Z Winigrad

I have this idea that I'm wondering if anyone has tried before/has thoughts on. Asparagus sends up spears based on soil temperature, so mulching can make it harder/take longer for asparagus to send up the spears. I'm fairly certain I've seen posts on here describing how people have used this to extend their asparagus season by having some plants with mulch and some without.

Here's a quote from University of Minnesota Extension :

Straw and leaves can be used for mulch in asparagus beds to help smother weeds. However, these mulches also keep the soil cooler and wetter, potentially delaying or reducing asparagus spear emergence in the spring. Therefore, push the mulch away from the rows in the early spring to allow the soil to warm and encourage spear growth.

This alone is pretty cool, but the addition of mulch opens the possibility for a lot of cool things, but what my mind immediately went to was wine caps. It seems like Eric Hanson has tried this but maybe didn't document it? Here's his Post

Someone also mentioned later on in that post about asparagus beetles being a problem as they can overwinter in the mulch, I do not know enough about wine caps to know if they would help/hinder that situation. Might be better to find a different solution (ie natural predation from birds/other bugs).

Anyways this is all conceptual on my end and I have zero practical experience with growing either asparagus or wine caps. Any thoughts would be appreciated, some of my own are below:

1) Will the wine caps eat away at the mulch prior to asparagus season (early spring)? And if they will could you mulch an extra X amount or would that just delay the asparagus too much?

2) Spring crops of wine caps are known to get a lot of predator pressure from slugs/other pests, could this be problematic for asparagus yields? Conversely, is it possible that the spring flushes would be a preferred alternative to pest that would otherwise eat the asparagus?

3) I imagine the timing lines up for the fall flush of wine caps and when the asparagus needs to be cut back, maybe the dead asparagus fronds could be fed back to the wine caps/mulch layer?

4) It seems like both asparagus and wine caps can handle shade relatively well, has anyone put an asparagus patch under heavy-ish shade? Maybe this is a fun polyculture idea for under a fruit tree/area where you might spend a fair amount of time in the early spring and late fall


Thanks!

So much information Josh, thank you again! The electric golf cart is incredibly smart, I wonder how long batteries last/ how replaceable batteries are, and how tinker-able those are for a more hilly landscape...

Aggressiveness is a definitely a pain point, and I imagine will be something I learn more about as I trial run a system. Jay brings up a great point about space and enrichment, and it makes me wonder about how much that plays into aggressiveness. I 100% understand that genetics play a role, I guess I'm more thinking out loud as it seems that rooster flocks aren't the most well-researched concept. While I am vegan, if push comes to shove, I'm willing to do what's best for the most animals whether that's separating or culling.

Sound is also tricky... inside a coop it shouldn't be too hard to dampen noise, but I'm not sure how that would work outside. Sound absorbent materials are porous, so they would quickly get damp/moldy which I don't think is desirable for me or the roosters. There might be some way to integrate it into the run fencing but I'd need to think that one out a bit more.

Josh Hoffman wrote:

We hatched 50 eggs in the spring and waited for the layers to lay and sold them. We put all of the roosters in chicken tractors and grew them out for the freezer. 2 tractors with 15 in each one. 6'x10' John Suscovich style with metal roof. There was absolute pandemonium during the sunrise and sunset but otherwise, they all played well together. During sunrise and sunset, there was a lot of fighting and doodle dooing. I personally like the crowing so that was not a bother. No chickens were seriously injured or killed so that was not an issue either.

My wife is on FB and I get on her account to sell chickens. There is one group, out of many, called poultry lovers of Mississippi. In the late spring, if you have transportation, you could get as many roosters as you wanted, for free. That seems to be the time folks bought all of the TSC straight run chicks and started to figure out that they do not want the roosters. You could also get a few at a time throughout the year as they are always offered for free intermittently.

I do not see your location but I would be this is true all over the country.

Super interesting stuff here! I hadn't really considered rooster tractor before, I figured they would be all over each other if they could hear the hens. This feels like a great answer to having too many roosters if you are hatching them and eventually putting them in the freezer! I'm curious if you found that moving 2 rooster tractors was a lot of work or not. To me, moving one sounds like a lot of planning and heavy lifting so I'd love to hear your perspective!

Sorry about the lack of location info, this is planning for Finger Lakes region NY, so Zone 5a/b ish and a fair amount of rain on well draining soil (wine country).

Josh Hoffman wrote:

I keep our meat rabbit breeders on wire suspended in the chicken coop/run and tractor the kits. Between the chickens and rabbits, we have an endless supply of some of the best compost I could ask for. I think what you propose is a good idea and worthwhile endeavor given your vegan convictions. I would only add that chickens can get injured or get sick and you will have to cull them "out of the blue" so to speak. Have a plan for that. Can you cull them yourself or should you have someone lined up to do so?

You can compost the carcasses.

A couple questions here if you don't mind:

1) I take it the rabbits are a meat breed? I have angora rabbits more as pets (I'm still in an apartment) but I've been thinking a lot about how to incorporate them into a more permaculture-y system. Keeping angoras outside probably doesn't work due to rain and dirtier fur but maybe someone with more experience can chime in on that. I do like the idea of a mesh bottom and having rabbit poop end up in the compost area, but I worry about bumble foot/associated health concerns with the rabbits. I don't mind my current system of scooping poop but it won't scale well if we get more rabbits.

