Backyard Chickens & Bees

Raised beds and solarizing the lawn to make way for grapevines

Why do I want to rip out all the pretty lawn and pre-packaged landscape and put in gardens, chickens, native plants, and bee hives? Is it because I’m lazy and don’t want to mow the grass? Probably not. Gardening is a lot of work. Chickens aren’t so much work, but bee keeping is. Or so I hear. We will know in a few weeks. Is it because I really dislike fast food and love to cook? Perhaps. Having fresh food always available is very nice. Canning is also fun at times, and the canned tomatoes that I did a couple of years ago were awesome! How about: is it because I went to the grocery store a few months ago, found they were out of boneless, skinless chicken breasts, and had a moment of uncertainty about what to do instead? Definitely. That one was an eye-opener, in addition to how stupid I felt. I realized that my dependence on what is available at the store is very powerful, and I want to make it stop. Well, maybe not stop, but I want to know how to get along without year-round asparagus and citrus. I would miss lemons if they went away for nine months out of the year, but I could learn to preserve them for later consumption. Seasonal vegetables offer a lot of variety and nutrition, and having good recipes for all sorts of things from my gardens would rock. I would even grow and possibly eat brussel sprouts. Another thing I want to do is raise chickens for eggs, and maybe someday for meat, and be comfortable with that. I would also love to have goats, sometimes for meat, but mostly for milk and making my own cheese. That’s not going to happen any time soon, or maybe never, but it’s something to ponder on. I definitely want to have bees and gather their honey. That just seems like it’ll be fun, despite the stings. I don’t want to resort to all the chemical mess and prophylactic treatments that so many books push as the only means for keeping the bees alive. So I research alternative means for chemical-free living and bee keeping. I think someday I will work on smoking or salt-curing meats, but I should learn to reliably bake my own bread first. One thing I don’t want is a fear of food-poisoning from something I bought at a restaurant or prepackaged at a store. But that’s not what drives me. I will readily eat out at a restaurant, but only if it’s not sketchy. What does drive me? That’s a good question. I work in an industry that is not known for being friendly to the environment (I do research and development for LCD-TVs and other high-tech apparatuses). I do what I can to minimize my impact at work, but it’s a small portion. There are all sorts of chemicals and other foul things that have to be reclaimed and processed. Why do it at all? There are a few reasons, although the biggest one is to be able to create some technology that will either produce energy in a cheap and sustainable fashion, or will detect and eliminate food-borne pathogens that have been plaguing the food industry for years. When I leave work, I try to do a complete about-face and practice semi- to fully-sustainable living. One can never be truly sustainable on a small city plot, so I do what I can. How else would you survive a zombie apocalypse? Farming is always the answer! But I also like to tinker and build things. That’s all part of the engineer/scientist in me. I’m more of a physicist than a chemist or biologist, but much of the biology and chemistry of gardening and producing food or drink from the produce really fascinates me. For what other reason would I rip out a boring, stupid lawn and put in wine grapes that will take five years before they are ready to grow grapes? For that matter, why else would I obsess over seed starts beginning in January, when they can’t even go into the ground until March? And I find that a lot of other people are doing the same, especially with the chickens. “Urban homesteading” seems like a cliché to me, but it is still a movement, regardless of what you call it. There are more and more people in my city who are raising chickens in their backyards, and more and more people are starting to have bee hives tucked away in a back corner of their yard. The farmer’s markets are bursting at the seams with all the people who go there to buy local, fresh produce. Maybe that’s what this time in America will be remembered for: a revolution that turns away from corporate interests, profit, and greed. A time that people turned away from prepackaged snackfoods full of trans fats and high-fructose corn syrup and started eating healthily. A time where taking responsibility for your actions was the norm. Well, yeah…that’ll never happen. Ah, but one can dream…