Last night's salad was from our garden, except for the lettuce. The tomatoes, cucumber, and pepper were so much tastier than any store- bought vegetables. I didn't even put dressing on, it was so tasty! (Which brings me to a side note that the kids reminded me of this week. Why did the tomato turn red when it opened the fridge? Because it saw the salad dressing!)
I put all the peelings, seeds, bad spots, and the lettuce core in an ice cream bucket for my son's chickens. He has two Barred Rock hens that he hatched for FFA last spring. Peggy and Penny have just started laying eggs. We are SO excited! He also has 25 or 26 GORGEOUS Blue Copper Marans- 6 roosters and the rest hens- that my friend from work gave him for free. WHAT. A. GIFT!! The chickens LOVE all the scraps that we add to their diets. (If you have chickens, make sure you check before you feed them things, though. There are several foods or parts of foods that will make them sick.)
Aren't these eggs beautiful? My son mostly feeds the chickens grain that is leftover from the cows. The original plan was that they would be free-range, and then they could just eat out of the barnyard. That hasn't happened yet, though. The Chicken Daddy is very protective of his girls/ children, and keeps them in tractors that he moves everyday up and down the back yard. For a 17 year old kid, he has demonstrated a lot of character in taking full responsibility for this endeavor. He designed and built the first tractor with his own money. The second tractor he remodeled from a bench thing that a friend gave me- but he used his truck to go get it with me, and he fixed it up to suit the chickens. But, enough bragging on my kid. This is a boring post about gardening and the circle of life.
The eggshells from the eggs that we use get recycled 2 different ways. The Chicken Daddy takes some of them, dries them out, grinds them up in his grain grinder (that he bought or asked for as a gift back in Jr. High!), and adds the shell powder to the chicken feed. The high calcium content is good for them, and the calcium supplement also makes the eggs they lay have harder egg shells. The other way we use the egg shells is that I crunch them up by hand and sprinkle them around my garden plants. This detours slugs this year and fortifies and loosens the soil for next year as they get tilled back into the dirt.
So, that's one of the MANY cycles of life on the farm. We get yummy veggies from the garden, we give the scraps to the chickens, the chickens lay eggs for us to eat, the eggshells go back into the garden and chicken feed, and then we have more yummy vegetables and eggs to eat!
