Chicky Poo is a blog about: family life with my husband and baby girl, ranch life, raising horses, raising chickens, rural life, community and sustainability. It’s about making mistakes, learning from them, and often sharing what NOT to do when trying to go green!

On that note, a bit about me:

 As of January 6th, 2012, I left my job in IT to stay at home with my little girl and finish a college degree that I’ve been working on part-time for ages. I previously worked in IT Security in Public Key Infrastructure. I’m a web-nerd.

I still work on sites though, I do design on the side and I am a web-host provider so I help small businesses get up and running on the web, SAHM’s with their blogs, and a few club organizations.

I am back to full time status at Arizona State (Go Sun Devils!) for Earth and Environmental Studies and Geographic Information Systems. Judging by the current rate of class availability, I hope to be done in 2 years on both the degree and the GIS Certification.

My Clan:

To date, this is my family:

• Ray (Husband)- A 5 year old with 30 years of experience.
• Lilly (Peanut)-  My little cutie pie
  
• Teyla- German Shepherd
• Ronon- Nebelung Kitty: aka long haired Russian Blue
• Neo and Penny- Quarter Horses
• 10 Chickens. 3 Black Sexlinks, 4 Rhode Island Reds and 3 Buff Orpingtons.

I have a small ranch, east of Phoenix, out in the sticks. We bought it to build our dream home (which is sooooo not going to happen with me staying at home right now) and get away from the city. I was born and raised in Iowa, so cookie-cutter houses just didn’t sit well with me.

When we were talking about purchasing it, we wondered what we would do with the rest of  the land.

My husband joked about cows at first. I said “NO WAY!”.  I have no interest in milking cows and I like my beef in a form that does not resemble cute Bessy from the field. The land was built up as a horse breeding ranch by the original owner, and I ended up falling in love with one of his horses and bought her (Penny)…

and so the horse ranch stayed a horse ranch….

We have 3 sectioned off pastures, a gigantic pole barn with 4 regular stalls, a birthing stall and a stud pen, a sand round-pen for training and coming soon we will have a private arena once the price of steel piping comes back down and we hire a welder. That still left one more section that we weren’t sure what to do with.

Our Corner of the World

So we’re going with garden and chickens.

The garden will be a food source for us, we do not plan on growing more than we can eat or give to family and neighbors.

The chickens will be our source for organic fresh eggs for us and our family out here. We will not have a lot of chickens, just enough for our needs and my mother-in-laws.

This blog is to share with people the things I’m changing in my life to lessen the damage we all inevitably create as humans.  While I don’t believe we can completely reverse that damage that has been done to the land, I firmly believe it is our responsibility to do whatever we can to not make it worse!

While the cities crop up closer and closer to us, and we battle the ever growing heat island effect and light pollution as it edges closer to us and it has made us even more aware of how population growth of the cities around us are so damaging. My husband is an astronomer and our night skies are diminishing all the time.  Give it another 5 years and his observatory will be useless due to the light pollution. The heat from the city will make it harder and harder for us to maintain our pastures. The city noise will become more of a disturbance each year.

When we bought this place, we never realized just how much of an impact it would have on our daily lives and how we live and what we’ve learned.

It is a blessing to have, and I hope to share wonderful (and if not, hopefully funny) stories about livin’ off the land.