 I was a little disingenuous when I said that we were going to raise old-fashioned chickens because back in the day, I am not sure people intentionally used the compost pile approach. It was more that chickens roamed around, fed themselves, and happened to find compost piles. The compost and chicken system that Karl Hammer at Vermont Composting invented and that I have now implemented at a backyard scale is not historical; it's a super-cool innovation.
 In the last post, New Old-Fashioned Chicken Theory, I wrote about the idea of raising chickens without grains or other chicken feed from the store. At the time, I felt excited to try the experiment, but also some trepidation about whether we might not end up leaving our new birds hungry and unhappy. So we bought a bag of chicken pellets from the store, just in case, before we got started.
 Permaculture and regenerative agriculture are full of innovators and experimenters, and some of them have found ways to do things - to do with raising food - that are vastly more efficient in their use of human resources, waste reduction, and building up nature than mainstream practices. I mean, not marginal improvements on our current ways of doing things, but paradigm shifting revolutions.
Take chickens.  Last gardening day with my wonderful mom, Maartje Muskens, at the Boston Food Forest in Mattapan... The last time I wrote in this blog, it was September 2018; today, it is the end of May, 2019. At that time, we were looking back at the wonderful season of putting together our Bigfoot Food Forest - cutting trees and branches; laying out the paths; taking the Applied Permaculture course with David Homa; working with Ruby, Dana, John, and Mik; putting in polycultures; bringing water to the back of the garden; building the sheds ...
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