Working on living more sustainably

I am finding I am struggling a bit with what blogging is for.  I read others' blogs and find that they blog in a certain direction.  My direction these days is learning to be more in nature and to live more frugally, more sustainably and with more ZEST!  I am looking for ZEST!!

Today is our chicken tractor day.  Tim drew up blue prints and we are going to work on building it today.  Carl was so cute yesterday.  He said, "Dad, I'll help you however I can!"  We have a list of items needed and we are planning to go to Home Depot in a bit. It should be an adventure. 

I am not much of a do-it-yourselfer.  But I am finding more and more that I can learn new things.  I am currently growing lettuce, carrots, onions, tomatoes, peppers, zucchinis and some yellow squash.  They are looking lovely and so far the rabbits haven't found the holes that got burned in the deer fencing around the garden.  How did the holes get burned?  Well...it had something to do with the cool weed burner we have.  But I won't say more about that.  :-)  I will probably be fixing our fence today too. 

Why do we want chickens?  Of course eggs are good.  And I like animals.  I like taking care of them and interacting with them.  And when I first thought about it, I talked to my sister who has a number of chickens.  She told me that they eat all their kitchen waste.  That is cool.  Mostly because our worm bin is too small and they are unable to keep up with the amount of veggie waste that we produce.  This is a good sign because when we got the worm bin, we didn't have much waste and it was just fine.  This shows that we are really working on eating better and eating more whole foods. 

And fertilizing is also a great part of chickens.  That is why we decided on a tractor.  Our soil is bad out here and every little bit of fertilizer and building up of the soil will help. 

I am a bit worried about the wildlife and them taking an interest in the chickens (this includes my dogs), but we just have to prepare the best way we can and then try it.  Hope it works!!

As another step in our frugal living/more sustainable living quest, we started back with our CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) this week.  I like to call it our farmshare.  We get a half share of veggies and a half share of fruit every week.  The takings were sparse this week, as it has been unseasonably cold, but things should be moving in the right direction soon.  The farm is just down the road and they are a nice family.  It is neat to know where our vegetables are coming from. 

We are hoping to do some canning this year as well.  We use a lot of tomatoes in our cooking, and even putting these up ourselves would be a huge money-saver.  Or at least it would be cool to know that we grew them and canned them ourselves! 

It looks like it is going to be a lovely day today.  The sun is out and it is supposed to be in the mid-70s today.  NICE!  The dogs are already out enjoying the morning.  I guess I had better get there too.