eggs & tea

Last Saturday (10/18) in Holualoa, Deb and i attended this workshop.  I gave a half-hour talk on Local Chicken Feed, basically summarizing what’s in my chicken notes.  It was great fun, people really liked my talk and i learned a lot also, about fruit and low-maintenance perennial food crops.  It was a sold-out crowd of around 80 people:

We got cuttings from 7 perennial crops (Cassava, Chaya, Katuk, Moringa, Okinawan Spinach, Pacific Spinach aka Edible Hibiscus, Sissoo (Brazilian) Spinach).  I planted them in my garden to see if any will grow here.

More info: Leaves to Live By: Perennial Leaf Vegetables, PerennialVegetables.org, ECHO Tropical Vegetables

It hasn’t been widely publicized, so i want to help: If you are in Hamakua, check this out. HHCDC’s Agriculture & Sustainability classes:

PRACTICAL AGRICULTURE FOR HAMAKUA 2008
Supporting local agriculture through classroom instruction, field operations and farm tours from specialists and local farmers who support sustainable agriculture in Hamakua

There are classes on soil, planting, monitoring, harvesting, value add, irrigation, aquaponics, biodynamics, alternative energy, food security – and a class on Poultry taught by me (Ben) on Nov. 13, followed by a farm tour here on Nov. 15.  You can sign up for the whole thing, or just drop in on the events that interest you.

At one point last year, Deb brought home a packet of Seeds of Change Japanese White Hulless Popcorn.  I planted it in the upper ‘experimental’ garden area in spring, and just harvested today, at 4 months later.  The catalog says [4-5' tall, 3-6 4" ears per plant, 95-105 days].  Mine grew to 5-6′, but had only 1-2 ears per plant after 120 days:

I did plant them a bit close, and this soil is unknown (first time planting in this new garden area), so any number of things could explain the low ear count.  On 30 stalks, i got only 35 usable ears.  Despite the small planting, pollination was very good, and it’s quite pretty:

Here they are with only one row left to harvest.  Note the narrow bed, surrounded by peanuts and taro and yacon:

I wasn’t sure whether to husk them or not before drying them, so i went ahead and husked them and put them in an open container in the greenhouse, probably the most sunny/dry place we have on the farm.

As my Azolla grew, i found a place to put in: in a plastic trashcan lid.  On the gravel under the eaves of our house, it looks quite zen-like – if anything can be said to ‘look zen-like’, which of course would be rather silly:

I did drop a little manure in the water, but otherwise it just grows and grows on sunlight.  Here is a detail of the structure:

The big test: I took a large handful of the Azolla down to my chickens in the morning, before their feeders were filled (they have all the feed they want all day).  At this point they are very hungry, and will all swarm around me, begging to be fed.  I walked into the throng and set down the handful of Azolla.  Immediately, several of the most aggressive hens lunged forward and took huge mouthfuls of it.  Then, they froze.  Cocked their heads side to side, looking up at me, puzzled, as if to say, “What is this?  We were expecting food!  WTF?”

In short, they didn’t like it much.  I came back a while later in the morning and they had in fact eaten it, but it took a while for enough chickens to wander by it bored/curious enough to take a bite.  Here are my theories:

1. It probably doesn’t taste very good.  If i dried it out, i could mix it with the standard dry food and they might not notice it.  That’s what they reportedly do in India.
2. It does grow in stagnant water.  Maybe i should rinse it before serving, to make it taste fresher.
3. Like most things, i’m sure the chickens would be more interested if they had it from chick-time.  These are 2+year old hens, already set in their tastes.

To grow a more useful amount of it, i’ll need to come up with some waterproof basins or troughs, and a way to maintain their water level.  Also, mosquitoes are definitely an issue, so i’d either have to make my troughs deep enough for larva-eating fish, or some other idea.

At last weekend’s famer’s market, the super nice Uluwehi farm folks brought me some Azolla. This is an aquatic fern which might prove to be an easily grown local feed for chickens. I brought it home and put it in some water with a little horse manure dissolved. It started growing right away:

I have updated the chicken notes page with a whole new page for Azolla as a Feed for Chickens.

I mentioned before i was suspicious of some trouble with my roughly finished compost. I did the classic agronomic test: made a number of pots and planted corn. Started 4/7, three weeks ago. Eventually i will pull them up and do quantitative measurement of the biomass grown, but for now i can already do a little qualitative guesswork:

A,B,G: plain topsoil, as a control.
C,D: 50% topsoil, 50% compost.
E,F: 100% compost.
H: Rich, dark results of feeding manure to earthworms.

