The Boy with Blue Boots

Guilt,Peaches, and Apples

Yes, it has been a while since I have last posted. Why? I am incredibly slow typer and sometimes it seems more work than fun but I am going to seriously try to remedy that.First off though, I need to take care of some LONG over due business. A while back Herrick Kimball circulated a documentary by Deborah Koons Garcia called The Future of Food. The deal was that if we saw the film we were to write about it in our blogs. After seeing the film, I was a little discouraged. The production was great but the content troubled me. It seemed to focus on the negative aspects of food production a little too much and not too much on the positives. Sometimes these films get me down. I think though that I need to see it again. It is worth checking out the web site.

Sprouting news; the first try at sprouting went well as I had previously wrote about. The main idea was to water the seeds over the fish tank and the seeds would help cleanse the water. They didn't. The seeds did grow well though. We then took out the fish tank and the aquaculture system. More on that next time. What we did next was to buy some flat plastic , rectangular storage containers and drill a ton of holes in them. The holes are for drainage. We placed the soaked seeds on them, spread out evenly, and watered about three times a day. We turned two pounds of dry wheat seeds into TWENTY pounds of forage. This happened in about seven days. I hope to post some pictures in the next day or two.

Chickens; The Whizbang Chicken Plucker is about 90% finished. I'm very excited.

Apples; We had the first taste of real apples last week. The orchard in the next town over is starting to harvest summer apples. They were so good along with their white fleshed peaches. I am convinced that ripe peaches were the fruit that tempted Eve in the garden of Eden.

Wheatgrass for chickens

This past week I have been fooling with trying to grow wheatgrass/sprouts for our layers. For those who do not know, wheatgrass has tremendous vitamins and enzymes which are greatly beneficial for people and animal alike. The problem is that the sprout kits that can be bought are for tiny amounts of sprouts . I needed something BIG,CHEAP, and LOW TECH that I could use to provide ample amounts of sprouts to over 70 hens.

I would sleep on it for a number of nights. It then came to me in a dream. Yes, I dream about farm things. In our little greenhouse, we have a homemade fish trough that holds the fish for our aquaculture set-up. I'll share about that another time. I made a rack over the fish trough and screwed in seven hooks. On those hooks I was to hang a bucket on each hook. Each bucket had about 30-40, 1/8'' holes drilled in the bottom to allow for drainage. The buckets hung directly over the water.

The first day I took a large peanut butter jar and scooped up some whole wheat berries and dumped them in a bucket of water and let them soak overnight. In the morning, I then took the soaked seeds and dumped them in a bucket with holes in it. The water drained back into the fish trough and also helped aerate the water and filter it. The whole process took about one minute. I did this every day starting a new batch of sprouts and by the seventh day, bucket number one was ready to go to the birds and a new one was taking its place. Everyday when I went to check on the chickens, I would put a small pail of the water in each bucket and it would then drain out. You cannot let the seeds dry out. My 8yo, mid-day would also give the buckets a drink and I would do it one more time in the evening. This turned out to be so simple . No motors, pumps, electricity, or high tech gadgets to deal with. Also, the birds go crazy for them! Next I'm going to try some barley seed and see which is better if any. Oh yes, I almost forgot. We take the whole bucket full of seed, root, and grass blade and just dump it to the birds. They consume everything. This would work well for winter greens to help supplement dry feed.

Take care,
Dave

First Step, First Blog

I have finally decided to start a blog of my own. I have been reading many other's blogs and comments and have enjoyed them immensely. Encouraged by others, by the fact that I have developed some low tech farming systems or rather improved upon them, I feel that I should share what I am working on to help others out since I have been certainly helped by many of you!
Why call this blog The Midwest Southerner? Because I was born and raised in Northern Illinois, which I do miss dearly, and now I am living in the rugged Blue Ridge mountains of North East Georgia. It is a great place and I'm here because this is where God chose for me to be for the time being.
While here I have learned a great many things about poultry, pigs, logs, timbers, fish, kudzu, fruit, and cider to mention but a few. Through this blog I hope to share some of my thoughts about these things with everyone. Lastly, I want to thank Herrick Kimball for gently giving me a nudge to start this blog so that I might be put on the movie list and to my wife Teresa for helping me figure out the computer. She makes it all look so easy. I'll write again soon. I have lots to share.