Postage Stamp Homesteading

small cycles on a sixth of an acre

There are many options for gardening, no matter how much land you own or don’t own. If you are a renter, much can be produced in containers, and if you have no outdoor space to occupy at all, you can look into community gardens and guerrilla gardening.

At our house, we are on a sixth of an acre in a neighborhood. We can keep up to six chickens and garden as we please (some communities have strict rules - always best to check the bylaws first). We are also free to create our own compost system, which in our case, looks mostly like this:

This is our Chicken Compost. We keep a big metal bowl in the kitchen, with a lid, and toss in food scraps, too-old leftovers, plate scrapings, stale bread - every single bit of leftover food with very few exceptions (coffee grounds, tea bags, etc. go into the regular compost pile). Essentially, anything we don’t eat is thrown to the chickens and turns into eggs.

But wait - there’s more! These scraps are served to them in a special area where we add straw and big weed leaves from around the yard (“green manure”), and when the chickens eat and scratch, bits of food get incorporated into the straw and the dirt, which produces worms, which the chickens scratch and eat as well. Plus, they poop into the lovely mixture and after a while, it becomes compost for the garden.

I recently put the chicken compost to work, along with some straw, to create a new planting area for two young melon plants that I purchased at the farmer’s market.

First I used my trusty wheelie cart to collect straw, chicken compost and some huge burdock leaves, which were growing in the dog yard.

Next, I added the straw and compost to the end of an existing garden bed that I wanted to extend. I placed the burdock leaves on top, poked a hole through them for each of the two plants, and filled them up with planting soil (a compost and perlite mix purchased in a bag from the store).

Finally, I planted the young melons into the holes:

Nearby, I put down some cardboard for a new planting bed for flowers. Since this is not an edible crop, I decided to experiment with the dog poop compost that I had started in the winter. It smelled awful! I shoveled it on top of the cardboard, then added straw on top.

I layered burdock leaves on top of that, and planted the young flower plants in the same manner as I had planted the melons:

A week later, the melons and the flower plants are both looking good:

Food waste, chicken and dog poop would otherwise be “problems” to be dealt with, but here they are opportunities to be exploited! Hopefully I have given the dog poop flower garden enough depth for the roots to grow while the cardboard decomposes. I guess that will become apparent soon enough.