Sunflower and Chickens

One of the easiest things to do and one that everyone enjoys, including neighbors, is growing sunflowers. Some of the giant ones can produce more sunflower seeds than candy sprinkles get dumped on the ice cream in the Verizon commercial. And, chickens love sunflower seeds, in fact you can buy sunflower seeds at the feedstore. I just buy the "David" brand since my chickens like "Ranch Flavored". Oh that is bad.....

Anyway, Sunflowers are worthy of planting, are killer to look at and make a great food source of the chickens.

Creepy...

Besides the fact our chickens have been free to roam the garden since 8 am ( it is now close to 11), they have eaten every spider along "Spooky" fence there is. Yes, we have one of those. You know, the fence that is slightly rotten on the bottom and has spider webs everywhere. Well one of the chickens pulled out a Woolly Mammoth of spiders. It was the size of the chicken. They all wrestled for it ultimately tearing the spider from limb to limb and devouring it in no-time at all. While this a creepy, nothing compares to this...

http://www.duncraft.com/Feeders-Houses-Baths-Foods-W117C202.aspx?gclid=CPvt8aeLupsCFRFMagodmhgHAA

Why do we insist on having talking Avatars, are people too creepy? Too expensive? Too large a file? I think this is Animatronic hell. "Hi buy my bird feeders and they will attract pterodactyls and then you won't sleep cause you'll be thinking about my talking head" ( you need to read this with one tone and a little herky-jerky). Why do people think this is cool? Let's think of the market. Outdoorsy people, farmer-like, gardners, possibly older.... 35+ Do we (me included) think this is a sell?

Anyway, I think my point is... chickens are incredible pest control. I have read where farms no longer have flea problems due to chickens...really this is all too cool. Manure, pest control, food and fun. My Aussie is fun, but leaves a lot of poopy to haul, that is worthless and sheds everywhere. Thank goodness he is scary, cause it keeps the creepy door to door sales people from peddling their $100 a pint citrus colon cleanser.

Gardening With A Drip!

I have spent the better part of two days installing and testing a new drip system. I feel like the drip here... it makes me nuts when it takes this much time to put something in. The system was designed to irrigate the garden and send water to the chicken coops waterer.

So, after making a short 20ft trench about 12 inches deep, no worry about freezing here, otherwise 18 inches would be better, I dropped Schedule 40 PVC into the trench. The nice thing about S40 PVC is the wall of the pipe is thicker and less likely to puncture or break in the event I come back in a couple years and put a shovel into that same area...which I will.

I bought a simple little kit of RainDrip... Made in the USA!!!! WOW.. Small plastic parts? Made in the USA... you're kidding!? BUY RAINDRIP

http://www.raindrip.com/cms/

The kit was $20 and it came with 11 sprinklers and more tubing than a hospital. It was super easy to install, although the instructions were really sad... there weren't any. I got the drip system in and viola' it worked... and worked well. I will add and subtract from it as time passes... bubblers, soakers... etc.

The next thing I installed was a shut off valve for hooking up the automatic waterer for the chicken coop. The chickens are really messy with their water. Actually, they are gross. They have no mental switch that says - "Hey don't take a dump in the water!" Nothing happening here, so you need to mount the waterer up, above their need to scratch and higher than their rear-ends. This is a good tip. There food needs the same treatment.

At the end of the day, everything is working - new Toro Automatic Timer, it is a 6 station unit, drip system for a 30 x 15 garden and a spigot for the chickens. The total cost for it all was $104.00