is still generally bad at things related to maths and numbers, including generating graphs. It will confidently lie to you and give you no clue that it has done so. If you want to use a graph like this I recommend that you find the original data source and either use their graphs or build your own.

My chickens have deep litter wood chips in their coop. When confined there they will actively scratch and turn it which keeps the top surface fresh and clear of poop. I add a few barrows of new chips every other month or so. When they have access to their larger run, or free range in the garden, they spend much less time working the litter in their coop and it can develop a bit of a crust of poop - especially under the roost bars. About once per week I go in with a fork and turn any crusty bits.

All this to say that I really like the deep litter - it's a much better solution for me than hard standing which would need to be human cleaned much more regularly. BUT it's not as low effort as some people advocating it indicate and you do need to pay attention to how much they are turning the top surface. In the context of quail and pigeon in this thread I imagine that the surface disturbance is less simply because they aren't as heavy, so the human management will need to be more attentive.

For those who may struggle to source local quality meat, there are facebook groups that connect hunters with excess meat to individuals who want it. In the UK we have "Giving Up the Game". I picked up a 40kg fallow deer this weekend for a good price and have stocked my freezer for the next few months. These are mostly hunters doing crop protection - pretty consistent supply of rabbits, wood pigeon, deer at a good price and all local.

I've been classed as obese for the best part of 20 years, not massive but carrying an extra 15kg or so at all times. It puts extra pressure on my already dodgy knees and is a contributing factor for my sleep apnea (although not the cause). This is to say, I'm pretty motivated to lose some weight, and have tried some diets that worked for a while but were not sustainable for various reasons

Most recently, I've started on a GLP-1 inhibitor for weight loss (Mounjaro), and the impact is fascinating. It modifies the effect of some gut hormones that regulate appetite and satiation. I'm fairly new to this, but even from early on the impact was stark. It flipped a switch in me, and the food noise around snacks was just gone. Completely. I was a habitual snacker, and as a food lover enjoy good meals.

The food enjoyment is still there, but it is so much easier to listen to what my body is telling me about how much I need and how full I'm feeling. My main meal size has reduced by about 1/3, and with the snacking gone, I've already lost a bit of weight. But it feels easy - there is no inner battle, anxiety, meticulous planning of meals etc... I was worried starting this that it would impact my energy levels with my blood sugar tanking during the day, but I haven't had that at all - if anything the post meal crash has gone.

All this is to say that the battle against food noise is real - your body is literally fighting your brain's desire to eat well and avoid snacks by flooding you with hormones. It's not fair, it's not fun, and it's not equal for everyone.

If there were going to be a genuine problem I think it would have been identified by now as people worldwide are already using biochar to grow their plants and the side-by-side trials of beds treated and not treated with biochar consistently show benefits of using the char.

Regarding the specific claim of the metals themselves being a potential issue; in my location we typically have problems with lack of trace metals in our soils, and in particular iron. I've spent considerable time researching how to supplement our plants with these traces. "Free" metals in the biochar would be a win in my book.

(Our bedrock is chalk which is very alkaline and any soluble minerals wash through rapidly with rain.)

Wood chips for the deep litter on the floor. We get them free from a local tree surgeon. More than we can ever use.

Clean pine shavings for the nest boxes. About once every two weeks I replace the shavings. I just scoop them out onto the floor and put fresh in. They get incorporated into the deep litter with 24 hours and you can notice them.

I love the deep litter. It is completely forgiving of a bit of benign neglect. If i have a busy week or so you wouldn't notice because the chickens are forever turning the top layer over. The only time it wasn't so effective was when I just had a small number of birds in the large coop. They were crapping from their roost bars but not doing enough digging and scratching to consistently turn the top layer over before it dried together in a cake.

I have replenished my flock recently and all is operating smoothly again.

Well rotted deep litter has been fantastic for the garden, particularly the rhubarb plants as a thick winter mulch.

Juniper Zen wrote:

Josh Hoffman wrote:This chicken you are referring to ate too much grass? In a coop or tractored or free range?

My chicken passed away today, and a necropsy showed that the underlying problem was that her gizzard was full of tumors. But while I was researching impacted crops, I came across stories of other people's chickens having eaten too much long grass and it getting twisted up and stuck in the crop. Obviously that doesn't usually happen, but I just wanted to let readers know about the possible risk so that they can watch out for it and intervene if they see a problem.

This happened to one of my birds a couple of years ago. Identified by necropsy. She got into some grass clippings.