Shadrach's Ex Battery and Rescued chickens thread.

2 things do make a big difference: variety of crop, and fertilizer.

Heritage varieties typically are much more nutritious than modern varieties, because modern varieties have been selected to suit the growers and shippers and retailers, leading to stuff that can be picked by machine, washed by machine, stored for months and months, packed by machine, and delivered to the supermarket as (ha ha) 'ripen at home' fruit that never actually ripens, but instead rots at room temperature (and tastes sweet if it tastes of anything) - and then the consumer gets the blame for large food waste rates...

And if you fertilize a field year after year with only NPK, what you grow in it will have lots of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (K), and very little else; and the higher the crop yield, and the deader the soil, the less and less of all those other nutrients that we need will be available to be taken up by the crop. And if it lacks them, we aren't going to get them by eating it, obviously.

The solution is to adopt or return to regenerative or traditional farming methods. Lower but better yields. And before anyone starts crying 'how then do we feed everyone on the planet?', I would ask them to have a look at the amount of food grown but lost or wasted on the dominant current model of agriculture, and the number of people starving on the dominant current model of agriculture. This FAO page is a good place to start
https://www.fao.org/platform-food-loss-waste/flw-data/en/
A topic that crops :)p) up at the field. It seems a few follow some ejit on a gardening blog. They either try out this ridiculous no dig growing scheme or buy in bags of cheap compost with the chemicals added to low quality soil.
I make my own from the chicken shit and ordinary composted waste and weeds from the plots. Yes it's true one gets more weeds in the growing season but weeds have nutrients too and either digging them in or pulling them out as they appear is too much like hard work for many.
I get the hghest yield per square metre of anyone at the field, partly because I grow what the ground and weather is most likely to support, but mostly due to replenishing the nutrients in the soil with my chicken shit compost. I've added a good two inches of decent soil to my plot this last year; the ground has a layer of rubble underneath a very thin soil layer and while I've dug out a good six inches of the rubble there is still not enough good soil depth to grow say parsnips or carrots, or even leeks.
 
sounds great; any animal manure will put back what the harvested plants drew out plus some other nutrients, and your produce will be more nutritious for it, apart from any improvement in yield as a bonus.

Have you considered a raised bed for root veg or leeks? Round here there are some who grow leeks in barrels, but they're just for showing, not eating of course :lol:
 
A topic that crops :)p) up at the field. It seems a few follow some ejit on a gardening blog. They either try out this ridiculous no dig growing scheme or buy in bags of cheap compost with the chemicals added to low quality soil.
I make my own from the chicken shit and ordinary composted waste and weeds from the plots. Yes it's true one gets more weeds in the growing season but weeds have nutrients too and either digging them in or pulling them out as they appear is too much like hard work for many.
I get the hghest yield per square metre of anyone at the field, partly because I grow what the ground and weather is most likely to support, but mostly due to replenishing the nutrients in the soil with my chicken shit compost. I've added a good two inches of decent soil to my plot this last year; the ground has a layer of rubble underneath a very thin soil layer and while I've dug out a good six inches of the rubble there is still not enough good soil depth to grow say parsnips or carrots, or even leeks.
I have been adding compost for over a decade. I dig when I plant/harvest root crops with a broad fork. I keep the ground covered with lawn clippings or straw. I have clay under the thin layer of soil.

The first year I double dug the compost in and couldn't tell I had added anything. This was a pickup truck load of composted horse manure on a 10 x 25 ft area. After that I just throw it on top.
 
Working on that now. A highly misused potential raised bed has become available due to the eviction of a now ex field member.:p
Consider using a hugelkultur method, it's worked well for some of us. In lieu of logs I use branches and woody weed stems at the bottom.
IMG_20220403_152751417_HDR.jpg


I add organic material in the fall:
IMG_20221112_155346828.jpg

Including chicken 💩

And top off the soil every year with compost:
IMG_20231005_163110671~2.jpg


For those unfamiliar with the method, there's lots of information here:
https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/hügelkultur-raised-beds.1604433/
 
WEEDS ARE GOOD!
And some are delicious!
It used to be true that an apple a day kept the doctor away, but it isn't anymore with supermarket apples.
They still have pectin (maybe not as much?), which is a water soluble fiber and helpful for elimination.
It doesn't make any difference if it's organic, home grown, whatever, it's still less nutrition than the same foodstuff even twenty years ago.
We have leached out/used up the minerals in the soil, and not replenished them.

I do a combination of turning things into the soil and adding them on top. So, sort of "no dig." It depends on the time of season and what I want to add to the soil.

It also depends on how much rain we've gotten. One of my gardens is heavy clay. When it dries out, it's hard as a rock. I mulch heavily around the plants to conserve water.

One of the reasons no-dig is very popular is because it involves no digging, and digging is work. The word "garden" is not just a noun, it is also a verb. A lot of people don't want to verb any more than they have to.
 
They still have pectin (maybe not as much?), which is a water soluble fiber and helpful for elimination.
yes indeed, but they are very variable in their phytonutrient values, and all of them are a lot poorer than wild varieties of apples. Worse, although thousands of varieties exist, a mere handful dominate the supermarket shelves - how many appear where you usually shop?

Fwiw, the most nutritious among the 12 most common varieties are Discovery, Fuji, Granny Smith, Liberty, and the Bramley cooking apple (which has 3 times more than the Fuji, which has more than most other common varieties).

Robinson, Eating on the wild side, 2013 chapter 10.
 

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