So one day a number of months back, Ann asked a fellow customer at the Alameda Farmers' Market if she wouldn't mind parting with her carrot tops to help feed some local chickens.  After some conversation, the woman asked for our address so she could deliver us her vegetable peelings.

Now we often get big bags of scraps deposited on our front porch, with peelings from carrots, zucchini, potatoes, fruit, etc. and often egg shells.  The problem is that the chickens have a hard time pecking at the large uncooked peelings.  

So I have taken it on myself to dump it all in our food processor to chop it up into peck-sized pieces.  I call my creation, "Chicken slaw."  Doesn't it look appetizing? The chickens like it quite a bit.

We also are appreciative of other donations we receive toward the chicken-feeding effort.  We get carrot tops and lettuce that is past its prime from various neighbors.  We sometimes get jars filled with snails (good protein!).  We recently received our first batch of spent barley from a beer brewer, and the chickens loved it.

We've been doing our best to reduce our water usage, and just took another big step: rainwater catchment barrels.  As the San Francisco Chronicle reported last week, California is on par this year for its worst drought ever.  In the East Bay, we've had water use restrictions and billing surcharges since August.

The idea of rain barrels is to harvest and store the rainwater that is routed down a building's downspouts and use it at a later time.  Since we are also expanding our food-producing garden extensively, it will be even more helpful to have extra water on hand to keep it irrigated.

The first step was to find a source of 55-gallon food-grade (HDPE) plastic barrels.  That type of barrels is used to distribute all kinds of items, including food ingredients (particularly liquids or foods packed in liquids).  Sometimes the barrels will be sent back and re-used after they are emptied, but they are often just thrown away.  For our purposes, it was also important to get barrels that had not contained toxic substances. They also have to be strong enough to be filled with water, so trash cans generally won't work.

We found some barrels for sale on Craigslist in the $20+ range but since we wanted a number of them, we hoped to do better.  After a lot of calling around (and talking to a lot of confused people), the only free sources we could find were car washes, which receive their soap in them.

The next step was to convert them to rain barrels.  I worked with our neighbor Michael to determine the best approach, and we came up with something pretty simple.  There are a number of great DIY write-ups online (some listed below), so I'm not going to go into too much detail on ours.

Basically, we:

1. Cut off the top of the barrel to give us access to the inside.  The barrels we got have a nice wide lip wider than the rest of the barrel, so flipping the lid over then gives it a nice fit.
2. Cut a hole near the bottom of the barrel and fasten a hose bib (spigot).
3. Cut a hole near the top for overflow.
4. Cut a hole in the lid for the water to enter.  I went to the trouble of buying some plastic drain pieces to make it a little prettier, but that's not necessary.
5. Cover all openings with fiberglass mesh to keep mosquitos out.

The final step was "installing" the barrels.  They need to be positioned by downspouts and then the downspouts need to be adjusted to feed into the barrels.  The barrels should also be raised to make it easier get the water out.  You probably want enough room to get a water can under the spigot.  If using a hose, extra height will give extra pressure.  We're putting ours up on cinder blocks.

We've converted two barrels so far, and the total cost for parts came out to about $20 per barrel.

Example Conversion Instructions (all at instructables.com)

• Single barrel
• Linked barrels (fairly simple)
  
• Linked barrels (rather complex)
• Linked barrels, mounted horizontally in a frame

General Information

• Rain Barrel Guide: Good general overview
• HarvestH₂0: The Rainwater Harvesting Community
• Guidelines for storing water
• American Rainwater Catchment Systems Association

Products

• Aquabarrel
• Noah's Rain Barrels

 

KGO 7 news has finally aired their news story on the urban chickens trend... which features us!  (They were supposed to give us a heads-up before it aired, but fortunately it's available online.)

We volunteered when we heard on the Oakland Pet Chickens Meet-Up Group that they were looking for people to interview.  They came out last month to interview us and got some good shots of Madeleine.

Then a couple weeks ago they came back again so that KGO anchor Dan Ashley could do his little blurb about BackyardChickens.com and Backyard Poultry magazine in front of our house.  They came back for the talent, of course—to try to get the chickens in the shot as Dan talked. 

But that also meant a big opportunity for me as an official chicken wrangler.  The chickens were not so impressed by Dan and the camera, and were more intent on scratching around for worms.  So they asked me if I could keep coaxing the chickens back toward Dan while I stayed off camera.  It was more like throwing them back in the shot.  It took somewhere around 20 takes for Dan to get through the copy.

Ann wrote up the story of the labor and delivery leading up to Madeleine's birth and submitted it to the journal Midwifery Today.  It was accepted and has just been published in the Winter 2008 issue as "A Surprise Posterior Brow Birth."  The article is not available on the MT website to non-subscribers and we decided not to publish it here because of some graphic anatomical details, but we can email you a copy if you let us know you want to read it.  They published a few photos of Madeleine with the article: a family photo with her as a newborn, a family photo on her second birthday, and one with her breastfeeding her baby doll.

The Red Cross just loves me. I have O-negative blood, which as you may know means I am a "universal donor" and my blood can be given to people of every blood type (and thus also in emergency cases where a person's blood type is not known).

But I also happen to be cytomegalovirus negative, which means I am one of an elite few (less than 1 in 100) who can donate to newborns.  I found the following quotation attributed to Wikipedia (although I can't currently find it on the site itself):

"A tiny percentage of adults may donate blood to small children in emergency rooms, newborn babies, and fetuses. To ensure the safety of blood transfusion to pediatric patients, including those in whom the immune systems are not fully developed, hospitals are taking every precaution to avoid infection and prefer to use specially tested pediatric blood units that are guaranteed negative for cytomegalovirus (CMV), because the consequences of CMV infection for newborns or low weight infants may be severe or even fatal.

Additionally, for pediatric patients with certain disorders or in emergency, when there is no time to perform crossmatching, only O/Rh negative blood can be used for neonatal transfusion. Due to these specific restrictions, to be recognized as a baby donor an adult must test negative for cytomegalovirus, and some blood collection agencies such as the Red Cross also require baby donors that they be blood type O-negative.

Since only 7% of US adults are O-negative and as few as 15% of adults do not carry CMV, only 1% of adults* may qualify as baby donors. Other restrictions (body weight, HIV status, vCJD, etc.) reduce the fraction of potential baby donors to less than 1 in 200. If an adult was not exposed to measles, mumps, rubella, or chicken pox, that amplifies the person’s status as a baby donor."

So once they ran the tests and discovered I was part of this group, I started getting phone calls every 56 days (the minimum time between donations) from the Red Cross saying how much they missed me.

I have tried even more so to give blood regularly since learning it's even more precious than I thought it was.  I just got a nifty little pin in the mail commemorating that I have now donated two gallons (wow).

I started regularly giving blood when I worked in Fremont and a co-worker dragged me along.  If you haven't ever tried donating or haven't done so for a while, consider doing so and bring a friend or co-worker!  I'm amazed how lonely the blood donation centers often are.

One trick I've learned is to be sure to drink a lot of liquids in the half-day before donating.  It makes a huge difference in my donation time.