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Sand and Water...Sounds like Southwest Michigan.

Drumroll please....the Irrigation Project providing water to the Hoop House and Raised Garden Bed is complete!


Thanks to the farms Handyman Jason Berry, (we don't 'own' him, but we hire him A LOT), each location has a Frost-Free Spigot and electrical line. While not a cheap project, as we plan on growing year-round, we need to ensure a reliable water source, and I'm way too old and broken to be carrying hundreds of watering cans back and forth on demand. Plus, the electrical line gives us options for lighting, and if necessary, heat! Or, just to charge my iPhone and speaker system while doing the gardening thing.


Then, not quite as exciting....unless you are a chicken, I finally created the chickens mini dust bath stations. Sounds fancy I know, but they are just old tires set on the ground and filled with sand.


We had originally planned these when all the bedding in the coops was pine shavings, but at $6.99 a bag there was no way we could make the poultry self-sustaining (let alone profitable). So, after a lot of research we decided to switch to sand...except in the nesting boxes, those still have shavings. The type of sand used is a mix of particle sizes and is often referred to as River Sand. Switching to sand is saving us $28 a week! The chickens love pecking through it. And, fingers crossed, it should reduce the flies during the summer months. As we keep our coops very clean, disease has not been an issue for us, but reduced diseases is another benefit of sand.


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