Dear Diary - 19th September

WEATHER:

Hot and sunny. Still heatwave - 35C easy. Middle of the day was boiling hot, I went out to check the chickens, also move things around.

RAIN

Officially, we're in El Nino territory with the an Indian Ocean Dipole which moves cooler, wetter air on the western half of the continent even further west. It's gonna be a very dry summer.

CHOOKS:

They're hot and noisy. Two eggs today, three yesterday. Free run of the front lawn, pooping everywhere and digging up things I don't want them to dig up.

OBSERVATIONS

I actually think there's a BRUSSEL SPROUT growing in the APPLE-CREPE. Not sure it's going to set the little nubs because we're heading straight for summer this year, no spring.

PREPARATION:

On Monday or Tuesday, I dug out the HOPS pot, and got about a dozen roots suitable for replanting - green leaves or budding nodes. Planted them out into four containers for the front yard, looking to vine them up the front if possible.

Actually, thinking that a vine shade will probably need a lot more things growing.

Also repotted the GRAPE (Iona) and a large BLUEBERRY. Didn't get around to the smaller blueberry or the newbie that mum gave me. Didn't manage the KUMQUAT either. BLACK SAPOTE and LYCHEE are doing okay-ish but not great. I start to feel like I need much larger pots for the trees I have to grow successfully.

Made the APPLE-CREPE bed frame, set up the netting frame and have the netting over it. Also planted into it - WOOLLY POD VETCH and a whole heap of MUSTARD. Was going to do CABBAGES (mini) but then realised what I thought was a massive envelope of seeds of a single type was actually a massive envelope of several smaller envelopes of specific cabbage varieties. Need to go through those and work out what can be used.

Realised that the permabee helpers only left me with three garden bed frames when I actually need four. Also, council clean-up is coming, and I need to toss the old garden bed frames out.

PLANTING

WOOLLY POD VETCH and MUSTARD into the APPLE-CREPE bed. Not mulched.

POT O'POPPIES under the AVOCADO, along with MARIGOLDS. Mulched.

was going to do SUNFLOWERS in the APRICOT bed and would still like to do it, but not until after I've removed things from that bed.

RIPENING

Still ALPINE STRAWBERRIES.

HARVEST

Several leafy greens ready to harvest whenever ready.

BROCCOLI in APPLE-CREPE - more leaves than florets at this stage, but leaves can be steamed and stems could be pickled.

PRUNING

Cut down more of the FOUR-APPLE tree: the DORSET/ANNA grafts are too strong. But I want to lop a fairly major limb off both grafts, trimming the tree way back to give the other grafts a sporting chance.

I've been digging up the DANDELIONS on the front verge and the northside lawn. Also been reading up on meadows and how they go wrong, as my attempt at a meadow space did the other year - grew for one year, petered out thereafter, is now entirely DANDELIONS running wild. Need to fill the holes with something, though, otherwise we'll just end up with more dandelions and we don't actually want that.

Pulled up some of the runner grass out the back, put it in a bucket for weed tea. Need to get a lid for it.

TO DO
* mulch APPLE-CREPE bed more heavily
* cut panels for last garden bed, or else buy more barrier edging from Hammerbarn.
* white oil/pest spray KUMQUAT, MAKRUT LIME, PERSIMMON (after heatwave, when temps have dropped again)
* repot MEDIUM BLUEBERRY, TINY BLUEBERRY
* plant CALLA LILIES
* pot TEA CAMELLIAS
* pot WHITE SHAHTOOT MULBERRY
* find a lid for the backyard WEED TEA (one of the new pot dishes?)
* dig around and find out what can go on the council clean-up pile
* plant BASIL in bathtub around the parsnips
* move small VEGEPODs to front lawn? We'll want the garage space back.

THOUGHTS

Given we're heading into drought, priority with the water tank is to use it for establishing the garden, then heavily mulch and water maybe once a day in the evening for 15 minutes on timer.

