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That's why I want to put in a vegetable garden, so the chickens have some place to forage.
You gotta fence 'em out of the vegetable garden! They'll strip every plant to bare stems. They don't just eat bugs y'know! It's like letting your foxes in the henhouse to forage.
It is good to have them in the garden before you plant it. If you've mulched the area they will scratch it all in and eat all the bugs living in the mulch.
It takes a lot of area to keep them fed without additional feed. We have a pretty large lot with about 1/4 acre in non-built condition. They (6 hens) have it clean as a whistle after about six months. Even the rather large compost heap they worked through in short order. Now, whenever we are in the yard they are underfoot hoping we'll turn over a rock or something. And they talk, talk, talk all the time. Pretty enjoyable, if you're inclined that way.
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete. R. Buckminster Fuller
The hens always need Layena available, it's laced with oyster shell to replace the calcium they lose making eggshells. I feed all the eggshells back to them too. Other than that I toss out corn twice a day for "treats". Squirrels eat most of it but they're kind of fun to have around too. My chickens roam free and spend most of their time scratching for bugs in the leaf litter in the woods.
By the way...Amazon has flour but only in 50 pound bags. They got yeast too.
I have some flour and yeast on order for Wednesday pickup. Did you know there is enough yeast on wheat kernels that you can easily culture it. That's how sourdough starters work. You can also culture it from grapes or even raisins: That's why the black surfaces have a dusty coating. It's wild yeast. You just throw a few raisins in a sourdough starter culture and it's ready to use in a few days. You do have to remove a cup of starter and feed it another cup of flour, sugar, and water every day (or once a week in the fridge). The cup of starter you removed is perfect for making a loaf or two of bread.
It does require some attention on a regular basis, but the feeding process encourages you to make the bread. Otherwise you feel like a bad parent if you just trash the starter you removed.
Did you know there is enough yeast on wheat kernels that you can easily culture it.
Not if your flour has been bleached or bromated. Use King Arthur flour.
I've done the sourdough thing and it's a f*cking pain in the ass. I've been baking my own bread for more years than I can remember and it's a process you want to streamline as much as possible. Otherwise it will get to be a chore and you'll stop doing it.
Most people bake a few sh*tty loaves and give up. My everyday bread is as easy to make as a pot of coffee and turns out an excellent white loaf in whatever shape I choose. Gluten free bread isn't bread but it can be made to closely resemble it. Not by me though.
Yeast lasts for years so buy it by the pound. I keep it in a mason jar in the fridge.
As I said, on wheat kernels. Not on every flour, but I always prefer unbleached. I wish I could buy a big jar of yeast, but everybody is sold out around here. I got 20 pounds on order for tomorrow. Let's see if they actually have any in the store when they fill my order.
I really prefer yeast breads to soda breads. I can always taste the chemical nastiness of the baking powder.
I usually buy 2 pounds of yeast at a time. there's 2 1/2 cups of yeast in a pound. It last a long ass time. If a person was running short, the no knead artisan bread only uses a quarter teaspoon. I don't care for it much though. It's got a hard crust and a weird crumb. I love the taste though, the long fermentation makes it taste great.
Top of my head it's three cups of AP flour, a cup and a half of water 1 1/2 tsp salt and 1/2 tsp yeast.
whisk the dry ingredients together and add the water, mix into a shaggy dough then put a lid on it and let it sit 18 hours, I do it in a big plastic bowl but I don't quite seal the lid so it can still breathe.
Next day you take it out and flour it so it can be handled because it's a wet sticky dough. You don't hafta knead it but to effectively make a nice cob loaf you need to stretch the corners out and fold them back in a few times to develop the gluten and form some tension within the loaf. Allow a couple hours for it to rise before the next step.
To bake it they want you to preheat a cast iron dutch oven to 450, pull that hot muther Phucker outa the oven and plop your risen dough into, and put it back in the oven and reduce the heat and something something.
It makes a super crusty loaf that requires a good bread knife to cut/saw into slices. The crumb(that's the inside of the loaf) is an unusual rustic texture that leaves a sticky residue on the knife.
It's absolutely delicious crusty rustic chewy crunchy bread that our ancestors for a thousand years ate every day. Baked in an iron pot over a fire. It's great with soups and stews and with winey cheesy stuff, but it aint everyday bread. This method is probably adaptable to some gluten free recipes, I wouldn't know but it seems like...
