Tag Archives: hobbies

Chicken Coop Yard Designs: Even If You Live In A Town

Leave a reply

If you’d always thought that raising your own chickens could be too difficult when you live in the city, then chicken coop yard designs might be just for you (so long as your city allows for you to keep farm animals).

The neighbors don’t like it when they’re woken by roosters, which is why some cities don’t allow them. This is why you’ll want to check laws before you begin.

Why Have Your Own Hens?

The main reason that individuals desire to keep chickens in the town will be so they can have access to fresh eggs all the time. But sometimes people just want to take a part of the country into the city. You can save money by producing your own eggs, and you can even make the whole project cheaper by joining along with your neighbors and planning on keeping chickens together.

Building A Home For Your Chickens

The best place to start is with chicken coop yard designs that help you out on your journey to keeping hens. These sort of plans are easy to follow, so building your own personal coop isn’t as much of a massive task as you might think. And you’ll benefit from ensuring your coop comes out exactly the way you would like it.

A chicken coop yard design should avoid overcrowding by giving enough space to each chicken. Crowding can lead to sickness among the hens, and they’ll stop laying eggs. Around four square feet of space, or more, is required for each chicken you propose to keep – so this information should help you decide upon the quantity of chickens you will look after.

If you reside in the north and have weather involving snow and ice then you’re also likely to have to consider the insulation of the coop to make sure your chickens are always warm. You don’t want to be forced to bring them in the house. You’ll should also be sure that systems are set to keep the coop cool during the summer.

If you wish to create a home for the chickens on a budget then that’s perfectly possible. Try to make use of recycled materials when you’re building it, like leftover wood that you have from other home projects.

Chicken coop yard designs should always include adequate ventilation for the chickens to prevent them getting sick as ammonia builds up. The most suitable option is to follow an expert plan that ensures your coop has all the features it really needs.

City dwellers really can look after their own chickens! Don’t be put off by all the fancy chicken coop pictures you might have been looking at. Learning how to build chicken coops is so much easier than you might think, and you’ll be enjoying fresh eggs for years to come!

Composting – The Easy Way

Leave a reply

There is an alternative — composting. It’s a good idea whose time has come again. Now more than ever it makes sense to compost all of your family’s food waste, plus paper and any other organic carbon-based waste you can. By composting your household food waste, you are not only reducing strain on already overtaxed landfills, but you are also providing yourself with a source of rich fertilizer for your garden. With your own compost on-site, you no longer have to go to the store to get fertilizer.

If you are not a gardener, you can still make your own compost — you can give it away to family or friends who are gardeners. you can sell it or you can practice random acts of kindness by spreading it on select neighborhood parkways or secluded park corners.

Making quality compost is not difficult. You just need a place to put your compostable matter be it a separate corner of your yard that you designate as your compost heap, or one of the many commercially available compost bins. Compost heaps must be turned and aerated every couple of weeks, and you should follow manufacturer directions for working with a compost bin.

Be advised, different compost bins can handle different materials, and most composting systems cannot handle meat, bone or animal droppings. There are two big problems with composting meat 1) It takes longer to break down than most vegetable matter and 2) Meat attracts scavengers like raccoons an opossum that can spread your compost all over the neighborhood. Compost tumblers address both these issues by making it easy to frequently aerate your compost and by being more secure against roaming critters.

Another alternative for meat and other food waste, the “Green Cone” system, is secure and includes packet of composting enzyme that speeds up the composting process. The Green Cone does not, however, produce compost to be redistributed elsewhere. Instead, it breaks down the contents and lets the nutrients seep into the surrounding earth for a radius of about 15 feet. Ideal placement for a Green Cone would probably be the middle of a vegetable garden. The Green Cone is also capable of handling small amounts of animal excrement.

If you are interested in recycling larger amounts of manure, I would suggest you look up the “Humanure Handbook”. It is about composting human excrement to reduce stress on sewage treatment plants and the special challenges associated with the process. Pet waste usually goes to landfills, so following the principles in the handbook to handle pet waste would relieve even more stress on landfills.

Composting excrement is not for everyone, but it is worth considering.

How does composting help save the world? Remember that the less rubbish needs to be taken away in garbage trucks, the less fuel they use and the less material is sent to the landfill. This is all good for the environment.

What can you compost? Vegetable and fruit peels, apple cores, small rodent and rabbit bedding, coffee grounds, tea bags, shredded paper, newspaper and cardboard, and egg shells all work. To make good compost, you generally need a mix of 3:1 paper/cardboard to vegetable waste.

A lot of localities now sell compost bins and some will even subsidize the cost for homeowners — people need only ask at their local township or village offices.

If your municipality does not offer compost bins, there are many build your own sites on the Internet with details on how to build your own compost bin. All you typically need is some wood, chicken wire, and a four by four foot carpet remnant to cover your compost pile to retain heat.

And if building your own compost bin is too much work, you can buy one, whether standalone or tumbler, from your local home and garden shop or on the Internet.

Place your trash in, turn as necessary to aerate, and in six to eighteen months waste that would have gone to the landfill will have been changed into one of the most valuable resources for rejuvenating the earth: rich black compost. Composting is the answer to a lot of problems Get a totally unique version of this article from our article submission service