The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Website, freezer, and hen news

New freezer, hauled by golf cart


You may have noticed that our website has received a face lift.  Hopefully now it will show up properly for all of you Internet Explorer users.  Stay tuned for other upgrades as we celebrate our first year on the internet!

Meanwhile, Mark and I splurged and got a brand new, Energy Star freezer.  We'd filled our small freezer to the gills over the last few weeks, but I didn't want to plug in the big freezer because of its leaky gasket.  The new freezer has handy sliding baskets and lots of room to put away more produce, and its annual energy usage is on a par with our little fridge.  Can you believe that Mark attached it to the golf cart and hauled it back to our trailer all by himself?

Finally, the bad news.  I've waited to post about this until now, because I didn't want to think about it.  Remember how I said that our broody hen was poking around under her belly when I heard the peeping Friday evening?  It seems that she was killing the chick, not helping it out of its shell.  She continued to pummel the dead chick with her bill Saturday morning until I scooped it out of the nest, and now the hen is happily sitting on top of what may be more dead chicks for all I know.  No more peeping.  I have no idea what we're going to do with this hen who is so obsessed with brooding that she kills her offspring when they get in the way.  (Well, the stew pot beckons....)



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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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