Attendees should come with seeds, root cuttings, or live plants packaged to share. Vegetables, flowers, herbs, shrubs, and trees are all welcome. There is no cost to attend.

The event will be held at the Estes Valley Library, on Saturday March 3rd from 12pm-4pm. If you interested in attending, please sign up at http://www.evlcalendar.org/events/index.php?com=detail&eID=7600. If you are interested in sponsoring or helping out with the event, please send me an email (philip dot magistro at gmail dot com) and we can talk about details!

Scott is looking for volunteers for the banding project – check out this article if you are interested!

The chickens are doing well, though it can be tough to coax a pose for the camera. Getting between 6 and 12 eggs per day from our fifteen hens. The “Red Broiler” hens are, evidently, fine layers as well. We’ve abandoned composting in favor of tossing every scrap of green waste (from weeding, kitchen, et cetera) to the birds, and they appreciate it. I spread the now six year old and not quite ready compost as mulch on some of the shrub beds around the house. The birds do a much much better job of turning scraps and weeds into protein and fertilizer….and they love it, as well. No onion peels, raw potatoes, citrus, or banana peels for those ladies, though!

The big new addition to the garden is a hive of bees, relocated earlier this week from Denver. It is a top-bar hive, made by the folks at www.backyardhive.com, and is full of thriving honeybees and their winter stash of honey. We’ll harvest their surplus in the spring. They wasted no time in locating all the flowering plants in the neighborhood, and bring back nectar and pollen to the hive. If the six foot wire and wood fence doesn’t keep the bears away this fall, we’re hoping that .6 joules of electric fence will. I touched it, and it doesn’t seem that bad…

On the practical side, anybody with a few tools can build a top bar hive from reasonably inexpensive lumber. We used scrap pallets and some 2×4 laying around the garage. We did borrow a table saw to cut the top bars. We used Philip Chandler’s free instructions on how to build a top-bar hive, but many plans are available.

Next step – find us some bees! If you happen on a swarm in Estes Park, drop us a line and we’ll give them a happy home.

We each took a turn on toprope. Jess learned quickly how to get into a groove and topped out on her first attempt…but dealt with a bout of “screaming barfies” while rewarming her hands at the base. Adam led two pitches later in the day, and I took photos from the top. Topped it off with beer and chili rellenos at Ed’s in downtown Estes. All in all a great day.

I’ve kept a blog on and off for over ten years now, but many of those posts disappeared over the last few years as Apryle and I created and maintained a succession of personal web sites. Over the last few days, I’ve updated and restored a ton of old content.

There are a few new (and old) features to the site. Take a minute and check them out!

We have a new snazzy archive that allows easy access to all the old posts on this site and previous…dating all the way back to the year 2000!

I’ve restored a bunch of old blog posts from 2001-2005, and added a “Time Machine” that displays random posts in the sidebar.

Most importantly, for me anyhow, is that I’ve brought back the South America 2004 expedition page with photos, trip reports, and journal entries from my 2004 trip to South America…including a NOLS Patagonia semester and climbing in the Cordillera Blanca in Peru.

Fun little trip down memory lane, though I am certainly looking forward to putting up new chapters going forward. My desire to climb is back, and Africa is a tempting destination for yet another trip of a lifetime. We’re settled, for now: tending chickens, jobs, bank accounts, and gardens…but before long the urge to wander may overcome us again.

In addition, I can’t resist giving them a small ration of scratch grains each day, ostensibly to help them stay warm…scratch is a high-fat feed, a mixture of cracked corn, wheat, and milo….but also for the sheer joy of seeing them frantically devouring the tiny pearls of grain. We give them a cup or two of dry scratch each day, some days a bit more and some days none at all.

Inspired by The Modern Homestead’s excellent information on sprouting to enhance poultry feeds, I decided to start a small scale sprouting operation. Scratch grains are inexpensive but relatively low quality food for the ladies. By sprouting, we can enhance the nutritional content of the grains. Wheat, for example, increases its vitamin E content by 300% and riboflavin content from 13 milligrams to 54 mg after two days growth. Seven days growth also turns 1/2 cup of dry scratch grains into a full 26oz jar of delicious sprouts. The growing sprouts are an excellent supplement for the birds, especially now when green forage is non-existent in their yard.

So far, it has been working extremely well and the chickens LOVE the sprouted grains. Here’s how it works:

We have seven spaghetti jars lined up on the fridge. Each day I’ve been feeding the oldest sprouts to the hens, rinsing the jar and refilling it with 1/2 cup of dry scratch grains. I give the dry grains a single rinse, then let them soak until the next morning. The other six jars of growing sprouts get a quick rinse in the morning and evening each day. By day seven, the sprouts are about an inch long, green, and taste like, well, grass.

I wonder if the additional nutrition from our sprout experiment helped kick start Lone Feather and the mystery layer to restart/start egg production after the recent (and brutal) cold snap…