The first harvest!

 

Yes I know, it's still February, but I couldn't wait.  So here you have it, the first harvest of the year.  Two beautiful romaine lettuce plants.

Even though these plants could have gotten a little bit larger, I decided to go ahead and harvest them anyway.  I mean what can I say, I was anxious.  Well there's that and the fact that I found a chicken IN MY GREENHOUSE this morning.  She must have snuck in at night, and got stuck there.  Chicken bliss I'd say.  Fortunately the damage was minimal, but because these two plants were pushed over I decided to pull them.

Surprisingly, that wasn't the strangest thing that happened this morning.  You see generally I don't go looking for a missing chicken.  But I found one of the girls on top of the hen house.

 

Besides wondering how in the heck she got up there, I wondered, why?  My next thought was, maybe she got scared up there, and then I started wondering if the chickens got attacked.  This prompted me to do a head count, and sure enough we were short one.   Well after some searching I found her where I said, in my greenhouse, just chillin'.

Open Source Ecology

NPR had a story on a network of farmers, engineers, and supporters that for the last two years has been creating the Global Village Construction Set, an open source, low-cost, high performance technological platform that allows for the easy, DIY fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a sustainable civilization with modern comforts. The GVCS lowers the barriers to entry into farming, building, and manufacturing and can be seen as a life-size lego-like set of modular tools that can create entire economies, whether in rural Missouri, where the project was founded, in urban redevelopment, or in the developing world.

Check out the story here:
http://www.npr.org/2012/02/19/147110017/building-a-village-one-home-brewed-tool-at-a-time

and be sure to check out http://opensourceecology.org/