Sustainable Me

Website: Not Yet

This grower has a photo album.

We are Richard and Jeni. We live on a small lot in Pinellas Park and we believe in being as self sufficient as possible. Our home uses a solar water heater and we have a 10k solar system for our electricity.

Richard received his Master Gardener designation last year from the Pinellas County Extension. His current projects include growing tilapia, pacu and blue gill catfish and will soon be adding fresh water prawn. His garden started as hydroponics to use vertical space and has just recently been changed over to an aquaponics system. We are adding 20 new towers with 6 pots each and hope to have a lot of fruits and vegetables listed here in the next couple of months. The strawberries we planted recently are fruiting and are mid sized, juicy and sweet. Hope to have enough to share during the year.

Jeni is mom to our chickens. The girls live in a coop with large run, all built lovingly by our hands. The girls love scraps from our vegetables and fruits, left over bread and their favorite treat is weeds, hand picked and hand fed to them…they just love the attention.

They also receive a diet of Purina Layena Plus Omega 3. This feed is vegetarian and our eggs contain 300% more Omega 3 than a regular egg. This makes for very nutritious eggs to feed your pets. “The Dept of Agriculture guidelines require we sell our eggs only as pet food.

There has recently been a request of the egg “farmers” to let you know about pasturing. We live in a city community and do not have the ability (or legal permission) to allow our chickens to free range. When we built our first coop, our goal was to be totally predator proof. What our girls live and play in now is a coop with attached run, both predator proof. Coop is wood with tar paper and shingle roof and the coop is attached to concrete pilings, cemented into the ground. Richard did not want this blowing away. Windows, grates and the door to the run provide air and lights or fans cool and heat the coop. The girls settle in each night on the several roosts tucked high inside the coop, over the black and white tile floor. The run allows the girls access to shade under a tangerine tree and also a portion of the roof is covered to give additional shade and also a place to get out of the rain. However, the girls do enjoy dancing in the rain so most of the roof of the run is just hardware cloth. The walls, ceiling and floor are all made of 1/4 inch hardware cloth. The ground cover is mulch on top of the hardware cloth. The girls dig for juicy bugs in the mulch, along with kitchen scraps, weeds, garden clippings and scratch. The run is available to the girls 24/7 unless the temperatures are very cold, at those times, I close the coop doors at night. They are smart enough to push them open when the first rays of sun touch the coop (or earlier if they hear us stirring at 5am!)

We are enjoying being able to offer our girl’s eggs and appreciate the wonderful customers here. So I wanted to let you know that we do change out half of our girls each year, usually in late summer. During this process, we may not have many eggs for sale for a few months while the new little girls grow to laying age. Keep looking for us, we will be back with more beautiful blue, green and brown eggs from our happy & spoiled hens. (Americanas, Easter Eggers, Sussex, Red Comets, Wyandottes & Dominickers at this time).

I have included a pic of our granddaughter holding Lady, one of our first girls.