Not sure what to do/how to fix the carport water barrels.

slow sorting out spring

Trying to work out what to plant right now.

I've already done most of my planting, but there's some seeds that failed and others that could do with succession sowing. But this always brings up the question of how many and what.

Tomatoes? More tomatoes? How many more tomatoes? Corn? Glass Gem for the pretty (and popcorn and grinding), or sweet corn for the eating? Pumpkins? I really do need to work out my pumpkins: I want some for eating and some for storing, and zucchinis if I can actually grow them. It's touch and go some years. I'd love capsicums and cucumbers because we would eat them, and eggplant because I love cooking with eggplant. Melons? That would be the ideal, but I never do well with melons. It might just be that I've never grown them in rich enough soil and well-watered conditions. IDK.

Those are the annuals, the ones that get sown and planted out every year. I should probably plant more lettuce for when the current crop of lettuces & silverbeets & spinaches die off - I could stick them in the somewhat shady HEXABED, maybe? Except one of the reasons I was growing flowers and whatnot in the HEXABED is because of the high lead levels...

I also have to think of what to say about Use And Value Diversity, which is October's Permie Principle. Apart from sowing heirloom seeds, or having early-, mid-, and late- varieties where possible, or buying heritage breeds to mix with layer breeds so they'll hopefully last longer than a few years' cycle of chooks. IDK.

I stuck the chooks back on the CREPE-APRICOT bed after protecting the bush beans that were growing there, because I needed them to dig up and deal with the remainder of the brassicas. But after this, they're going to be stuck with the front yards, and that's about it. I'm still trying to grow some perennials along the edges of CHOOKYARD 2, because everything else gets scratched up something awful.

In the NORTH PICKET FENCE, a couple of 'Very Large' pumpkins have started growing from the seeds I dumped there. The sunflowers I planted out seem to be doing well, and the Elder tree is in bloom. Not sure if any of the Avos have pollinated, nor the mangoes. But the Asian basils and the salvias are coming back with a vengeance, and the lavenders are starting to reshoot after I hacked them apart in midwinter.

And the roses and the wildflower lawn are going off!

Real Chooken Keeping: Living Conditions for Chooks

0. Real Chooken Keeping
1. Somewhere To Park The Henhouse
2. Care and Feeding
3. Eggs and All That Jazz

We All Need Our Own Place To Live, Not Just Somewhere To Park The Henhouse

First post on Real Chooken Keeping is...keeping them.

Let's do a quick lesson on the ethology (behaviour) of chickens.

Biologically, chooks are birds. Originally, they were jungle birds, accustomed to living among the leaf-littered forests of South East Asia and flying up into the low branches to perch every night so they'd be safe from ground predators.

They can fly, but not very high. They love scratching up the ground looking for bugs and worms and creepy crawlies, as well as for entertainment. They hang out in small flocks - maybe a dozen or two dozen birds. They have a literal pecking order, where there's a top bird (usually the rooster) and then a set hierarchy of birds. They are omnivores, like human beings; they will eat just about anything edible you put before them: meat and grain and green things and dairy, and their bodies can process it. (That said there are things where you should limit how much your chooks get. More about that in the next post - care and feeding.) They lay their eggs somewhere dark and 'safe', where they can get comfy while popping an egg out their oviduct.

What does all this mean for us humans as chook keepers?

It means chickens are best off somewhere where they can:
- scratch up the ground and pick at green things
- roost at night
- lay eggs
- safe from predators (including overenthusiastic 'helpers' of the small human kind)

This is pretty easy, right? Just put them in one of those chook coops and they're all good!

Well...not quite.

Let's talk about the chickens who lay the cage eggs you get in the supermarket.

