Fresh, Local, Regenerative & Organic Practices, Sustainable, High Welfare.
Our laying hens are rotated on pastures we manage with organic & regenerative practices and are fed certified organic feed pellets. They also get scraps from the garden and our kitchen.
Predator losses are a major issue for birds in this area, who have the pleasure of living outside. So we keep a close eye on our ladies and have also trained a protection dog on duty to run off predators, including aerial raptors.
Many of our hens have names, and we do what we can to give them a life where they can be chickens. This means lots of space to scratch, hunt, and dust bathe. We also try to respect of their natural social dynamics, keeping a few roosters to provide leadership, and allowing broody hens to actually raise chicks when we have room for more chickens.
We do cull our birds when they become unproductive, but we honor this sacrifice by butchering and eating them.
We have been organic gardeners for a long time. It is important to note, this is not the same thing as being a certified organic farmer.
To us, being organic gardeners means focusing on developing a living soil ecosystem that plants grow vigorously in, with minimal need for fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, and agricultural plastics. We further reduce the carbon footprint of our garden by utilizing mostly human power, recycling our farm wastes, buying things second hand or just not buying stuff unless absolutely necessary.
These are our ideals, things we work toward. We know plants which are grown in good soil, in a climate they are adapted to, during the appropriate season of the year - definitely don't need additional inputs to grow beautifully.
The reality is that very few vegetable crops are adapted to the intense stressors of this climate and we try to grow them earlier and later in the season than they’d prefer. So it is probably not realistic to hope that we will someday "arrive" at a point where we never need to fertilize or spray or cover for frost. But healthy soil minimizes this. So we put our attention there first.
We are happy to report it is working! Each year we watch the soil mature and notice the plants growing better and better with less and less inputs.
We are still needing to use minimal organic nitrogen fertilizer, two organic insecticides, lots of insect netting, irrigation lines, one greenhouse and row cover fabric.
To our knowledge, we don’t need and haven’t ever used products in our garden which are disallowed by organic standards. We make sure by checking the list of allowed and disallowed substances, which is available online.
So that is the short description of our organic gardening practices. We'll dedicate the next post to going into more details about our efforts to build a healthy soil ecosystem and reduce off-farm inputs.
We didn’t get into this to consign other folks products, but we love supporting them and define appreciate having some additional items to round out our options in the stand.
We give preference to vendors who are on the NE side of town, use organic/sustainable practices, and who are small scale.