Explore the Village Projects
I have a habit of noticing something that would be useful, deciding somebody should build it, and then accidentally becoming that somebody.
Roots, Roost & Rafter is the umbrella over the projects that have grown from life here at Westholme. Some help people learn more about their chickens. Some help poultry keepers find birds, resources, or one another. Each has its own job, but they all started with something I thought our poultry community could use.
Feathered Fundamentals
Practical chicken education without the internet panic spiral.
Chicken keeping comes with a lot of questions, and the internet has a lot of answers. Unfortunately, those are not always the same thing.
Feathered Fundamentals is where I teach practical chicken care through beginner workshops, Flock Talk consultations, educational resources, and longer answers to the questions that deserve more than a quick Facebook comment.
The Rooster Registry
Helping eligible bachelors find their flock.
Roosters are easy to hatch and much harder to place. The Rooster Registry is a free rehoming platform for roosters and other male poultry across Atlantic Canada.
Keepers can create listings for birds needing new homes, and people looking to add a rooster (or any other male poultry) can search for one that may suit their flock.
The goal is to give these birds a better chance of finding homes where they are wanted.
Featured on CBC Nova Scotia, listen below:
The Breeder Registry
Find local poultry breeders without digging through Facebook.
The Breeder Registry is being built to make Nova Scotia poultry breeders easier to find and give them a proper place to introduce their farms, homesteads, birds, and breeding programs.
Visitors will be able to search by breeder, species, breed, and location. Breeders will have their own profiles, complete with the information poultry keepers need to start asking good questions and deciding who they would like to contact.
The Registry will not decide who people should buy from. It will make local breeders easier to discover and give buyers more information to work with.
The Roost Report
Local poultry news, all in one place.
The Roost Report is being developed as a home for Nova Scotia poultry news, useful resources, community events, breeder stories, seasonal reminders, and the things local keepers should probably know about.
The plan is simple: gather the useful information scattered around the province and put it somewhere people can actually find again later.
Planned Launch: Early 2027
Henquiries
Answers to the chicken questions other people are wondering about too.
People send me chicken questions all the time. Henquiries are where I choose one of those questions, remove any identifying information, and answer it publicly so the answer can help more than one person.
Questions begin here at Roots, Roost & Rafter. Answers that need a more detailed explanation are given a permanent home at Feathered Fundamentals, where they are easier to find and refer back to later.
Work With Me
Long before the chickens took over, I was building websites.
I have spent more than twenty years working with WordPress, design, photography, and online projects. These days, I use that experience to build practical websites for homesteads, small farms, and other people doing good work who need a home online that does not depend entirely on social media. I also do all my own design and development work for the various projects I run.
My website work lives at KrystalAcker.com, where you can find ready-made WordPress websites and information about the limited custom projects I take on.
Different Projects, Same Village
These projects have different jobs, but they came from the same place: keeping chickens, talking to other poultry people, and noticing the places where something useful was missing.
Some are fully grown. Some are still being built. A few probably started because I should not be allowed to browse available domain names unsupervised.
They are all part of Roots, Roost & Rafter, and there will almost certainly be another one eventually.