Cage Eggs

They're laid by a hen who's been bred to lay every day, some 320-350 eggs in a year of 365 days. The instant she starts laying regularly, she's shoved into a small box in a factory, amidst thousands of other chooks in small boxes, where she's fed as much food as she can handle, and left to lay eggs and shit all day. Her food is heavily medicated, because the conditions under which one keeps thousands of chooks in very small boxes never letting them out is not hygenic, and while their poop is carried away to be turned into 'rooster booster' or some such product, it still gathers flies and breeds infection and disease.

When she's about two years old, she'll stop laying. At that point, she's toast. I don't know precisely what happens to them because the egg companies don't tend to tell you. A handful (maybe 0.5% of the total) are rehomed to people who don't mind a hen with no social skills who lays occasionally rather than every day. But the rest of them? Well, let's just say it's not a nice retirement in a shady orchard with all the worm-infested fruit that they can handle. I can pretty much assure you of that.

This is the life of a battery hen. You are not seeking to emulate it.

Or maybe you are. Maybe you don't care how chooks are cared for (or even if they're cared for) so long as you get eggs? While it's not a view I personally hold, it's one that many people have to take because they need to feed their families and eggs from caged birds are cheap and convenient.

But you are here reading my blogpost, and I believe that we have it in us to define 'better care' of a chicken as rather more than merely "better than a battery hen".

What about Free Range eggs from Free Range chooks?

So, Free Range chickens, by definition 'have access to' an area where they are free to range.

This is good, right? Like, if a kid's been kept in a small room all their life and suddenly they're in a house with a backyard that they can go out with, it's all okay, yeah?

Before the COVID-19 travel restrictions, how many kids did you see randomly out 'free ranging'?

Chickens are a bit like kids in some respect; they're creatures of habit and instinct and there's not a lot of reasoning up there in the brain. Your modern kid has access to the great outdoors...but they'd rather be inside, sitting on their devices.

So sometimes the chooks who produce the Free Range eggs that you buy in the supermarket have access to The Great Outdoors...but they don't know what to do with that terrifying open sky and that long green stuff, and that big place where...look, it's just safer being in the barn with the other thousand chooks on the free range farm. Also, because of the nature of chickens - being highly hierarchical - in the earlier days of 'free range chook farms' a lot of birds were debeaked so they couldn't peck each other to death while trying to find their position in the pecking order. Like someone pulling out your kid's fingernails so they' can't scratch the other kids when they go out and get into fights.

Now I don't know if that's the case anymore; public awareness has moved on a lot, but the gist is that 'free range' egg production may be better than 'cage' egg production, but it's still not really recognising that chooks are chooks.

There are free range farms that have 'chook cams' these days, so people can see the treatment of the chickens. I approve. I am also highly cynical by nature, so I question whether the chooks that are being viewed on camera are necessarily the chooks producing the eggs that end up in the cartons on the shelves. But that's my own suspicious nature, don't mind me!

Free Range egg farms are considerably better than Cage egg farms, but the simple fact remains: it's a commercial process. They're looking for maximum eggs out of minimum effort.

Maybe that's what you want, too: maximum eggs out of minimum effort.

I submit that if you want maximum eggs from minimum effort, just buy the eggs in the supermarket. Remember how I said it was easier in the series base post? It is. Seriously, it is so much easier. Even if you sometimes go to the supermarket and there are no eggs on the shelves, it is still easier to buy an occasional carton of eggs from the supermarket than labour through keeping chickens to get a dozen eggs.

But back to the keeping of chooks - and specifically, the housing of them.

The Basic Recommendation

The basic recommendation is:
a) a coop (location where they can roost at night)
b) a run (location where they can wander by day)

There are stats on how much space per chook, and details of the best types of perches and all that. I don't need to reiterate those.

What I'm going to mention are the things that a lot of sites frequently gloss over: the other things that chooks do apart from eat and produce eggs.

The Bad, The Worse, And The Stinky

They eat everything green that they can reach. They eat the grass. They eat clover. They eat your vegetables, and sometimes the new growth on trees if they can reach them. They love lettuces and Asian greens and brassicas, because the leaves are just soft enough for them to snap off with a clip of the beak.

