Day 11 - Daily Routine and the Growing Power Livestock

We're at the point now where we've gotten into this routine at Growing Power: Each morning us interns wake up around 7:00 – 7:15, get ready / eat breakfast together, walk out the door at 8, and the first thing we do is take care of the animals. There are chickens, goats, turkeys and ducks here on-site (and fish but we aren't assigned to them.) Personally, I've taken a liking to feeding the chickens and collecting their eggs (we put them on the refrigerator truck which is constantly running outside, which is plugged in so it doesn't use gasoline). The goats are also really fun to have on-site, though we don't milk them so they don't produce anything to sell. It seems kind of odd that Growing Power has them, since they require a lot of input and only sell for ~$100 after years of maintenance (hours of manual labor.) But then again, the goats in the middle of a city are a great marketing piece, and draw a lot of volunteers / interest to the organization.

There are six of us living in the intern house right now. Today was a typical day except it started off a little sad when we discovered one of the chickens died during the night. It was a first experience for me having to pick up a dead animal and dispose of it. Regardless, it is still a great experience feeding 100 or so chickens, gathering 5-6 dozen eggs per day – all in the middle of a city

The day got better as I spent more time indoors than I ever had before. It was a day spent reordering and checking on the plants in the aquaponics systems. We had to remove the underproductive pots for re-seedeing and move the others around so that the tallest pots were on the north side, and the shortest on the south side, so that all the plants get as much sunlight as possible. I feel very connected with plants, more so than animals even, and learned a lot by being silent and listening to / observing them. I felt the compactedness of the soil in some of the pots inhibiting the plant's growth as well as the moisture content being low, high or just right. I tasted many leaves of both the underproductive and highly productive plants and looked deeply into their cell structure.

This whole place is magical and draws so many great people here. There are many aspects of permaculture present here at Growing Power. The permaculture ethics: earth care, people care and resource share - food comes in and an abundance is produced… things getting shared among the staff and interns - earth care with the making of compost from food waste / plant waste – people care in building the local community.