Su MacLean

Come support you by living in community and eating Uber healthy organic while working and living close to nature?! So tempting! I even enjoy the challenge of cooking delicious food for restricted diets. If my kids were just a little older, I’d be booking plane tickets. I hope some great people take you up on it because I hear you, sticking to a new lifestyle regime alone is hard!

I’ll at least join the forum and see if I can make any simple recipe suggestions with the allowed ingredients. Though I’m not generally a recipe person. I’m more of a “wing it” cook (and gardener, and crafter, and… yeah, it’s a hard and fast personality trait of mine)

I’m thinking about participating. I certainly have no shortage of hard packed clay dirt covered in aggressive weeds and grasses that I already want to start gardening in. Welcome to Western North Carolina! My question is, what about cultivating 200 square feet of weeds without at least a pile of imported wood chips is easy? I would never use plastic barrier as I don’t want to introduce that to my soil, but I’ve been thinking about getting wood chips or hay (I have an organic source).

Paul suggested a seven foot hugel which is a good idea because I’m on a hill and need swales anyway to capture water. That might be easy to build with an army of volunteers at hand, but we’re just two people.

Maybe this challenge is my incentive to try it and see how easy I can make it.

I have a couple of questions for people recommending Muscovy ducks. How did you train them to not eat your garden, to go in the coop, to let you clip their wings? When we lived in Costa Rica, we had Muscovies that basically went wild and flew all over our farm eating all our greens from the garden (they Loved kale) and getting into our bananas. They were too smart! They learned in one go that following a trail of feed into any enclosed space meant getting their wings clipped. After that, they ignored any piles of feed on the inside of a door. Once their wings grew out again, they flew out of the duck fence for good and became a menace. Any thoughts? Make sure to clip the wings often enough from the start that they never learn they can fly? The previous farm manager had given them very little attention thinking that independent ducks were a good thing. Not true for Muscovies!