They scratch up the soil in search of creepy crawly things. if you have mulch on beds, they will go for that. If you have vegetable beds, they'll dig around there. They're looking for bugs and earthworms, flies, slugs, grubs, and larvae, as well as insect eggs. Digging into the ground is the way they do that.

They make noise. Not crowing like roosters, but certainly loud enough to be annoying to neighbours who might like their quiet, or who might want a reason to dislike you. There's the steady clucking with a squawk of outrage. There's the loud 'where are you, we're bored' clucks that can go for an hour or more. There's the 'puff and ruffle' of hierarchy assessment and assertion.

They poop. In rather large quantities. It's smelly and stinky and sloppy and slimy. It attracts flies by the bucketload if it's left around. And if you want it for the garden...well, you have to let them into the garden, first. If you're not prepared to deal with chicken manure, don't get chooks.

Basically, chooks do a lot of things other than lay eggs, and those things are an integral part of their nature. Trying to suppress them will mostly cause you angst and frustration and mess.

In short, chickens are living creatures that happen to produce eggs. To most people, a chicken is there to provide eggs and maybe a meal at the end of its life. The things like scratching up the lawn and garden, eating the leafy greens it comes by along the way, and the dollops of chook poop that lie randomly scattered across the ground are inconveniences that most people put up with in order to get the eggs.

That's the part that most people who've bought chooks for eggs haven't taken into account, and it's the part that's going to catch a lot of people unawares.

How do you deal with these things?

Well, you can take the 'caged chicken' view of things, and just shut them up somewhere where they get fed, lay eggs, and are bored. And once again, I say: if all you want from the chooks are eggs, then just buy them from the store.

You can let them out and deal with the hair-tearing frustrations of stepping in poop every time you walk into the pen, of having your garden dug up and your mulch relocated, of finding dusty, barren patches all over your lawn where the chooks have decided to dustbathe.

Or

The alternative is setting up a regular area for them to run around in, dig up, dustbathe, and generally do their thing.

Did I mention that chook keeping wasn't easy? This is the 'not easy' part of it.

Your garden will not be the pristine one shown in the Pinterest and Instagram pics that are used to sell chooks or chook products. It will be a mess. It will be a delightful mess if you love watching creatures being creatures, but most suburbanites want that nice clean lawn, no flies or insects, no poop all over the place, and no unsightly dust patches in the green.

Keeping chooks manifestly involves these things. There's just no avoiding it if you want happy, healthy chooks.

Now, note the 'if' clause in that statement. A lot of people won't care if the chooks aren't happy and healthy - after all, they're just dumb animals, right? Well, I reserve for such people the same blank stare that you would reserve for someone who bought a beautiful collie dog and kept it cooped up all day, never taking it out for a walk and shouting at it when it wanted attention. Or for people who fostered a kid and then treated them like an unpaid servant rather than a member of the family.

You have taken a creature into your household; that means you have taken on the responsibility of caring for it and seeing that it's not only physically looked after, but that it's life is as good as you can make it.

Am I a bleeding heart about animal care? Yes. Yes, I am. But people say that like seeing a creature bored and frustrated and wanting better for them is a bad thing.

The way most people who are aware of chook needs deal with the scratching, pooping, etc. is either to have the chook house within a chicken yard. That is, a place where the chickens can run around and scratch things up. They dump kitchen scraps and leaf mulch and grass clippings and woodchips into the chicken yard, and the chooks go to town on it. And every day or couple of days, the chooks are let out to go around the garden and yes, cause a bit of damage. Every couple of months, the chook roost and the chook yard are cleaned out and all that scratched-up and mulched compost matter is put on the garden beds.

You do you.

Thinking outside the box

I do...something slightly different.

As I said in my introductory post, I have been planning to get chickens for years. And I planned my ownership of them around the things that would have been frustrations to many suburbanites: the manure, the digging up, the relentless nibbling of every green thing in reach.

