carla murphy

I also vote for Black Soldier Fly larvae.  I am in CA and the BSF find my compost bin.  I built what I thought was going to be a worm bin for all our kitchen waste, to keep the waste... and hopefully the rodents... out of our compost bin.  Only yard waste goes into our compost bin now.  The 'worm' bin I built is actually a set of stacking bins, discarded fence board sides and mesh bottom, solid lid on top of stack.  The BSF found this setup also so I drilled ... less than 1/2" ?... holes in the side to make it easy for the BSF to get in.  Caught a rat in a snap trap and put it in the very active bin and the rat was unrecognizable the next day.  And the beautiful thing about this bin?  The BSF larvae crawl out the bottom (YES, they do NOT need a ramp of a particular angle to crawl out of the waste space) through the mesh and the chickens do their own scavenging of the larvae, no collection necessary on my part.  It is January in CA now and I've seen very few BSF larvae in this bin so I just add another bin on top if a bin gets full of kitchen waste.  I have 5 total, but have never needed to add the 5th one.  When the weather warms up again, the BSF will plow through the goodies in the bin in no time.  Not sure if you want offal sitting in a bin all winter until the BSF return, but by the time I'm done parting out a chicken for meals and stock, I wouldn't mind putting what is left into my bin until my BSF workers return.  Might be a different story if I were concerned about a sick animal.

Favorite breed should really depend upon your ultimate goal for keeping goats.  Love our Nigerian Dwarf does.  We have two.  We milk them everyday.  The girls jump up on a stanchion and we sit on a stool to milk.  Easy peasy to reach.  Small teats?  We do 'finger tip' milking.  Super easy to learn.  Takes 1/2 hour for milking chores in the morning and evening.  We get a quart of milk a day from each of them.  More than enough for our household of 2 humans...and the grandson who visits weekly.  We have goats for their milk to make CHEESE!  Glorious cheese.  I make cheese 2-3 times per week, plenty for us with plenty to share.  We make yogurt from their milk.  We eat yogurt for breakfast every morning.  1 gallon of milk keeps us in yogurt for two weeks.  Lower qty milk than larger goats, but higher butterfat so the return on our milk into cheese is much higher.  A 2 gallon batch of milk gives us 3+lbs of cheddar, along with another pound of ricotta from the whey and this after skimming the cream for butter.  

We keep our girls on deep litter and just topped off 300sq ft of new raised garden beds with the litter from their pen.  Incredible compost.  Their spent hay...that which drops to the ground while they are eating...provides a beautiful mulch cover on our garden beds to help keep the beds from drying out in our summer heat.  

We are on 1/4 acre in suburbia.  Small stature of Nigerians is perfect for our backyard.  We walk the goats in the neighborhood every day for exercise.  We know MANY more of our neighbors now that we walk our goats.

Our girls have kidded twice in our backyard, twins and triplets, then quads and twins.  No issues.  If you have good stock, good nutrition, and good herd management you are less likely to have issues with kidding.

I do comb them every spring to collect their cashmere....but pulling the guard hairs has prevented me from doing anything with it yet.

Heh....just read the book description ALL the way through and found my answer.  Thank you for writing this book.  Can't wait to get it!

Kate,
When you say '100% whole grain', do you mean home ground freshly milled grain?  I desperately want to make a home ground whole wheat sourdough (no purchased yeast) loaf of bread....but all I can manage is beautiful doorstops.
Enjoy!
Carla

We are small scale, 1/4 acre in town.  Our char making is done in a metal, lidded pot in our Chofu which heats the water for our outdoor soaking tub.  So anytime we are heating the tub for soaking, the last 10 mins before we get in, the pot of 'hardwood' goes into the chofu and pyrolizes.  Once cooled, that charcoal goes into either the chicken run or the goat pen for inoculation before it goes into the garden.  Very little ash is created.  Certainly nothing to attempt to sift out.

I just spray down with a hose the heavily mulched area under the mulberry tree.  The chickens dig, dig, dig deeply and then 'dust bathe' there enjoying the cool ground.

P Oscar - What is BA goat?

Backyard chicken keeper here...can have only 9 hens and no roosters per city code.  We have one Buff that goes broody.  She's 2 years old.  First went broody at six months...had only just started laying.  Put day-old chicks (3) under her after she'd been broody for about 2 weeks (thats when the chicks were available at the feed store).  She instantly perked up "My chicks have hatched!"  She raised those babies beautifully and integrated them into the flock.  Soooo much easier than our previous method of raising day-olds in a brood box in the house.  The integration step was the worst.  Second time she went broody we were maxed out with chickens per city code so we let her be broody just to see what would happen.  She sat like a flat pancake in that nest box for 2 months.  She was definitely skinnier when she decided she was done being broody.  Third time she went broody we put day-old meat chicks (3) under her.  She raised those babies beautifully but I must say those birds ran her ragged.  She's always fed her babies first, a special call of "I found something good, come and get it!"  Fourth time she went broody was one year from the first time she went broody.  We had room for some new birds and a friend had fertilized eggs.  We put four under her and one hatched.   She raised that one beautifully, but that one grew and grew and grew and then crowed....so he went back to my friend.  Now one of the benefits of having this broody hen is that when she is not broody, or feeding babies, she is laying eggs.  So she kept us in eggs last winter when every other bird had stopped laying!  She went broody again this spring and we put 3 day-old chicks under her.  She's raised them beautifully and is mostly over caring for them and has started laying eggs again.  LOVE our broody hen!

Year-round charing here.  We are small scale, 1/4 acre in town.  Our char making is done in our chofu which heats the water for our outdoor soaking tub.  So anytime we are heating the tub for soaking, the last 10 mins before we get in, the pot of 'hardwood' goes into the chofu and pyrolizes.  Once cooled, that charcoal goes into either the chicken run or the goat pen for inoculation before it goes into the garden.

Just looked and I only have 11 copies of it left though and I want to keep a few for personal use.  She self published and had something like 4000 copies sold.  But she published it just as all the fat will kill you, butter bad, etc craze hit so it never went really big and it was a niche market anyway.

Now I do have the legal right to the book and the camera ready pages for it so if there was enough interest it might be worth uploading to some book on demand printer??  

I'm interested in this book.  How can I purchase?