carla murphy

My bait for fly traps is egg in water.  Yes, stinks to high heaven, but attracts the flies to the trap so I'll take it.  Black Soldier Flies would love your eggs and turn them into excellent ...not stinky...fertilizer for your property.  And I read, but I don't remember where, that if you have BSFs in your pile, you don't have filth flies.  Dunno if that is accurate, but it seems to be true for my BSF bin.

Stumps would be better than slices for stepping stones.  The slices we laid out (redwood) as stepping stones have disintegrated in less than 10 years.  The stumps (redwood) we placed as a spiral staircase for the chickens to get up into the hen house are still going strong.

tuffy monteverdi wrote:
Really?! Does the regular China marker (any color?) last through both heavy rains and high heat?

Ay yup!  Altho I've only tried black.  We get some rain...not torrential much... and up to 110 in the summer...uggh...  

And I mis-remembered my measurements....I use 1/2" wide strips for my starter trays and 1" wide strips to go into the garden.  I flip up the bottom on one side to create the point to make it easier to insert into starter cells or soil.  End of season, I drop them into a tray of water to soak a bit, then wipe them clean and store for next year.

Really like soda cans cut into 3/4" strips for my plant markers.  Tried the 'embossed' method using ball point pen to emboss the name.  Great for longevity, not so great for being able to read it from standing height.  Now I use a grease pencil/china marker/wax pencil.  Lasts many seasons....I'm on 5 or 6 years? without fading.  Score!  Since I tend to plant the same things year after year, I save the plant markers and use them again and again.  I keep them stored in a 6pack starter tray.  Alliums, Greens, Brassicas, Herbs, Peas & Beans, Peppers & Eggplant...you get the idea.  I can write the specific variety on each marker and find it again next year.

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.