Based on Linda Woodrow's The Permaculture Kitchen Garden, I based my ownership of chickens such that the things that would otherwise be frustrations were part of the design.

This is a map of my backyard with the elements relevant to the chickens coloured in.

The orange section is the chicken coop or house, where the chickens lay their eggs and sleep at night, and sometimes get fed and watered depending on the season and the garden setup. The coop is also a shelter in the rain, although they don't always use it and don't mind getting wet.

The green sections are the annual garden beds where I grow vegetables.

The blue sections around the edge of the garden? Those are tunnels that connect the chicken coop to the garden beds.

Most of the time, the green sections - the garden beds - are not available to the chickens. But when I want the chickens on there (after I've finished growing things for a season and want to clean up the soil, bugs, remnants of the plants, etc), I put a 'chicken tractor' - a large wire-covered cage-like frame - over the top of the garden bed, and open up a little gate in the side of the tunnel so the chickens can come through and dig that area up to their heart's content. The beds are the exact size of the chicken tractor, and provide a space for them to dig, sit, scratch, and feed that is more than just the coop space.

They eat the spent remains of the vegies I planted there (most of which I have harvested).

They pick out any bugs that have been left in the area.

They poop onto the bed and then scratch it into the dirt.

They till the soil ready for the next planting.

We toss them food scraps from our kitchen, I add grass clippings from the front lawn and the neighbours, and oaten hay from the pet store. They scratch that around, digging up the ground as they do so, and not only aerate the the soil, but create a lovely surface mulch that keeps the moisture in once they're moved off.

When the garden is eaten and dug up and pooped and mulched...I close up the door to the tunnels and take the tractor cage off, and I have a bed all ready for planting: fertilised, weeded, and tilled.

The tunnels around the edge are there for several reasons. I wanted a way for the chooks to move from the coop to the chicken tractor that I wasn't going to have to climb over (the original layout involved wire tunnels stretching across the yard), and then I wanted a way to keep the grass and weeds from the neighbouring properties from invading. Putting the chook tunnel next to the fence to deal with that was a perfect solution for both.

It takes effort and planning, yes. But the effort is relatively small and I'm prepared for it - rather more prepared than some new chook owners are prepared to deal with dusty patches in their lawn, scratched up flower borders, and shredded vegetable gardens and shrubs.

Yes, this is a specific setup with a specific purpose. I've set it up so that it works for me. You don't have to slavishly follow it - in fact, it's probably better that you don't. Work something out with the time and energy and effort that you have. But it's an example of how I'm using the properties of chickens that might usually be negatives for a suburbanite in a positive way.

I don't know what your setup is; I don't know if you planned for a 'setup' or if you just thought it would be eggs all the way down. But this post is to give you a slightly broader view of chooks - of the things they do simply being, and not just as egg-producers.

There are ways to manage the behaviour of chooks that will be less frustrating on you and won't condemn them to a life of boredom. Finding a system that works for you may take a while, though, so expect some upsets to your life.

And if chook keeping is not for you, there's no shame in saying so, and re-homing those chooks to someone who's prepared to give them a good life. My recommendation is to find a local FB gardening group and make inquiries about re-homing. There are people who'd be willing to add to their flock; indeed, I know a number of people who are just waiting for all the new chook owners to realise chicken keeping is not for them and who'd be glad to take chooks. Think about it.

If you're still on the page, the next post is 'care and feeding' - mostly about things to feed them (or not feed them) and a light skim of some of the things that can happen to them.

(And this time I will try to be a little faster with the next post.)

the summers die one by one - how soon they fly on and on!

Today, a friend and I made a garden bed frame using pallet wood.

It turned out to be a pretty intensive process, partly because we were working it out as we went along, but we started at 9am and finished around 5pm, with a morning tea break and lunch (about 90 minutes total). A lot of it was working out how to do what I wanted done with the tools that we had.

