Pro Tip:  How We Hit Pay Dirt
February 22, 2020

    I'm also a shit-'n'-pony kinda gal.  By which I mean, I'm an optimist – the sometimes (always?) annoying, half-glass-full, Pollyanna kind.  Full-blown Olaf.  I can find the bright side of the underside of a rock.  I can tell you why the dog peeing on the floor is "actually a good thing" ("because I needed to deep clean that area anyway").  I can tell you why losing so much sleep in the first few months of my babies' lives built my character ("Now I sorta understand the training our Navy Seals willingly put themselves through").  I can tell you why chicken shit is pay dirt.

    No, seriously, I can. 

    * * *

    Last year was our first year having a big vegetable garden – or, bigger than anything we'd ever attempted, anyway.  The year before that, in 2018, my dad put in six tomato plants in the front row of the 40'x25' garden plot I tilled up at our place with a roto-tiller.  I added a seventh tomato plant to the row, and it promptly got some kind of rot or fungus and choked.  But those six tomato plants of my dad's produced.  I don't know if it was the epsom salt or the fish and blood meal he used at planting, or the mushroom compost we worked into the soil (or all of the above), but I was still picking a bucket of cherry and grape tomatoes off two of those plants every day in mid-October, right up until the first hard frost.  I couldn't give them away fast enough.  And the large tomato plants produced these luscious, dark, sweet-and-tangy fruits.  I made my first ever batch of tomato sauce from scratch from those tomatoes.  Brad declared it the best he'd ever eaten, and the kids gobbled it down.  I saved the seeds from all of our favorites.

    But we didn't get anything else planted that year besides the tomatoes.  I experienced a retina detachment in my right eye in June that year, and the surgery and recovery from that basically nixed our gardening progress.  And before that, our only experience with vegetable gardening had been three or four potted tomato plants sitting on the back porch of our house outside of Oklahoma City,  which were attacked by hornworms and only produced about five tiny green fruits at the very end of the growing season.  Not exactly what I would call an auspicious start to our gardening story.  

    So 2019 was ambitious for us.  I germinated those saved tomato seeds by the dozens, along with a few additional heirloom varieties that I had ordered the previous fall, plus bell peppers, two varieties of cucumbers, and a spate of herbs: thyme, sage, basil, and mint.  (I bought a rosemary seedling and my spicy oregano plant from the year before came back on its own.)  I gave away most of my seedlings because there were just so many, but we ended up putting in a dozen tomato plants.  We also tried potatoes and garlic for the first time, as well as butternut squash and miniature pumpkins.  The mini-pumpkins were a hit at the kids' schools last fall.

    To say that the garden was successful would be a gross understatement.  We just used up the last of our tomato sauce that we made from our tomatoes last summer a few weeks ago – and it's the end of February.  I can't count the hundreds (thousands?) of fruits that those plants produced, but it was epic.  And we're still eating off of the squash and potatoes.  We got about 60 squash from six plants, and I currently have about a dozen left.  I also have a handful of full garlic bulbs left.  And for the ten pounds of seed potatoes that we planted, we got over 150 pounds of full grown potatoes!  We would have gotten more if I hadn't left half of them in ground about two weeks too long.  I probably threw at least ten or fifteen pounds from that batch straight into the compost pile because they had rotted in the ground.  I still have about 20 pounds of potatoes that we need to finish off in the next few weeks.  

    We shared (and still share) a great deal of this bounty with the chickens.  Chickens are nature's garbage disposals.  (So are pigs, just on a bigger scale.  But as permaculture-homesteader guru Justin Rhodes says, chickens are basically small pigs with feathers who give you eggs instead of bacon.)  If you have chickens, you always have a place for your kitchen scraps and surplus food waste to go.  If you have both chickens and a compost pile, you'll never put organic matter in a landfill again.  There's a pro tip for ya.  Here's another:  Chickens are also great at processing your surplus garden proceeds and converting it into eggs.  So when we were up to our eyeballs in tomatoes last year – or if there were tomatoes or cucumbers or peppers that were damaged or otherwise wonky – we just threw them to the chickens, who gobbled that stuff up with abandon.  It is also convenient that cucumber seeds (and other seeds of plants in the cucurbits family, such as squash, pumpkins, and zucchini) act as a natural de-wormer for chickens, eliminating the need to use synthetically produced chemicals for that purpose.  Pro tip.

   We also moved our chickens to new patches of grass every couple of weeks.  Many modern homesteaders and farmers practicing regenerative agriculture try to move their chickens every day.  But we're not that awesome yet.  Nonetheless, we moved their coops-on-wheels and their light, solar-powered electric fence as often as we could, in order to make sure they had access to fresh grass for beta carotene and fresh bugs . . . for all the good stuff that's in fresh bugs.  Pro tip.  

    Oh, and as you move the chickens across a given space, they poop.  A lot.  And the poop acts as fertilizer for the space – all that nitrogen! – as long as it's not too concentrated (hence, the don't-leave-them-in-one-place-for-very-long practice).  Pro tip.

   So perhaps we shouldn't have been surprised when we found tomato plants growing in the  chickens' wake.  But that's exactly what we found, and surprised we were.  Giddy, in fact.  The chickens had gobbled up all those tomatoes, and then deposited some of the seeds in little, ready-made packages of fertilizer.  And since we had moved the chickens on to fresh ground, the seeds were able to germinate and take root unmolested.  It was late in the growing season by the time they got going, but we actually got a few grape tomatoes off of some of those plants!  (Don't worry, we fed them back to the chickens.)

    Chicken shit.  Pay dirt.  No lie.  

    Pro tip.