This past summer I havent spent much time in my garden. I was out of the country for work several times, a family member passed away, and I had a big project that caused any number of late nights.
In the mean time, my aquaponic garden grew like gangbusters. Unfortunately, I let a friend give me some mint. Shes a kind-hearted soul who hates to let any living thing die.
Luckily for me, my daughter acquired a rabbit this fall named Silver. Hes a chinchilla colored rex buck (for those of you who know rabbit terms). Luckily for me, Silver loves mint. So I can pull it out in big handfuls and hell happily munch it down. We have enough mint from this past summer to keep Silver happy for quite a long time yet to come.
My last post was about making emergency lights for Hurricane Sandy. Luckily, our power didnt go out for long and the storm passed us by. I had a chance to spend a long weekend up in New York helping clean up homes in Queens, which was hit particularly hard by the storm.
Hope you have a great holiday season! Ill be back posting about aquaponics again in the new year. Greenhouses, solar heaters, and more!
Check out this video to learn more about raising chickens in the winter. Will they lay eggs when it is cold? Do they need a certain amount of light? How warm should it be? How will they get water in the winter? These are many of the questions that I had going into this first winter with the chickens and I couldnt be happier with our coop, watering system, feeder, and heat lamp. The chickens have been providing us with plenty of eggs for a family of five throughout this very very cold winter.
We have six ISA Brown breed chickens and every day we go out to the coop (well maybe not every day) and there are six eggs waiting for us. This year we have had a very cold winter, I mean, really cold! For the last couple of weeks it has not been above 10 degrees Fahrenheit (-12c) and the chickens have kept on laying! The only issue we have had is if we dont get the eggs in 24 hours they will freeze in the nesting boxes. This could be solved with some extra pine shavings or paper shredding I just havent gotten around to it yet.
The other issue that I was curious about was lighting. I had installed some solar lights in the coop but since the little solar panels are covered in snow and the batteries dont seem to charge very well in the cold; the light s have not really been working much. The only extra light they get is from the heat lamp when it is on. It is hooked up to a thermostatically controlled outlet that turns it on when it gets to 32 degrees (0c) and then turns off once it warms up to 45 degrees (7c). During the coldest days they pretty much dont come out of the coop except to eat then quickly get back into the warmth. I feel that the addition of the heat lamp in this case is helping them to lay more by creating a nice warm nesting area for them (no science here just opinion).
The only other issue that we have had was with the watering system during the coldest periods. When it was down well below 0 degrees (-17c) with wind chills close to -25 (-31c) the heat tape and insulation could not keep up. The water pipe froze almost solid but not enough to break the pvc at least as far as I can tell so far. The inside part of the pipe also froze and no water was coming out for the chickens at all. I may do some redesigning on this heat system for next year but as long as it is not insanely cold for the rest of the winter it should work ok.
We have been so happy with the decision to get these chickens. They require minimal upkeep and provide us with so much. It is so nice to always know there is a free breakfast, lunch or dinner waiting in the fridge in the form of recycled cartons full of fresh eggs from our girls.
Products mentioned in this video:
Temperature controlled outlet - http://amzn.to/1A9sJRT Similar heat tape - http://amzn.to/1wRPQzl Heat Lamp - http://amzn.to/14SnEoH Heat Bulb - http://amzn.to/1y5HMB4
All of these products and more recommended items from the SSL Family are available at the
What do you do when one of your chickens starts to get picked on? In every flock of chickens there is a pecking order and sometimes the weaker smaller birds will start to get bullied, mean old chickens. We have not had any issues with this until just recently when we started noticing a lot of feathers scattered around the run and coop.
I started to investigate a few days ago and witnessed one of the larger chickens chasing the smallest one around and literally pull its feathers right out! Not just one at a time but bunches at once. I hoped that it would just lay low and heal up and all would be well in the SSL flock. I could not have been more wrong, by the next day there were more feathers and more bald spots on the hen.
I was starting to get concerned especially since it is winter here in Michigan and temps were dropping into the teens at night. Each day I would check on the hen and see that it had bunkered down in one of the nesting boxes; basically hiding from the rest of the chickens. I tried to feed it some scraps of food and gave it water.
Last night I went out to put the chickens in for the night and I opened the box to check on it and noticed blood all over the tail and wings. It was time to do something to help this little egg producer.
After some research and based off of what I have seen once the flock draws blood they will not stop until the hen is dead. There is something about the look or smell of blood to them that makes it irresistible and they will actually eat the chicken alive basically. Now, I know what some of your are thinking, take it to get slaughtered or put it out of its misery. Well, no, not going to happen here. Number one I live with 4 girls in this house and if I wanted to continue to sleep inside I dont think that is an option. Number 2, the meat is no good at this age and this chicken still has a year or two of egg production left so I want to save our investment. And, oh yeah, I dont like to see the little runt chicken suffering!
At this point the only thing you can do is separate the chicken from the flock in some way. In our case, the easiest thing to do is to bring it inside our basement or garage and let it heal up. I had and old dog crate that will work just perfectly. Since our garage is a mess right now the basement seems like the logical choice.
