Enjoy the third part in our series about Florida Urban Homestead "The Moon Landing" with the wise and giving, Albert Risemberg. Albert tells us how he got into urban chickens, how he feeds them and what they provide for the system he manages!



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i always felt i wanted chickens i had taken care of chickens on the faith house farm um that i had started working here they had chickens and they had rabbits the chickens were of interest to me i always felt i didn't have enough room in the small city lot that i'm living in i just said i i think i can do it i utilized some space behind my sheds for their coop and then i turned out i had a run i just built another wall in the back that added you know there's about 600 square feet there and then i went and i rescued a few chickens from a friend of mine that had too many i just have three i mean but i do have space for as many as i want 600 square feet are you kidding me most chicken farms they give a square foot per chicken maybe two if you're lucky so i have a lot of room there and these chickens are really happy at first i was just feeding them organic feed and it was getting kind of expensive but then i started realizing that wait a minute i've got all the stuff i'm growing let's see what can i supplement their food with and i started looking stuff up and sure enough moringa was high on the list i grow moringa and i dry it also mulberry this is a mulberry here the leaves from the mulberry whenever i do a trimming of it for more propagation i dry the leaves i also add that to their feed anytime i'm dumpster diving if i find flaxseed or a little bit of bread not too much bread but i'm i'm adding whatever i can i ended up buying a biopod which is a contraption that helps you get soldier fly larva and there's a lot of homemade ones and i really did some research on it and the homemade ones just didn't work that well and to be honest with you the biopod doesn't work great either but it's very convenient turns out that the thing that the soldierfly larva love the most beer mash it's a huge thing here at micro breweries and so i'm able to get beer mash when the uh solder fly get in there and start eating the beer mesh it doesn't get moldy when they're in there for whatever reason so i can even scoop out the the young soldier fly larva before they pupate when the soldier fly larva are actively engaging with the beer mash the chickens can eat it it doesn't get moldy so that i just discovered that recently which is really a wonderful discovery lettuces and things like that they just really don't make much soil the worms don't like it that much no one really wants it except for the chickens there's a greek place that i go to and there's one bag that's always the leftovers of the greek salad and i'm telling you i think these chickens are greek because they're dancing when i pull that bag out they are just so ready there's a little bit of an issue with some mice that are protected in the chicken coop and they only come out at night chickens eat all kinds of little animals the lizards they'll catch them and eat them of course the palmetto bugs anytime i'm working in the garden and i find some of the native worms i throw them over the fence for the chickens in that corner where i throw all this food is where they spend most of the day pooping peeing and turning about every four months i go back there with my hand sifter and i sift out you know a good 30 40 uh gallons of soil the stuff that sifts out you know that's not it's of course i throw it back in the run but i take that and i use that as part of my potting soil and then i take whatever poop they have i shovel it into that hole that area that's usually the area is usually about four foot by two and a half foot wide um then i shovel that all that poop in there cover it with mulch and let them go at it again that soil tends to be a little sandier which actually some plants prefer you