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By Mark Zeiger, March 3, 2018

We do not raise chickens on our homestead.

We have a chicken coop, built and used by the originating family. It serves mostly as a garden shed right now.

We talk about raising chickens or ducks, but a few key obstacles keep us from taking any action yet. First and foremost, I want to find an alternative to hauling feed over the ridge. Also, we have a really good relationship with our neighborhood predators: mink, ermine, and marten, (okay, maybe not so much the martens—see “Wait Til ‘Marten’ Comes!”) that keep our rodent pest populations in check. I don’t want to change that dynamic by offering them poultry to raid. Finally, there’s the issue of working out an off-grid method for keeping them warm in the winter. I know several ways to do that, it’s just a matter of setting it up.

So, for now, we raise no chickens of our own, but we buy almost all of our eggs from Hainesites who do.

A couple of dozen local chicken eggs (Photo: Mark A. Zeiger).

Continue reading '“Dinosaur Eggs”'»

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By Mark Zeiger, July 16, 2015

The content you’re looking for is no longer here. We’re finally beginning to shut this blog down, to remove old content.

We’ve chosen to start with essays that are available elsewhere. Specifically, this article has been edited into our eBook, More Calories Than Cash: Frugality the Zeiger Homestead Way. It contains edited, improved, and expanded versions of essays that used to be available for free on this blog, and new material as well. You can learn more about it, and order it here.