Our new Suburban farm

Thanks to Meg's Eggs we got four two years old hens last night. Three Wyandotte chickens (two gold and one silver) and a pretty Rhode Island Red, all still within the reasonable age making them good laying hens. Meg is a nice little farmer girl with a Phd. in some useful science, 85 chickens, about half a dozen goats, and some assorted turkeys. She had a good attitude toward sustainable living and grows nearly all of her own food on a few acres out near Milano, Oregon. She will probably miss her four girls, but probably knows we mean them no harm. It may take a few days for the dogs to quiet down and the hens to start producing, but it will happen.

Part of our plan to sell a micro farm in a sub-urban town near Intel.

We got a nice coop from Costco a week or so back. The manufacturer had marked them down from $660 to $295, so we snatched one up. The watering and feeding containers were less than thirty dollars at Coastal Farm, the feed is inexpensive too.

The chickens add a nice protein to the diet that the suburban farm proposes. Each chicken should give something like 200 eggs a year, making four chickens plenty of chickens for a small family. If the new owners don't want them, they come with us to our Creekside Farm in about two months.

Our garden is a neat little low maintenance design which might easily be expanded. It should yield about three weeks of produce a year, spread over a season, a has peppers, tomatoes, tomatillos, Onions, little potatoes, strawberries, lettuces, peas, cucumbers, and beans, all in the ground and doing pretty well. I put a watering system together and covered the beds with weed blocking "plastic mulch" to keep things easy. I made the isles between the rows wide enough so that the plants can spill over a bit without making work difficult. 

Another Farm goal achieved, two yesterday alone. So things are starting to move pretty quickly, in a relative sort of way. We had planned on doing this when we decided our back yard last year, but it took a while due to weather and budget restrictions. I covered over the entire back yard with 6 mil black plastic to exhaust the seed bank in the soil and kill off as much of the grasses as I could. Then roto-tilled the rows neatly, keeping the soil packed in between. We should get a good harvest this year.

But this is not about the house and its little farm, this is about the Farm and its big dreams.