HOWLE’S HINTS: AUGUST

BY JOHN HOWLE

August is a great time to exert your food independence. Whether you are raising a few backyard chickens for meat and eggs or raising a garden or raised bed produce, you can enjoy the benefits of your labors and have food for your family for well into the winter. We learned from the Covid pandemic that food supplies and grocery store shelves can empty out quickly, and it’s a wise move to have plenty of farm-raised food on hand.

Pastured Poultry

There are many places to purchase day old chicks. You can order them through mail order, go to a local farm supply store, or contact local individuals who incubate their own eggs. Regardless of the method of buying, you can end up with some valuable food producers. Even though there are plenty of people who shy away from the idea of butchering chickens, you can still allow the birds to live out their lives and collect their eggs. Some breeds, like golden comets, will produce an egg a day for up to two years without stopping.

Chickens love to forage for insects and grass, and this makes for healthier eggs and chickens.

The best setup I’ve found for pastured chickens is housing the chickens in a dog pen with tin on top at night and letting the chickens out to graze during the day with four-foot-high dog fencing. In early spring, I plant Pennington’s Wingmaster wildlife seed. It is marketed as their game bird mix, and it is intended for game birds such as mourning dove, quail, turkey and duck. However, this mix works great for chickens, and it contains a combination of proso, browntop and Japanese millets along with sunflower and grain sorghum. For more information on Pennington’s game bird mix, visit www.pennington.com. Once the forage has reached a few inches high and the chickens are mature enough, you can turn them loose for daily foraging. When the mix matures, there will be nutritious seed heads for the chickens to pick from.

Once mature, this mix provides seed heads with high food value.

Raised Bed Gardening

Even if you don’t have a lot of space for gardening, you can create a few raised beds on your property. Before constructing your raised beds, first, remove all the grass sod from the area. I used a box blade with plows set shallow. After the sod and weeds had been removed, I smoothed out the area with the box blade and laid down a layer of sand for further smoothing.

Next, I rolled out a quality weed barrier to prevent weeds from coming up from the soil underneath. Once you roll out the landscape fabric, you can build the raised beds directly on top of the weed barrier. I built three raised beds 6 feet by 4 feet wide.

I used repurposed lumber from a deck that had become dilapidated. The five-inch boards made perfect walls for the sides and ends of the raised bed, and I used two-inch corner posts to secure the sides to the ends. Once the raised beds are complete, you can fill them with topsoil and mix in a fair amount of sand and potting soil to make the soil more porous. I used a front end loader and simply filled the beds with soil from a richer part of a large garden.

If you want a low-cost perimeter around the raised beds to give an aesthetic look, pea gravel makes a good ground cover. This way, even if you have bermuda or other grasses creeping in, you can use a hand-held propane torch to burn the weeds coming in from the edges of the pea gravel. Finally, plant the vegetables you enjoy. If you are late in the season with your plantings, you can simply plant winter greens in September or October to have healthy greens for the winter.

A thick weed barrier keeps weeds from coming up through your raised bed area.

The author’s wife planting raised beds for summer produce.

Farm Pond Fishing

Once you’ve done all this work, remember to take some time to relax. One of the best ways to do this is by fishing. If you are after bass, sometimes the simplest lures are the best. A simple Texas-rigged black worm on an off-set hook should set off a bass strike or two. Other popular bass lures are jointed minnow and deep running crankbaits that resemble smaller fish.

Be sure to bring a large dip net with you when you fish. Nothing is more frustrating than getting the fish to the bank and watching the bass flip the hook out or break the line as you are trying to bring it up the bank. With a net you can pull rod tension with one hand and dip the fish up with the other. My daughter recently caught a four-pound bass using this technique.

This August, take steps to preserve the fruits of your labors. Any extra food produced can be shared with neighbors, canned, or frozen for long-term enjoyment. Finally, it’s always good to be independent instead of allowing others to take care of you.

The author’s daughter, Abigail Howle, shows off a bass harvest from a farm pond.