Farm boy in Town

"Such a man feels himself a citizen of the universe, enjoying freely a spectacle that it affords, untroubled by the thoughts of death because he feels himself not really separated from those who come after him. It is in such a profound instinctive union with the stream of life that the greatest joy is to be found."

-Bertrand Russell
I'll attempt to put up pictures of the back lot where the garden and the birds are.
If it doesn't work, they're at Flikr, under Amfortas the Hippie:


These are in no particular order...I'm not sophisticated for that.

This area was a wasteland 11 months ago....10' weeds, trash, brush, a 50' diameter trash pile,10' high...and no fences. The cousin/neighbor, whom noone likes, had tried to annex this part of wife's family place...unsuccessful, but he had contributed mightily, to the pile of refuse.
Enter Amfortas.
The Chicken House has an attached Greenhouse and "Run", where chicks go when they are too big for the hutch, but not big enough for the General Population.
The lot is divided into 3 "paddocks": the garden, the "Goose Pen" (w/ the kiddie pool) and the "Foyer", where the Chx House is, the apple Trees are, and the grain and whatnot is kept...the foyer opens either into the back yard, the lot next door (another, absentee, Uncle), the Goose Place (Anserinium), or the garden.
The birds (Chickens, Ducks and Geese...next year Pheasants and Turkeys) are rotated: Winter, they clean the Garden, Spring and Summer, they're next door, mowing...Fall is the yard, the Anserinium, etc....
The Garden shown is what I could accomplish this year...(I'm Damaged, after all...)
I've got around 15-20 more of those metal beds, out at the old place.
The neighbor to the back has horses...I get all the horseshit I can carry.
And the feedlot in Town gives well rotted cowshit away...just pull up the truck and they load it.
All this, combined with kitchen scraps, and bedding from the chicken house (I use hay)makes for abundant soil where there was only clay....the topsoil having washed away over years of misuse/neglect.
If I can acquire the place next door, on the other side, I'll have enough room for more birds, and a coupla milk goats....and we're well on the way to Food Security.
I've started on gutters on the house, have one 300 gallon tank that filled up during a 1" rain....and there's an old well I'm intending to work on this summer...gonna put a hand pump on it.
The Cowboy Pool (water trough)is in one of those pics....I have an idea for a savonius rotor to circulate the h2o through a charcoal filter...
And whatever h20 I can't collect will be channeled into the Pond, close to the pool in the pic, that is slowly taking shape (hand digging...ugh!)
Didn't have any chicks hatched this year, as the house wasn't complete and the birds were being moved here over time this winter...uproar isn't conducive to Broodyness.
It's a Work in Progress...