Week 17: Fun with Chickens and Homemade Composter

Well spring seems to have finally made an appearance! The grass is turning green, the Mourning Doves and Cardinals are starting to build nests in the yard, and our chickens are growing fast! They graduated from the chick feeder and are now eating out of a real chicken feeder.  We decided to let them go on a field trip upstairs into our living room.  All 16 chicks participated, and after a half a paper towel roll later of chicken poop, we decided the field trip was over and it was time to go back to their little home in our garage.

It looks like our beets never came up in the garden outside, so we will have to do some replanting.  Our old stock of radishes that we sprinkled out in front of the kitchen window didn't come up either.  In propagation everything came up except the jalapeno peppers. Again, those were old seed.

On the weekend Aaron made our composter which is going out in the back yard with the garden plots.  He constructed it out of the old fallen pieces of aspen and mulberry in our cedar fence line. The bottom is currently lined with the chicken's used bedding along with contents from our kitchen compost bucket. It took him about two hours to build the composter out in the sun where he got his first major sunburn for the year.  Whoops!

A month ago we went to the Chatham Home and Garden Show and gathered contact information from 4 local 'green' energy companies (solar, wind and geothermal).  One of those companies (OYA Solar) had some good info and seemed to be the most forward to put in the extra efforts and with zero up front cash-commitments to make a solar installation possible.

Currently the only way for solar to be feasible (economically) is to sign a 20 year microFIT contract with the OPA and accept a government subsidy for power generated.  Essentially what we have signed up for, presuming our MicroFIT applicaton is accepted by the OPA and we get the OK to supply Hydro One with our own solar generated power, is a 10kW fixed solar installation on the south side of our roof, with a 7 year payback on a system that should be viable for 30+ years (with a 20 year warranty).  This should end up providing a second source of income for the 7-20 year period after it is paid for, and give us the option be to be hydro independent in the 20+ year time frame.  We will find out if it is a go in 8 weeks.