2) Roosters and kits together in the same tractor? Are there more than 2 tractors? I admit that I don't know much about animal tractors, I should look more into this.

3) Sickness is something I'm not looking forward to dealing with, but I can manage as the time comes. I am curious about the carcass thing though, I would think that could cause problems for the live birds if they are in close contact?

Thanks for all the info you've given, I really appreciate it!

Timothy Norton wrote:I'm really intrigued by what you have proposed.

I, too, have no experience with a bachelor flock but I have heard that they can work rather well. I would love to have a coop of many different beautiful roosters with their long tail feathers and striking colors. I wonder the frequency that they crow, if at all? A couple here or there wouldn't bother me, but if they start trying to harmonize...

An unfortunate part of chickens are that roosters tend to be undesirable. It'd be nice to change that, even for a few of them.

Yeah I've been trying to think about this to... I know that you can turn old/thrifted/cheap towels into sound-proofing panels but I'm not what you would do about them when they are outside...

Christopher Weeks wrote:I don't know anything about rooster flocks, but I'm interested to read more.

I'm curious what vegans feed to carnivorous pets. If you have a few cats and dogs, I bet they could be convinced to eat a lot of eggs. And every can of meat that you don't buy because your happy, healthy hens made your dogs some eggs, represents animals not slaughtered far away. I get how, for any of a number of reasons this might not work for you, but since it might, I thought it was worth bringing up.

This could be a whole topic of conversation! I know that cats and I think dogs can eat eggs, but I'm not sure if that becomes problematic if you were to then take away meat entirely. I do however know that there are dog foods that are yeast-based and from what I understand are healthy. I personally only have pet bunnies, but I much prefer eggs to meat in this regard! I find it interesting to balance permies ideas with vegan ideas to find happy middle grounds like this :)

Hi Matt,

I would 1000% still do protection! I guess I more meant if (hopefully not when) something goes wrong I trust a group of roosters more than I would just one! I have some interesting ideas with flock protection as well but probably not worth getting into as I haven't played around with the ideas enough.

You raise a good point about bird personality, I should probably do more research there!

As for input material my thought process is to use mostly food waste (my own, and as things scale up, ask local restaurants/supermarkets), and worms. The idea being that anything the roosters deem inedible will get eaten by worms, and turned into more worms which the birds will eat. Edible Acres also does soaked organic grain seed which I will likely replicate as a way to account for minerals/vitamins that food waste does not hit.

Lower laying hens is something I've thought about, but I think has a few problems. Chickens can eat their own eggs, and I would be fine feeding them back to the hens. Unfortunately there will almost certainly be surplus, and the issue with composting excess eggs is that the smell can attract predators. I think it might be possible if I were to find eggs pretty quickly after they're laid but seems like more work on my part. Not to mention that egg laying in general is taxing on the birds, and might require supplementing more calcium than I would with roosters.

Old hens could work, but I think there are less people trying to get rid of old hens as opposed to getting rid of roosters. Maybe I'm a bit off base but I think the general consensus is that once the hen is too old, she's turned into a meal. Roosters on the other hand are realized to be a liability much earlier and thus people aren't as eager to eat them since they are not full sized. Again I could be wrong about that, I don't really know how chicken farming works in that regard.

Long time lurker, first time poster. I want to preface by saying that I don't have any land to work with at the moment, so all of this is theoretical and I'm really just looking for peoples' thoughts.

I really like the chicken composting runs I've seen online, namely Edible Acres system for a number of reasons. Here's the playlist of some of his videos talking about his system, it's a tad meandering but very interesting. For one, it's composting and thus handles food and carbon waste really well. I also like the idea of having a constant supply of microbial rich compost as an "amendment" of sorts for other areas with less soil life for one reason or another. On top of that, Edible Acres has used the compost from this system as a heat source for his winter run and a high tunnel which I would love to try. I could go on, but we all know that compost rules.

Here's the catch: I'm vegan. The traditional permaculture view here would be that you want to stack functions, and have an egg yield from hens that live in this system. I have no doubt that chickens living in this type of system are happier and healthier than those in most any other system, but I won't be changing my mind on eggs (especially since the number of chickens required to make a system like this work means that I would need to sell/distribute eggs). Which left me questioning if it's possible to have a system like this without buying into what I find to be unethical systems (large scale, industrial breeders).

This is where rooster flocks come in. The premise being that it's very difficult to sex chickens when they are young, and often times people will buy (or hatch their own) chicks only to discover that they ended up with a few too many roosters than they can handle. Roosters near hens will get very territorial, and this ends up either making a lot more work for the chicken farmer to separate the roosters, or they kill the extra rooster(s). However, if roosters are kept in an all male flock, with no hens in sight (or hearing range), they can get along (at least based on what I've read online). To me, this seems like a win-win. The chicken farmer who is raising chicks can sell me a rooster or two to make up for their losses for however much they paid (or ideally hatched), I get to have my chicken compost system w/o having to deal with eggs that I won't eat and probably cannot get rid of fast enough, and my personal favorite is that it avoids a lot of unnecessary culling of baby chicks as is seen in industrial chicken farming.

I'll also note here that roosters tend to be more affectionate than hens, are better able to defend them selves against predators (probably not by much), and depending on the breed can have their feathers used for fly fishing lures (not my cup of tea but an interesting yield).

What are your thoughts on a rooster flock? Do you have one? Anything that I might be over looking?