Livestock
If you are vegan, or perhaps even a vegetarian you will decide from the onset not to keep livestock. However, many people keep some livestock on their land and incorporate full into their self-sufficient lifestyle. To be ethically acceptable the following conditions must apply,
- Any livestock must be housed suitably and given full protection from bad weather
- You must ensure that your livestock is properly fed, watered and bedded at all times
- You must regularly clean out or otherwise look after your livestock to provide a healthy environment
- You must be prepared to use the services of vets if your livestock needs attention
- Long periods away from your home of long working hours that mean you do not get home until after dark in the winter are not compatible with keeping livestock
Chickens and Goats
Chickens for egg production are the first choice of many when it comes to keeping animals. Choose your variety well and ensure that you have housing that provides enough room and fox protection. It is, in my experience impossible to keep chickens roaming freely over your vegetable and fruit crops; they will eat it or scratch up the roots, in wet weather they will turn any seedbed into a muddy swamp! Better to keep them either within a run with housing for roosting and egg laying or keep them in a large barn which is open each end but fenced to prevent escape. A good laying hen will produce about three hundred eggs a year, so don’t keep more than you need. Cockerels are noisy and will mate with any chicken around so why not go for an all-female cross like Warrens, excellent layers and placid birds. Chickens are prone to bullying each other so be prepared to intervene on occasions, long term flocks will have a pecking order established, but if you are introducing new birds be prepared for difficulties.
Chicken food has, like human food, become much more expensive in recent years; cut your costs by feeding your chickens on weeds and unwanted crops from your garden. Chickens fed on ‘corn and greens’ produce much better eggs than those fed on commercial ‘layers pellets only’. If you do buy pellets please make sure that they do not contain antibiotics, which are an unnecessary addition. I grow as many pumpkins as I can in the summer to supplement chicken feed throughout the winter months and a plot full of overwintering Brassica is a good idea.
Goats are also favoured by the self-sufficient grower, but please take expert advice before you start. I was once told that if you keep goats, at some time they will escape, and when they do, they will wreck your entire garden in a very short time. The answer is to keep them in a paddock which few will have room to provide. Vet bills for goats can also prove expensive.
Both chickens and goats will provide an excellent amount of manure that will make your compost heap the envy of folks for miles around, an added bonus.
Bees
Beekeeping was once so common in many parts of Europe that almost every country-dweller had a row of skeps in their garden and honey was readily available. Today this is far from the case; declining meadow and hedgerow combined with non-selective insecticides; bee diseases and climate fluidity make beekeeping much more difficult. If you look at the cost of keeping bees and the time it will take to get the money back, you will soon realize that beekeeping has moved out of the realm of self-sufficiency and into the realm of an expensive hobby. If you do decide to keep bees then strongly consider taking a course in beekeeping from your local bee association and get some honest expert advice on how to get started. We do keep bees on our land, but not for honey, the bees are maintained with as little interference as possible just for us to enjoy the sight of them and for the work they do in pollinating the crops. As an alternative to keeping bees yourself, why not make your land as ‘bee-friendly’ as possible and let the people ‘up the road’ who keep bees have all the expenses and the hard-work. Given plenty of flowers and places to nest, wild bees of all kinds will take up residence in your garden and pollination of your fruit and vegetable flowers will be assured’
Wildlife
Your use of the land puts you in a position of trusteeship; the land was there before you and the land will be there when you are gone. Take your trusteeship seriously and do what you can to live in harmony with the wildlife to which your land is a home. If you have space to let a corner of your garden be a wild place where animals can live and feed without harm, if you have a lawn, let some of it become a meadow where wildflowers can grow and bees and butterflies feed. If you can, try to grow a hazelnut tree, the nuts that you can’t eat will have wildlife queuing up to devour them. Your providing these facilities mean that you are more than just a gardener, you have considered the needs of other things and that is the right way. Some sacrifice is necessary, either of space or produce, but the world does not belong to us and the squirrels know little of the laws of theft, nor hedgehogs of trespass.
Children
Most, but not all, children love the process of growing food. Try to encourage them as much as possible and get them enjoying work in the open air. You may decide to give your children a plot of their own to grow food on, but please only do this if they want the responsibility, a plot full of weeds with, you have to constantly moan at them to ‘work on their plot’ is not the outcome you want. In my experience children work best helping adults with the jobs that need doing.
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Celebrating your produce
Throughout the world ever since humans gave up nomadic hunting and took to being farmers, then the bringing home of the harvest has been a time of celebration and thanksgiving. Make sure that every autumn you and your family take the time to have a special meal (hopefully made up of your own produce) and give thanks. Whatever your religious tradition, this is important!
“The best place to seek God is in a garden. You can dig for him there. “
~George Bernard Shaw
(C) Ray Lovegrove 2016 2022