Some tentative conclusions:

• It all grows quite well. My topsoil is pretty good.
• The corn in the 100% compost looks more yellow, less green. It must be that something is lacking, either the compost isn’t sufficiently broken down or it lacks some nutrient(s).
• The 50-50 blend is doing slightly better than straight topsoil, so the addition of compost is overall a benefit.
• H looks great. Plants just love pure worm output.

Aside from the usual spring planting, here are some things that have been going on at the farm.

• I dug several new beds above and outside the upper garden. In addition to the usual taro and veggies, i have planted some “hull-less” popcorn and a large bed with two different kind of peanuts. I bought the heirloom peanut seed from organic farms i found on LocalHarvest.
• When all the stores were out of Azomite (which we use to add all the minerals our soil lacks) i got a bag of Kelp Meal instead. Expensive, so i use it sparingly, but seems like great stuff.
• I ‘activated’ a gallon of EM and have started a number of experiments with it, seeing if it affects anaerobic composting and whether it helps to “balance” the rough compost. In addition to the anaerobic tests, there are number of pots with 5 corn plants each, with varying amounts of finished compost and EM.
• On a tip from Tom Baldwin, i am now looking for some Azolla (aquatic fern) as a way to grow nutritious feed for my chickens.
• I gave a talk on biochar at a local gathering of farmers, a seed exchange/potluck event held in Honokaa every other month. Lots of other biochar news, but that’s another blog post..
• I gave a talk on How To Eat Local, at the Waimea library. Only a few people showed, but the talk went well. I hope to give the talk to a big audience at some point.

Here are the new upper beds as of a couple weeks ago. That brand-new bed is now full of peanuts:

For the past few weeks, i’ve been getting more and more excited about biochar – that is, biomass charcoal as a way of producing carbon-negative energy and improving soil. I really can’t summarize the whole field here – just take a look at the Biochar Fund, International Biochar Initiative, Biochar: the new frontier at Cornell, Terra Preta, Carbon Diversion. The article Black is the New Green, from Nature (2006) gives a good overview with pictures. This is really the closest thing to a world-saving technology i’ve ever found – and i can’t wait to try it out on our farm. I’m looking around for a source of quality-controlled char, emailing UH and asking everyone i know, spreading the word.

Despite the rapidly-increasing awareness among researchers, environmentalists and technocrats, apparently still very few people – including farmers – have heard of biochar. Global warming has reached the mass consciousness, but not any realistic solution. That may change soon.

My back failed dramatically last week (sacroiliitis) and i was unable to sit or stand for four days. A great time to catch up on reading, i finished two ag books:

You Can Farm, Joel Salatin.  A great book on how to realistically earn a profit raising food in a healthy, humane, sustainable way, on a family farm.  It’s fun to read, blunt, loaded with excellent advice, and definitely not for vegans.   Lots about chickens.  One very interesting point Joel makes in Chapter 13: to have realistic access to markets, you should be within ~40 miles of a town of at least 25,000 people.  Here in Ahualoa, we aren’t – all of Hamakua, plus all of Waimea, is less than 16,000 people.  For people like us in such a rural area, selling enough products, and trucking it to markets, would be a real stretch (in time and fuel).

The Farm as Natural Habitat.  It starts out kinda stuffy and academic, but there are some great chapters in here (all by different authors) on exactly how agriculture and biodiversity can and should coexist.  Most of the book is about the US midwest, but there is also a chapter on Tule Lake in California, and the meadows of England.  There are actually systems in place in the world where agriculture improves land for wild species, and vice versa – the farm doesn’t have to be a “sacrifice zone.”

Recently i’ve found myself spending an awful lot of time out by the compost piles, sifting the rocks out of the horse manure and twigs out of the rough compost, using a simple wire mesh. It’s slow, and takes a lot of energy. Hoping to find a better way, i searched the internet. There are a lot of different ideas out there.

Homemade Compost Sifter Screen Sieve shows the basic idea of making the screen slide, so you don’t have to hold it up. That’s the guy in the picture (that’s not me, although that’s exactly how i’m sifting now). Here are some detailed plans for how to make it with a slider, and some other people show how to build it with wheels. Some other people have built a rotating drum which looks nifty, and google even turns up some patents on that design.

Then, at the higher end, there are some big designs with serious motors, multiple screens, the sort of thing you’d want a front-loader to move your compost with. That’s out of my range.

So, i think we’re going to try building the slider approach, perhaps a bit bigger so it fits on the cart, which is bigger than the wheelbarrow. It’s a lot of work sifting an entire pickup truckload of manure!