Nina Wright

https://harvestright.com/blog/2016/how-much-energy-does-freeze-drying-use/

I have the medium-size HarvestRight. Took months to get it working - them sending replacement parts for us to install, then finally they shipped it back to the factory and fixed the leak in the top of the chamber. They paid for everything except my electrician's time. though they gave me a $100 credit that I happily used to get extra trays.

You sometimes have to fuss with the door seal being properly clean.

All that said, I do like it! Especially the dried apple slices of my tasty cooking apples. Last spring I bought lots of asparagus when it a good price and separated the tender spear tips from the thicker lower stock which I sliced in pieces. I parboiled them and freeze dried. The spear tips are fun to eat as-is. The thicker pieces I either throw into some hot broth, or powder them in the food processor to be used for instant "cream of" asparagus soup.

I grew sunflowers for my muscovy and kakhi campbell ducks.
I broke some out of the flower and gave the seeds-in-shells to them.
They try eating a few if I give them my "I have a treat for you" call. But then ignore them.

A few years ago the chickens figured it out and went after them.

Is it reasonably possible to teach them that there is good food inside that shell?

Healthy edible, pretty greens: I potted up my Gynura procumbens to overwinter it and have it on my sink by a window that gets indirect light. It doesn't like direct sunlight, anyway.
Website says: "Gynura procumbens, also called longevity spinach or the leaves of gods, is the cousin of Okinawa spinach..."

"Less eggs, more broody times for muscovies than for Khaki Campbell or egg-production chickens."
Right. Small family here on 1/2 acre, so less eggs + meat production + I don't have to do the brooding work + not enough noise to trigger the neighbors to call zoning laws down on me... works for me.

I have 5-gallon buckets with side hole for sticking their long necks through the greenhouse wall to drink from. Deep enough that they can immerse their heads if desired. Zone 6, keeping the buckets (insulated) inside the greenhouse wall helps have less freezing water that I have do work to take care of. (They break through thin layers of ice for themselves.)

Then a smaller (2' x 3') cement mixing tray from Home Depot for their "pond" out where the tree needs the water anyway. Though I hope this summer to put in a real (rigid liner) pond under a tree raised enough that I can clean it out by gravity-feeding the water out to the tree etc that needs water anyway.

I raised chickens - hens - for 30+ years. After I recent move, I chose muscovy ducks (with a couple of Khaki Campbell hens for extra security that there will be enough eggs). Of the two Khaki hens, one is noisy sometimes. I am glad she is the only noisy one.

Pros;
- Muscovies are VERY quiet. Sometimes, if very upset (time to catch them to trim their wings) a hen will sound as loud as a quiet waterduck. Drakes hiss/whisper
- Duck drakes don't crow at all hours!!
- They aren't quite as hard on the garden as chickens
- I have terrible squash bug populations - this year I will plant the squash where I can run the ducks and we will test that out
- ducks live longer, have longer high-egg-production lives than chickens
- muscovies make good mothers (I hope this batch was the last time I ever brood newly hatched birds myself!)
- duck manure is not hot. While for human health reasons you are still supposed to compost it 6 months before putting on vegie garden, if some gets in there it won't kill my plants (yes, story to tell there of applying what I THOUGHT was well-composted chicken manure...)
- muscovies are climbing wood ducks, so have nasty back claws (like fighting roosters) which can help fight off hawk and dogs
- muscovies are larger, which also helps against predators
- muscovies are larger, which means the breast meat is SO good! More like beef.
- muscovies are good foragers
- I have read that muscovies don't need water to mate, but some water-duck breeds do. So they don't demand a pond.
- ducks are much less light sensitive, so more year-round laying than chickens


Cons:
- must have at least four hens per libidinous  drake. And I want two drakes in case something happens to one, so that means minimum of 10 ducks
- duck house needs are more demanding than for chicken housing - need more space (they are active during the night) and the bedding gets wetter, needs changing more often.
- waterer needs to be cleaned out more often since they rinse out their foody beaks there. I pour out the buckets onto my veggies
- must be able to dip whole head into water
- some websites say they need to be able to bathe to trigger proper oil secretion for their feathers - mine have a pan they can get in up to the tops of their legs and hunker down in to bathe

The woodchips in my garden beds plus the logs with bark that are the beds' wall have made the earwig and pillbug popultions explode. So I can't start (or even transplant) beans  there - pill bugs LOVE bean sprouts! And the leaves of many veggies get skeletonized. But I still used woodchips for long-term land recovery.

In my second year of gardening in this old lawn site, I used logs as the side for raised beds and topped the beds with some manure compost then a few inches of wood chips. This year, the pill bugs and earwigs decimate all seedlings. That wasn't a problem last year, before the wood chips.
I had to replant everything, starting it all indoors. I have a friend who drinks a lot of soda, so I use the 2-liter bottles as tubes to keep the pill bugs out and slow down the earwigs from discovering the plants until they get bigger.

Any suggestions?

If the wood chips of trees that are listed as allelopathic are actually OK, how about using those logs for hugelkultur?
I have lots of elm logs that I was thinking that I should not use for hugelkultur.