The Cob Oven!

1 October 2017 • Cob Oven, Make

It's done! It's usable! We've used it! It works! This thing was a mighty labour of love but we couldn't be more pleased with the results! It's a little unrefined at this point. We didn't get around to doing the final finishing layer...

7 August 2017 • Cob Oven, Make

Now we're getting somewhere! The base is complete! This part was really intimidating at first but once I got going it was surprisingly easy. Do I have any experience laying brick you might ask? Nope! I watched a few youtube videos and called myself...

1 August 2017 • Backyard Herbology, Make, Medicinal Herbs, Yarrow

Recently I took a 4 week Practical Herbalist course at Little City Farm. I learned so much! What was really inspiring was realizing how many useful things grow around us, usually considered as weeds! Last week I was browsing through this book looking...

22 June 2017 • Cob Oven, Make

I've made some big progress this past week on the cob oven! We had been putting off this step because it seemed like one of the bigger manual labour aspects of it: digging the hole for the foundation. Dave spent a few summers with a shovel in-hand...

21 June 2017 • Chickens

Well we've run into our first major snag with the hens. They've gone broody! Broody pretty much means that they stop laying eggs because they want to hatch some baby chicks. So they pluck out their belly feathers (for skin to egg contact),...

16 June 2017 • Fermenting, kombucha, Make

Have you had kombucha before? I think the first time I tried it I was a little weirded out by it. I mean, fermented tea? But lately I've been really getting into it! Surprisingly though made from tea, it doesn't taste like tea. More tangy and fizzy...

24 May 2017 • Cob Oven, Make

Ok so it looks like we're doing this cob oven project! When we first had the idea to put one of these things in our backyard it was totally overwhelming. It's easy to look at a big project like this, that's totally out of our comfort zone, and think,...

16 May 2017 • Eat, foraging, Make, plants, violets

I've totally hopped on this DIY/crunchy lifestyle train lately. One of the things I've been wanting to try out is creating something from foraged plants in the neighbourhood. Maybe a little strange? Then I saw this blog post and thought "I can do...

10 May 2017 • Garden

Every neighbourhood has that one chatty neighbour. You know the one you may try to avoid making eye contact with when you're in a rush because you know you're bound to be chatting with them for the next 10 minutes? Well Dave may be that neighbour...

7 May 2017 • Cob Oven, Eat, Make

Wanna hear about our next big project? The COB OVEN! What is a cob oven you ask? Pretty much an outdoor wood burning oven made out of cob. Cob = clay+sand+straw. Most people use these types of ovens for pizza but you can also make amazing bread and...

9 April 2017 • Chickens

The chicken yard has been built! As we mentioned before, it's against bylaw to let your hens free range in your backyard so we decided to build them a little yard where they could roam outside the enclosed run/coop.

We had a couple of options when it came to building it. We ending up using cement footings instead of digging in fence posts. It went up way faster this way, plus if we ever want to move/make alterations to it, this will be much simpler to do. My Dad and Dave got the fence and gate put in within a weekend and we were going to just leave it as is. BUT. Then we noticed that Frida could jump/fly (chickens have the most awkward "flying" ever) on top of the 6.5 foot fence! I looked out the window one afternoon while doing dishes and saw her perched right on top there! Yikes! So this past weekend we added a chicken wire roof on top so we can prevent Frida from flying the coop.

We also added some straw to the run part of the coop but the chickens ended up kicking it out into the whole yard area. They've pretty much eaten the whole section of lawn they have access to and I was getting concerned about how we would be able to keep the area somewhat clean from chicken poop. So, straw seemed like a good idea. Plus it adds to the whole farm feel which I'm definitely (unabashedly) loving.

There is a small area above the gate that we couldn't really add chicken wire to, so I repurposed some wooden stars I had to hang there. Hopefully the stars will deter Frida from ever trying to jump up there. I also "did the Natalie thing" (as Dave says) and found some hanging planters in my craft room to hang up on the outside to make it a little more pretty. I'm hoping to put some geraniums or something colourful in there once the weather levels out a bit. We had a large old wood ladder we picked up at the side of the road last year that Dave sawed down and we added that to the yard for the chickens to climb on. I also thrifted a small (kind of ugly) blackboard that I repainted and hung up for us to keep track of who laid how many eggs, but Iris just likes drawing on it. Ah well. Dave also scored some free blackberry/raspberry plants on Freecycle that we're going to plant along part of the chicken yard fence. Exciting stuff!

$$$$$

Now let's talk about the not-fun part. The cost! All the materials for the yard (wood, cement footings, chicken wire, gate, straw, hardware, etc.) came to about $500. Not cheap!

