Posted 08.21.2008

The chickens came first, then the eggs - maybe

By Mike Taylor

It’s late August and the Green Giant’s urban farm hasn’t yielded enough produce to justify the effort and expense I’ve put into it. All I’ve gotten so far is a handful of green beans, a bowl of peas and some basil.

And what I’ve grown isn’t even organic, since I used some Miracle Grow plant food a couple of times when it became apparent compost and water weren’t getting it done.

But the groundwork has been laid for future harvests – maybe even later this summer or fall.

The five young hens are scheduled to start laying eggs in early fall. The coop I built out of scrap wood is 8 feet long, 5 feet wide and tall enough – 6 feet – to make it easy to walk into and thus easy to clean. Nesting boxes await, as do empty egg cartons I began saving a few weeks ago.

The plan, as discussed in previous Green Giant entries, is for the chickens to not only produce eggs at an optimum rate of one per day each but also to provide fertilizer for the 20-by-20-foot garden containing corn, peppers, cucumbers and yellow squash.

The seven or eight yellow squash plants have blossomed, and those orange-yellow blossoms have transformed into tiny squash, so I’m expecting a bumper squash crop in the coming weeks.

The other vegetables aren’t yielding much, but I am going to re-till some of the soil with my two-stroke rototiller and try another round of cool-weather vegetables (peas, spinach and lettuce). I sowed the cool-weather seeds too late in the spring the first time. They wilted under the intense mid-summer sun and produced almost nothing.

I do have one sustainability success to report, however: my clothesline.

Last updated on Oct 16, 2009 at 11:19 PM