February harvest

This should really be "daily harvest", as we get eggs every day. We currently have 15 chickens, from a high of about 25 a few months ago. A few of the older ones passed away from old age, and a few made their way into my favorite recipe Noisy Chicken Soup. All you need for that is a noisy chicken and a cleaver.

We no longer have any cocks. The noise was simply too much, and chickens can be gotten for free anytime, so we dont need to produce our own chicks. I kept this one cock around for a while though simply because he was so ugly.

The eggs are free as we feed the chickens kitchen & table scraps, weeds they really like, we get sacks of last years rice at harvest time, and a good part of their diet is nuka (rice bran and germ). Sacks of nuka are free as the Japanese dont eat it, preferring the tasteless, barely nutritional white rice. We do feed the chickens a little store-bought mash, and this we buy from the money we get from selling our surplus eggs. We have a lot of people who will take all the eggs we can sell as they are said to be really tasty (must be the bran)

Of course the other product is chicken shit for the garden. Store-bought chicken shit is really cheap, but it comes from factory farms and is loaded with antibiotics and other drugs that end up in the soil.

Picking cabbages, lettuces, spinach, spring onions and carrots right now, and gearing up for planting as spring seems to be here....