The straw I found on Kijiji for $5 a small bale and the guy delivered it (and stacked it up so nicely against the house for me!) for an extra $15. I bought 4 bales for a total of $35. I think this will be enough to last us about a month or so.

This stuff adds up! Start-up has been very expensive. We're so lucky to have received our coop for free because that would have been another really big expense.

Maintaining the chickens (feed, pine shavings, oyster shell, grit, etc.) is fairly cheap, so we're still seeing all of this as a really great thing, even if it has been rather expensive to start up.

Dave: So far Nat has written everything here. I just want to add a comment about the cost of chicken keeping. As much as start-up for our chickens has been expensive (very expensive, if your only motivation is to get eggs), I have no regrets about this endeavour. The whole experience, right from the beginning, has been so full of learning. Learning about our city's bylaws (thanks to our neighbours for the extra push, lol), about construction (a more genuine thank you to Nat's Dad), the needs of chickens (the Kitchener Public Library has been a phenomenal resource), organic farming techniques (KPL again), and compost (KPL again!).

Regarding our money, we are constantly faced with a decision on how to spend it. Some people have $100/month cell phone bills, $100/month internet subscriptions, and/or $100/month television packages. We are not those people (I know, we're the weird ones). Instead, we have chickens, ha! And we love them dearly. So yes, there is a financial cost to keeping our chickens. But our other life decisions (read: ultra frugality) make that cost possible to swallow - though it IS still a hard pill to take. All the learning we've done and will continue to do as we tend to our flock of four is worth the spending to us.

Another thing... our family has been spending SO much time hanging out together with the chickens, doing all the chicken things. This family time has really drawn us to homesteading, it's great! So far keeping our vegetable garden, starting up our composting system, and now keeping chickens has increased the Nunn Family Love-o-Meter exponentially. In short, totally worth the $500 ;)

I really REALLY love having this chicken yard. All four hens gladly come out of the coop right away now in the morning and they all have space to do their own thing so we've seen a lot less bullying. Yay!

(Shout out to my Dad for helping us out so much with this! We couldn't have done it without you!)

31 March 2017 • Chickens, Garden

Look! They're all outside! Together! Can we call ourselves a homestead yet? What even makes a place a real homestead? Oh well, I'm calling us a homestead! Fake it till you make it! Anyway just thought I'd do a little re-cap of what went...

25 March 2017 • Chickens

Michelle, one our Chanteclers Well. What a week it has been! I should preface this post by saying that the day after we brought the hens home Iris came down with the dreaded barfing flu and then, of course, I got it a few days later. Bah! So it...

19 March 2017 • Chickens

You guys! We have chickens in our backyard! Man, it was not an easy week leading up to bringing them home - let me tell you. But first with the fun stuff!! I want to share how we picked our chickens, where we got them, their hopes and dreams,...

4 March 2017 • Chickens

Yay! Today we rounded up a bunch of free things people had set aside for us including not one, but two chicken coops, some pallets, hay bales, and some chicken paraphernalia. This fall when we mentioned we wanted to raise a few chickens...

18 February 2017 • Eat, Fermenting, Make, Pickles

Today I went to a really cool workshop at one of my favourite places in town, Little City Farm. LCF is one of our biggest inspirations when it comes to backyard homesteading and they run a variety of really interesting workshops there throughout...

12 February 2017 • Bees

I've JUST begun exploring the possibility of keeping honey bees in our backyard in the past 5 months, and I love sharing my excitement with friends, family, and colleagues. It's perhaps unsurprising to you that my excitement has drawn mixed...

3 February 2017 • Garden, seeds

We have seeds! Woot! We spent quite some time trying to figure out where to get our seeds from this year. Not gonna lie, prior to this I would just grab them at Home Depot (obviously... being picky about where you buy seeds is, perhaps, strange)....

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