Rescue Chickens!

FYI, if you live in then LA area and have been thinking about raising chickens, there is going to be a hen adoption event in Echo Park this October. There isn't a firm date yet but it will probably be the second or third week in October.

The rescue group organizing the event is called the Animal Place and they are based in northern California. Since they are driving the hens down here, they will only be bringing down as many chickens as there are pre-arranged rescuers. You can contact them on their website about adoption to reserve a hen. They are apparently young and laying eggs. The Animal Place specializes in rescuing farm animals. They rescued thousands of these lady chickens after they had been abandoned for weeks at a defunct egg farm. The whole story is on their website.

So help a critter out and enjoy some homegrown eggs!

Hail Britannia

Things have been really busy for me this year, as one could surmise from the dearth of blog posts. So I've been trying figure out how I can cut back on some of my chores. As a result I decided to decommission my worm bin. I realized that I use my regular compost bin much more, and since I do cold composting and never turn it, it's also chock full o'worms. The worm bin was just a little too redundant for me to keep. It was really sad. I imagine this must have been how Queen Elizabeth II felt when the HMS Britannia was retired.

On the upside, I did find something awesomely gross inside the deepest depths of the bin that I just HAD to share...

Canning Caution: don't make marmalade barefoot

 

I bought a starter canning kit recently (super cheap at $12 from Ball) and I've been trying it out on the weekends. This weekend I tried making marmalade for the first time. I followed the orange-lemon marmalade recipe from the Ball Blue Book Guide. But I also looked at posts from various other blogs like this to see what extra tips I could find. So now that I've given it a go, I thought I'd chime in with my own bit of advice for making marmalade:  wear sneakers, and orthotics if you got 'em. Let me explain...

Chickens: The Final Frontier

Just bought a coop and painted it. We won't be getting chickens for a couple months still. Wanted to give myself plenty of time to get everything set up. Incidentally, this is the sloppiest paint job I've ever done. I had to repaint my mistakes repeatedly. I hope the chickens like VOCs because it'll probably take ten years for all the paint to dry.

In case you were wondering...

This is what two cubic yards of decomposed granite looks like: