Quarter Acre of Livelihood (for chickens :)

A month back, after harvesting the sun hemp, we proceeded to seed all the raised beds in the 25 cents with a variety of seeds weighing about 10 kgs (22 pounds). Many of the seeds were tiny so we decided against making clay pellets for faster completion of work. Also, we are not very good at making these pellets so the decision was easy.

Satisfied with the work, we took a day off to see Ragu’s parents. When we returned, one of our neighbors sadly informed us that our other neighbor had sent in a troop of 30 plus hens and roosters to polish off most of the seeds.  They had seen our time away as an opportunity to fatten up the chickens before their impending sale.

Now we’ve strengthened the fence from a chicken point of view by adding an extra layer of barbed wire both horizontally and vertically close to the ground. We tried seeding some beds again but the weather has changed a lot in the last 4 weeks. It’s hot now and it takes a lot of watering to keep the soil moist. This is soil that does not have much humus at all so not everything germinates. So we’ve decided to wait for the monsoons to seed these beds again.  May be we’ll grow some green manure in the meanwhile to keep the ground cover.

But we did get a whole day’s worth of chicken manure.