Gardening with Free-Range Chickens For Dummies
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Sustainability is the ability to maintain a desired level of ecological balance without depleting natural resources. The more time you can devote to growing your own food, raising your own chickens, composting, recycling, collecting rainwater, and conserving resources, the richer and more self-sustainable your life will be.

To some degree, it’s also being self-sufficient. In this day and age, global warming, diminishing water resources, extreme weather, rising energy costs, and genetic engineering of food are just a few reasons to create sustainability in your own garden.

Your food will be more flavorful, and it’s rewarding that you grew it and can share it with others. Having a garden and growing your own food naturally aligns you with the rhythms of the seasons. Keeping a flock of chickens in your garden rewards you with the tastiest, most beautiful, and freshest eggs.

Successfully composting and creating humus to return to your soil costs you nothing yet dramatically and organically improves the health of your soil.

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Today you can see a great renaissance in gardening and animal husbandry to explore the many heirloom seeds, fruits, vegetables, and animal breeds that have been nearly lost or forgotten since the 19th century.

Often, produce varieties that traveled well won out to others that didn’t but had better flavor. Animal breeds with high fertility and rapid weight gain were genetically favored over ones that didn’t. Man imports and freights food from other countries for year-round availability. Creating sustainability in your own backyard gives you more flexibility to grow a much more diverse array of food for yourself and loved ones.

Explore all the ways you can be sustainable and self-sufficient in your own garden. Consider solar heating, solar power, windmill energy, keeping bees, creating a worm farm, and collecting rain water as a few more suggestions.

About This Article

This article is from the book:

About the book authors:

Bonnie Jo Manion has been featured in national garden magazines with her gardens, organic practices, chickens, and designs. Follow Bonnie at VintageGardenGal.com. Rob Ludlow is the owner of BackYardChickens.com, a top source on chicken raising, and the coauthor of Raising Chickens For Dummies.

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