Basket full of awesome. While there are many rewards in gardening the harvest tops the list. A great motivator in our wanting a large garden and chickens is obviously to provide food for ourselves and others that we know is responsibly grown without the modifiers and enhancements of what might come off the shelf at the local grocer. Other more subtle things as we get older are nearly as important, the chickens and garden present a constant activity that not only is something to do but something that requires done. They both call to us daily making sure we don’t spend too much time idle.
For me the chickens are for the garden and the garden is for the chickens and I am caught in the middle like a donkey that does their carting around for them. The basket above is the reward that helps to keep dragging me back.
That Armenian Cucumber was delicious, like zucchini you have to stay on top of them as they can quickly grow past their prime.
Beets are an easy to grow substantial food source, the chickens love them. Weeding in the beets there was lots of fileree and purselane. Both of these weeds are devoured by the hens and provide high nutrition for them which passes along into the eggs collected. The purselane is high in omega3 fatty acids, another plus to add to your morning meal.
Weeding has become a harvest in its own, by identifying the toxic weeds and working to eliminate them and allowing the spread of those weeds that easy to collect and are beneficial to the hens a resource is being created that requires no input from us other than gathering and hauling it to the compost bins each of our chicken runs have connected to their coops.