Jeremiah Donaldson's Blog: This and That - Posts Tagged "essay"

This is a new blog series that takes a look at what I've done, what I've learned, and what I plan to do in regards to being self sufficient as possible on my ½ acre property. Each post will cover a different topic, but this first one is the intro to the series.

First of all, why? Why go through all the work to be self sufficient when you can buy what you want from the store? And the answer to that is easy: poisons. The food from the large stores are full of poisons. These are in the form of insecticides sprayed on produce to keep bugs off them. They are steroids and antibiotics given to animals to keep them healthy in poor conditions and to make them grow faster. They are in the form of sweeteners like high fructose corn syrup and artificial sweeteners that are causing cancer and obesity in equal amounts. These poisons are in the form of many other ingredients that cause or are suspected of causing health issues like palm oil and dyes. You can't even get real meat from a large store, because it's shot up with saline solution to make it weigh more so that you're buying as much water as meat. There's other reasons to produce some or all of your own food such as food cost, wanting to know how the animals are treated, and economic purposes.

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As detailed in part 1, the number one thing to get going IMO are fruit plants. Trees, bushes, vines, whatever. Doesn't matter. Just fruit plants. In general, you can eat as much fruit as you want to consume, although there are some exceptions. The most important thing provided by fruit is without a doubt vitamin C. People in the modern era mostly see vitamin C as a cold and flu scam cure all (or an actual cure all if they don't know it's a scam) and not much else. In reality, vitamin C can't be stored in your body, is constantly flushed out, you must have a constant and consistent source of it, and to go without it for too long means scurvy. And scurvy means that your body simply falls apart. The collagen that bonds your cells together literally starts becoming unglued, which shows up first as bleeding from the gums. If it progresses too far, it can't be reversed. Vitamin C has been stuck in almost as many products as HFCS due to how important it is. Needless to say, you don't want scurvy today, tomorrow, or ever. And you prevent scurvy and other vitamin C deficient ills by making sure you get vitamin C. Of course, citrus fruits have the most, but you're not growing those easily except in south Florida or California. Anywhere else, you're left with other types of fruit and now I'll go over what I've got so far and what I've learned...the hard way.

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Cherry tree. Again, this gets shut down by the late frosts. However, it is a wild cherry tree and they self pollinate. It was planted as a sapling back in 2018 and it bloomed for the first time in 2022, which was early at 4 years old. Wild cherry trees, unlike domesticated, have pits (seeds) and you will have saplings coming up around the mature tree once it has gotten going, and the one I have was a sapling at my dad's. They are also somewhat susceptible to fungus infections. To sorta make up for that, you can take branch cuttings from a wild cherry tree to start a new tree with. Unlike domesticated cherries, wild cherries are darker and more sour, which makes them good for jams and pie fillings where sugar is added to them. The trees only live to 18-25 years and stop producing in their last years, so they have to be rotated out every decade and a half or so. The wild cherry tree I have is the shortest lived of all my fruit plants and is already almost 1/3 through its estimated useful life. Birds will go after the wild cherries relentlessly.

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This year, 2023, marks a big year for me. I've got two major writing anniversaries coming up later this year (20th for first self published book and 10th for first political essay) and, through dogged determination, I've managed to get my sales picking up once more for the third time. I get a laugh at these people asking 'how much can you make as a writer' after they were lied to for 4+ years at whatever bullshit college they went to. It shows they don't understand the task. They don't understand that writing is an expensive hobby and a way to leave a mark on the world, not a 'job', unless you want to be a reporter, and even then, you're not making much unless you get some cardio and go out reporting in war zones. Sports writers are a dime a dozen and that was before 'AI'. Which I won't get into, because 'Intelligence' doesn't belong in the definition of anything that's a glorified copy/paste program that does nothing but steal any material it encounters like a malicious internet bot. And any other writing that doesn't require actual thought, research, and insight into human beings is at risk of being turned into gibberish by poorly programmed bots. Just like EVs, AI is going to take out nearly everyone stupid enough to engage with it since both are frauds. Which actually makes this a perfect time for a comeback.

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Now, I'm to what is perhaps the most important thing you need to pay attention to when it comes to producing your own food: protein. It's also perhaps the most important thing to pay attention to when it comes to your diet in general. As nutritionists and people who work out have been saying for decades and as recent studies are finally backing up, vegetable proteins are just not equal to animal protein. The reason for this is very simple: complete proteins. No vegetable or combination of vegetables gives you the 21 amino acids you need like ANY 'complete protein' like beef, chicken, milk, eggs, etc does. Your body cannot produce these amino acids and you will literally fall apart like a two-bit Frankenstein monster if you don't get them. The vegan nut that just 'starved to death', aka, fell apart due to amino acid deficiency, is a sped up version of what happens to all vegans at the end of the day. She just took it to extremes and it happened in a matter of a few years instead of a decade. And when I say your body falls apart, I mean that the connective tissue breaks down and you leak fluids from your skin and into your body cavities, such as that vegan leaking lymph fluid from her legs in the weeks leading up to her death. This breakdown of connective tissue is very similar to what happens if you have scurvy (discussed in previous essays in this series) or catch Ebola. Needless to say, you don't want this to happen. To prevent this, you need access to complete proteins.

