Subject: Bread & Chickens

From: [email-masked] (Julie Chamay)
Date: Wed, 8 Mar 95 14:07:40 EST

I'm with Bonni on the issue of bread machines. We received one as a gift, 
and used it for about a year, until the motor died. For a fraction of the 
cost of repairing it, we bought a bread bucket through Lehman's. It's 
basically a big bucket with a manually turned dough hook. The first time I 
used it I was blown away at the difference in the texture of the crust vs. 
the machined bread crust. As Bonni said, you also have a lot more control 
over the bread, and you can make more than one loaf at a time. We found that 
the machine also was not well suited to breads made with only whole-grain 
flours. 'Nuff said. 

About chickens: we recently saw a talk on "chicken tractors", in which you 
house chickens in portable cages which sit on the ground with an open 
bottom. You move them once a week or so, allowing the chickens to scratch 
and till the ground for you. The slides we saw were quite interesting. They 
showed the row that the chickens were being moved down. Has anyone tried 
this, or other "pastured" poultry techniques? We've just had a few chickens, 
who have the run of the place, but we're thinking of putting them on an 
upper pasture when we get new chicks.

Julie Chamay
Librarian/Farmer/Herbalist
Julie Z. Chamay
Reference Librarian
Sawyer Library, Williams College
[email-masked]