Firstly, there was cutting up the pallets. At one point early on, I nearly cut through the cord - ended up breaking through the plastic part but not actually exposing any of the electrical wire. lucky!

The pile of wood that we got from five pallets was pretty decent:

I got practise using the dropsaw:

Then there was measuring, nailing the 'palings' to the braces, and connecting the sides.

This is me using an angle-grinder to file off the tips of the nails. The nails I'd bought were a fraction too long, meaning they stuck out of the other side of the wood.

Squaring it up was an absolute nightmare, partly because of the corner posts I chose to use, partly because we were a bit lackadaisical with the measurements. But, after a lot of back and forth on how we were going to do this...success!

And the chook tractor fits nicely on top of it.

So, that's one - on the Crepe-Apricot bed.

I'd like at least two more - for the Apricot-Avo bed and the Avo-Shed beds. Ideally, I'd like four more - for the two beds previously mentioned, plus the Plum-Stone and Apple-Crepe beds, just so the backyard has a single aesthetic. Anyway, ith the Sydney Edible Garden Trail 2020 coming up, I need to start putting down my design on paper, so there's a better record of how the design has changed over the last five years.

But this is the last photo of the day:

On Monday I'll be planting out the bed, most likely with Jolly Roger corn and...pumpkin? Some kind of melon? More dried beans? I don't even know right now. Have to think about it some more.

maps and plans

A layout for the garden before I had chickens:

And the garden on the weekend. Easier to see because it's winter and there are no leaves.

Useful to see, isn't it?

in the height of summer

Quick bed-check.

Avo-Shed: chook tractor (since at least November)

Apricot-Avo: corn is tall and full of ears, could probably do with some extra watering/mulching.

Apricot fore: potatoes (need digging out), Queensland arrowroot (also may need harvesting), random curcubit that doesn't look like anything we know.

Crepe-Apricot: Popping corn (not very good), tomatoes, kale (left over from winter), some comfrey and parsley as edging. I seeded a summer mulch there yesterday, and planted some 'homegrown pumpkin' seedlings, but one Hainan chicken got out and probably dustbathed there and killed them.

Apple-Crepe: tomatoes, beans, a couple of pumpkins/curcubits,

Stone-Apple: tomatoes, 'good bug mix', sunflower.

Stone fore: Wintermelon seedlings, zucchini seedlings. I trimmed down the stone fruit tree pretty severely - it went up and up and up and the only harvest I really got were the plums, so I'm cutting it back.

Plum-Stone: ginger up the back, parsley, a single beetroot, some tomatillos that are just about to fruit, only I want to put the chook dome over it for the next two months...

Upper Cherry-Peach: bathtub water garden - need to check for a hole in the plug area. It's leaking.

Lower Cherry-Peach: bathtub garden - nothing in here yet, but I'm thinking I might plant the garlic in here if I can get enough good soil. (Good soil is tough to find in decent quantities; at least until the compost bioreactors finish getting their acts together...

Chook house: Due to be moved sometime this weekend (I hope; maybe.)

Asparagus bed: (upper step bed)

Annual herb bed: (lower step bed)

Vegepod:
Front row:eggplants, capsicum (peppers)
Middle row:tomatoes
Back row:melons, cucumbers, possibly a pumpkin or two? They're growing up the vines with the plan to provide shade (this aspect of the house faces north, which is the sunny side here in the southern hemisphere, so the shade would have been good a month earlier, but the bed was only created in December).

Front garden/orchard: various plants which aren't doing so well - probably the soil isn't rich enough or deep enough for them. I'd need to run the chooks through here rather longer than I did, I think.

Hainan: a chook perspective [guest post]

Hi! I'm Hainan the Leghorn, and I'll be taking you on a tour of the garden I live in today...

The first picture there is me (aren't I pretty?) with my companion Honey Soy, an Isa Brown, in the background.

