Maureen Atsali

Paula Hudak wrote:So I raise Muscovy for meat... they are not in mallard family and a tree bird. Their meat is more red meat then typical " duck meat"

I tested intolerant/ allergic to duck.... and rabbit...

Does muscovy meat fall under the category of " duck meat" or no, since it's not Oillie and more red meatish? It's a tree bird...

Or would the meat still fall under duck?

I need to decide if I'm out of the muscovy business.

Also I don't like chicken white meat. So what other small game can O raise for meat?

Obviously not a doctor, but to share my own experience.  My gut was/is a hot mess.  My naturopath has declared me an autoimmune sh*tstorm, and I have several diagnoses. I did the comprehensive allergy testing, and I react to almost everything except meat and a few fruits. (Duck was okay for me, but Turkey was in the red). What she told me was that if I gave my body a chance to heal, my immune system would likely calm down and be less hyper-reactive, and I probably wouldn’t have such violent reactions to everything.

My plan has been to go to a strict carnivore diet, but I haven’t succeeded yet 😖. So I can’t say for sure if healing the gut will help… but that’s my hope.

I also raise Muscovies and I love them.  So easy and so delicious.

Thanks for sharing Robert!

If you know a hen is laying, and you confine her you can observe her becoming really agitated when she wants to lay.  Pacing the fence, looking for an escape.  Let her out at that point she will generally make a beeline straight to her nest...and you can follow at a distance to find the spot.

Hi Everyone,
I'm in Vermont, which seems more like "the great white north" than Eastern USA.  I hope I'm in the right forum.  I spent the last 8 years in Africa. This will be my first year back in Vermont.  I'm feeling kind of bleak as I face the long, dark winter.  What do you do during the winter?

Maureen

Where I live, especially during the rainy season, certain parts of the farm produce so much biomass.  I'll see if I can put a recent picture here.  The locals slash it down, pile it up, and burn it, or leave the pile to rot in place.  And yet the tropical soils here are STARVING.  In many places the top soil is gone and farmers are trying to grow into a gravely, lifeless subsoil.  It's a lot of work, but my method is to slash it down with a machete, chop it into a size I can handle (about 2 ft) and then spread it everywhere.  Around trees, between rows in annuals and around perennials.  When we get rains here they are torrential, so having the mulch in big pieces helps keep them from washing away.  They help some with weed suppressing.  Weeds will sprout in and on the mulch, but they are easy to yank out on a walk through, and are often beneficial type weeds like blackjack, which all the livestock, especially the rabbits love.  Also some of the chopped mulch doesn't die, it will try to re-root.  Again just keeping vigilant and yanking up the piece if you see it starting to sprout leaves.  The soil is so hungry that it will eat through 6 inches of compost in one 4 month season.  You will find nothing but a few of the fattest sticks left.  So for me, it's part of a never ending cycle of controlling the bio-mass, and feeding/rebuilding the soil.

That's it R Jay.  I am thankful that I was able to learn as much as I did when I lived in the village, and now my kids and I enjoy a wide variety of healthful, easy to grow food.  Can't force anything on any one.  At least people aren't as likely to steal my indigenous goodies and even the chickens aren't so thrilled with them 😁. But I keep hoping it will catch on. (With people, not the chickens.)

I learned about indigenous African foods only when all of my american imports failed to grow.  All of my squash succumbed to mildew and insects, but I noticed that my elderly neighbor had indigenoud mystery squash growing abundantly on her fence.  I had to mine those seeds and that knowledge from the elders in the village.  Changing over to indigenous food crops transformed the farm into a productive successful project.  There are still half a dozen things I dont have an English name for.  Some studies done in Nairobi a few years ago showed that only 17% of urban Kenyans ate indigenous greens, and the main reasons were availability and not knowing how to prepare them.  (And of that 17% the most common greens eaten were cowpeas and pumpkin leaves, not much variety there.). In my experience in rural areas it has been more than lack of knowledge but a strong prejudice against those foods which are regarded as poverty foods or "old peoples food.".  They are insulted if you serve it to them.  I had an american friend who was staying with a Kenyan man, and I offered to bring her " omurere" (Jews mallow) to try.  Her man friend turned to my husband and said (in Luhya, not knowing I understood.) "I dont want that sh*t in my house.". And that man friend was overweight and suffered from bleeding ulcers thanks to his rich, western diet.  

I have no idea how to overcome that mind set.  Just this week I had to chase a local lady out of my garden who thought she was doing me a favor by "weeding" out all of the amaranth between the rows.  She was incredulous that I had scattered that seed there on purpose.  And this was a poor lady in her sixties who surely knew that "mchicha" was a nutritious veggie.  She also didn't like my system of growing between the rows. She complained that it was messy and unsightly.  She is planting collards on her side, with fertilizers and insecticides.

"Tend to the part of the garden you can reach.". Its good to be sensitive to the fact that there are starving children in Yemen, but that's out of reach for most of us.  Instead of philosophical discussion about " world hunger" I would love to see permies all over the world addressing local hunger in their corner of the world garden...

Yes R Jay, agree completely.

Sometimes its hard to read these posts.  I live in the third world, and let me assure you that any time there is instability, people do NOT run to help each other here.  It takes very little to break civilization when you are already on edge.  And people DO immediately default into rioting, looting and murder here.

Also let me say that people are already suffering in many parts of the world, right now.  I do home care visits, and was out the day before yesterday to see a woman with spinal TB who lives in a 10x10 mud room in a squatters slum behind a cemetery.  She shares that house with about 8 kids and grandkids.  The only food she had were a few packages of enriched porridge flour given out by the government at the TB clinic, but she had no way to cook it.   She used to earn money washing laundry for others, but now her spine has collapsed and she is barely mobile.  She has no money to buy food or charcoal or firewood, or water.  She was burning her plastic jerricans to cook, but eventually ran out of plastic too.  Pictures from Friday, not 1933.