Is it weird that I now have a pet chicken in the house? The answer is, yes! But, it is nice to be able to go down and collect an egg without having to go out in the cold so there is that to think about. Maybe I should move the coop inside too! Dont tell my wife that I said that or seriously, it will happen.
I will give an update on this little hen down the road after a full recovery. My only further concern is will it happen again? I may have to separate the bullying chickens for awhile when I reintroduce this one but either way I will take you along and let you know how it turns out. Good luck to all you chicken owners out there and as always let me know if I can help anyone out there in anyway. Have a good one!
I spent a few minutes today catching up on favorite youtube channels and blogs. In the process, I stumbled across a video that looked unusually similar.
There was the bulkhead fitting created out of electrical conduit connectors. The standpipe had the Affnan-style flared mouth I figured out how to make out of standard US plumbing fixtures. The bell on the siphon had the same cap and a series of slots sliced into the base, as Id done.
On the other hand, I didnt see a media guard. And instead of using the single 45 degree connector to exploit the coanda effect to form the siphon-starting water plug, the author of the video had a traditional 90 degree connector, but with a 45 degree connector at the end. From a hydrodynamic point of view, the 45 degree connector at that location wouldnt do anything useful. The video creator didnt cite any prior influences on his design, so its not clear if he even knew his "design" was completely derivative of what Id posted. Then again, he didnt repeat my faux pas of calling a standpipe an "upstand." ::blush::
Its not like I do any of this for money or even fame. I really do just want to make aquaponics accessible to the maximum number of people. But it was surprising to see myself so completely copied, if copied imperfectly. Heavens knows Ive learned much of what I know about aquaponics because of the generosity of individuals who made their information available on the internet. But there are a couple of ideas that werent out there before I posted them.
Im reminded of a wonderful poem my mother wrote. In later life she went back to college to complete a Bachelors Degree. In one of her college textbooks, she found her poem, attributed to "Anonymous."
The Gardener by Pat Chiu
If you were a gardener, your child the seed, Your task it would be to nurture and weed way wild things that threaten distruction and strife and prepare the young plant for the rigors of life.
But a daisys a daisy. A rose is a rose. The child must be true to its form as it grows. True to the form from the maker sent And not to the will of the gardener bent.
There are so many people to whom I owe my understanding of aquaponics. And in some cases they may have been leveraging knowledge from others of whom I never knew. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.
May those whove learned from my little contributions go on to further the journey. Upward, towards more effective and efficient systems, and forward, towards ever-more affordable ways of doing this kind of gardening.
We all want to be environmentally friendly and do the right thing for our planet, dont we? But how do we know which choices will leave the smallest footprint, and which items to throw away and which items to recycle? Finding the right answers are hard and when you do, they may surprise you.
The SSL Family Dad and I love to watch Ted Talks. If you havent heard of Ted, click here. Ted talks are available on all different topics but we seem to migrate to those dealing with sustainability and farming. One talk we watched earlier this year really changed the game for us, and I just love it when that happens. I love it when information just hits you over the head and changes the way you look at life forever.
This talk is so powerful, I think you should watch it right now and then finish reading this article because I will never do this topic the justice it deserves by trying to explain it to you myself. For those of you who are worried about burning up your data for the month like I would be, click HERE for the transcript of this talk.
And for those of you who didnt have time to watch or read it, Ill recap for you but only if you promise to watch or read it later. Its seriously THAT good.
The speaker, Leyla Acaroglu, states that "everything at some point comes from nature,and its how you use the materialthat dictates the environmental impact....what we need to do is we need to learnto do more with less."
Biodegradable materials, such as paper bags, do not decompose in a landfill the same way they would in nature. Landfills are anaerobic (meaning no oxygen) and biodegradable materials emit methane gas when they degrade. Some facilities actually capture the methane gas and use it to generate power, which is a good thing, and gives us an alternative to fossil fuels. Bottom line is, if youre going to pick the paper bag but take it home and throw it in your garbage destined for a landfill that does not generate power with its methane gas, then youre not picking the best choice for the environment. Landfills should be our last resort for items we cannot reuse or recycle.
Reduce, reuse and recycle. Sounds so "elementary", doesnt it?
So the best answer to the great paper or plastic debate is actually neither. The best option is to use reusable bags instead. But if you really need to pick one, pick paper. And reuse that paper bag, and then compost it.
Writing this article has forced me to look at everything were doing now with our waste as a result of this talk we watched, and I have to laugh because it seems that a majority of what we do here at Simple Suburban Living is centered around our trash. That surprised me, a lot. But it also reminded me that we are being good stewards of our planet by being good stewards of our garbage. Here comes Luke 16:10 again, "Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much." Its so true, isnt it?
Weve made some serious changes around our little homestead this year with regards to what we do with our trash. So this week, well be sharing how our family reduces the amount of our waste that ends up in a landfill.
Were calling it Garbage 101. (And dont forget to watch that video!)
This post has been shared at: Homestead Barn Hop, The Backyard Farming Connection Hop, Homestead Blog Hop
