Brown Gold: The Benefits of Poo

My Uncle Brian once told me about a sanitation company that had a slogan that was "your crap is our bread and butter." I thought it was funny. I didn't realize how true that was on the farm. Chicken, rabbit, and duck manure has all been an excellent fertilizer for all of our plants. Below is our first harvest of red and green leaf lettuce which was planted in a bed of cultivated compost this spring. Basically, the entire winter's worth of chicken manure grew our lettuce. We have more crimson and emerald leaves growing and could have a very colorful salad thanks to our chickens. Their eggs gave us delicious egg salad sandwiches. A complete Rosefield meal!



You wouldn't believe the crap we had to deal with today! Carly cleaned the rabbit cages, I switched the duck pond (which is basically a plastic duck toilet that they swim in,) and we spread compost. We planted six artichokes today and dug up twenty feet of lawn to make way for these beautiful and tasty plants. The picture below is three hours of hand digging and planting.




Artichokes are members of the thistle family. What I love about artichokes is it is one of the first things that Carly and I cooked together. It was great! We steamed one and ate it with mayonnaise. According to some research these plants will eventually be about three feet around and get about six feet high. Our hope is that this creates a natural, edible hedge along the front side of our house. A well performing artichoke plant will yield as many as thirty artichokes. I decided that I wanted to plant artichoke this year because I thought that it would be a pretty addition to the yard. Carly responded by buying one plant early this spring. For father's day she gave me six more plants! To think that out of our seven artichoke plants we could yield over 200 a year? Maybe we should buy some more mayo!




Our chickens may be heroes when it comes to helping us grow our lettuce but they are in trouble when it comes to our kale. Last year they broke out of their pen and into our garden. Beautiful rows of kale and collard greens were decimated. My heart broke. Similarly, today I found the chickens out of their pen. They got into the garden. They ate some of the kale. I'm certain that they will recover because the kale is hearty. The picture below is a plant we have in our front yard. The kale makes a pretty decorative plant with crinkly leaves that have a purplish red hue. When it hits the plate it will be both nutritious and tasty.



Things are going pretty well on the farm. Chickens are laying like crazy, ducks are full grown, rabbits are healthy, and things are blooming and producing fruit. The dreams we had in February are slowly coming true in the early days of summer. We try, we fail, we try again, we get better, we aren't farmers; but we want to be. We want to be better. We want to give a crap - and that's not just a fertilizer joke.