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This will touch on chickens, but there is so much information about them that this only scratches the surface. This is only taking a look at the most basic chicken information that you need to get started.

First and foremost, you have two main types of chickens: heritage and production.

Heritage chickens are the old style chickens, the old breeds, that were either originally bred from the Jungle Fowl or from a combination of the original breeds that were bred from Jungle Fowl. These chickens are what people think of when they think of a 'chicken'. They chase bugs, fight among themselves, take dirt baths, are good at predator evasion, are very hardy, have medium to excellent foraging abilities, are duel purpose (they're good layers and get big enough for the dinner table), can be trained pretty quickly, and are far smarter than anyone wants to admit (30+ vocalizations have been documented and I've IDed a minimum of two more from my birds, aka, they talk to each other and they talk to you). Two of the most popular heritage birds are Heritage Rhode Island Reds and Buff Orpingtons. I also have Barnevelders (a heritage breed from Holland). A few other popular heritage breeds are Australorps (Australian Orpingtons), Silkies (best known for their hair-like feathers), and the Jersey Giant (the largest of all duel purpose breeds).

Production chicks are the newer breeds that sacrificed EVERYTHING for pure production. These birds are pretty stupid compared to heritage breeds (poor instincts, but can learn if you mix them) and they are never duel purpose. The two most common production breeds are the Cornish Rock, which goes by a few different names, including 'Frankenchicken', because they grow so fast they have to be culled by 8-10 weeks to prevent them from dying on their own from heart issues (chicken breasts you buy in the store all came from ~8 week old Cornish Rocks), and the Leghorn, which is a tiny bird (4.5 lbs) that lays an extra large egg, and they are also prone to health issues due to how often they lay such big eggs. Another very popular production breed are the ISA Browns, which are a production chicken that was bred from Rhode Island Reds and Rhode Island Whites but are sex-linked, aka, you can tell the male/female chicks apart at hatch via coloration. There's also a Production Rhode Island Red that is smaller than the Heritage RIR that lays bigger eggs but doesn't have enough body weight to be duel purpose. There's a few other production chickens, but I stay away from them in general. As stated before, they're not as smart, which makes them a bit more aggressive, they have far more health issues, and they lack many of the other heritage characteristics such as being able to forage for themselves. All this means that they're far harder to care for than their heritage cousins.

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The second part of the chicken series continues from the first with basics, but will touch on some other stuff.

One thing I left out in the first part of the chicken series are the two sounds I've heard from mine that aren't in their list of documented sounds. The first one is well known, but not listed for some reason I don't understand, except maybe for them not wanting to acknowledge it. This sound is a sound made only by young females that are not old enough to mate and it means something like 'I'm not old enough'. If you lightly pinch them in the back of the neck or when a male does accidentally tries to mount a juvenile, you will hear this screeching sound and it will be combined with them ducking their head down and attempting to dismount whatever is on their back.

The second sound is way more complicated and means something like 'Holy cow, you're alive!'. I've only heard it once and it was tied to a specific event. I had some young chickens that were about two months old being attacked in their cage at the same time that I had to go in and out of town because of a family emergency and couldn't properly see to them. On the last night they were attacked, the last four were torn apart by raccoons (literally horror show stuff) before I headed out of town for the last time and for three weeks. When I finally got back home, the first thing I did was go look in on my adult Heritage RIRs (the only ones to have made it because of the attacks) and all three looked at me and made a really complicated and multi-toned call that was combined with their eyes widening. I can't even attempt to describe the noise, it didn't sound like a chicken noise at all, and never heard it before that night or since or seen anything like it mentioned. I can only figure that they thought the raccoons had got me also.

On the subject of recognition. Chickens can recognize up to 100 faces. I would assume that the Heritage breeds are also better at this than the Production breeds, considering their other differences, but maybe not. At any rate, this 100 faces includes everything around the birds. You, your family, your pets, other livestock, other chickens, neighbors, visitors, mail people, and so forth. Anyone they don't recognize makes them nervous and they'll move away from that person if they approach. However, they recognize people fairly quickly like they train quickly and it won't take them long to ignore visitors unless they throw treats out.

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