Here's a better one of Honey:

We run around in a moveable chook 'tractor' which we scratch around in most of the day, connected to our coop/house by a series of tunnels:

Our chook tractor is made without a bottom so we can dig up the soil. Our droppings combine with the straw and other clippings that are tossed in, and they fertilise the ground which can then be planted out with seedlings.

Here you can see the patches which have been planted out - the first one with corn and tomatoes, the second one with corn and pumpkin, and the third one waiting. We're not allowed into the planted out patches, which is really unfair! I love sitting on a plant and scratching it into submission while pecking at the leaves and destroying the plant! It's one of my favourite things to do when I escape!

This bed, with the corn, cucumbers, and tomatoes, is the first bed that Honey and I were set to scratch out - look how well it's doing after around 6 weeks!

More corn, and pumpkins. Although, as chooks, we're supposed to love pumpkin seeds, Mummy tossed us a whole heap of seeds and we didn't end up eating them! So they lay in the compost until our chook tractor moved on to the next bed, and then they sprouted. But Mummy is keeping them. (Maybe she shouldn't keep quite so many of them - one vine grows quite long!)

And this is what a garden bed looks like after the chicken tractor is moved off:

Lots of space for planting things!

At night we get locked up in the coop away from cats and foxes and other urban predators, and in the morning we lay eggs and make very noisy clucking sounds to let everyone know what we've done! It's a hard-knock life for a chook.

more chooks

How much happens in only a matter of weeks!

The girls are still with us, still scratching away, a lot bigger.

We had a dip in egg production for a while - Hainan laid three eggs - one with a weird 'soft' shell, one that came out crushed and bloody, and one that was normal. And then she stopped. And Honey stopped egg production, too. For about a week, I was worried at first that they were egg bound, and then I was worried that Hainan had torn something up inside her laying that broken egg, and then I was worried that I'd hurt them or injured them while checking that they weren't egg-bound...

The local vet where we take our cats was very helpful. Right in the middle of fretting about it, I called the vet and the tech there was so helpful and lovely and encouraging. I needed that - to know I wasn't a failure at chook management. So I'm feeling a bit better about it all now...

Anyway, we got back into egg production about three days ago, and yesterday we had a breakthrough: TWO EGGS! (Okay, so one was weird and long and was shaped like those really smooth river/sea stones, but still...an egg!) Hopefully we'll see another two today. They've sure been swallowing the curl grubs down something fierce...

They sat on the 2nd bed for 2 weeks, happily picking and scratching and grumping and clucking back and forth, although I think at the end of the two weeks they were getting a little bit bored with the space - I haven't managed to grow much inside or around the cages as yet, you see. So it's a bit of a wasteland beyond grass and dirt and the mulch I throw in semi-regularly.

So I moved them on from the 2nd bed on Sunday, but I've found the grass isn't as torn up as I'd like, and I'm thinking I probably should have left it there for three weeks at a time, rather than the standard two. But what's going in there will mostly be corn and beans and cucumber and fruiting vegetables.

One of the things about the chook run/pen is that it's pretty small and rather low. It's not easy to climb into and fix things, and it felt kind of poky. So I added another 'level' to it.

Behold Casa de Chook, now about 1.5m tall, with a lot more airspace (even if no more floorspace) and the potential for perches and wing flapping! I can also climb into it without catching on anything, which will be a relief. Fewer scratches (we hope)!

I finished it just last night, and while it does need a little more work on it to neaten things up, I'm pretty happy with it right now...

chickens, setup, and bed prep

One of the principles of permaculture is review and redesign as necessary.

It's been six weeks since we got the chickens and while they're a PITA to have to wake up and feed first thing in the morning, they're terribly cute, excellent garbage disposal, and destroying the grass at a wonderful rate!

My desire for chooks originally stems from Linda Woodrow's 'Permaculture Kitchen Garden' in which she keeps the chickens in the garden , preferably among the fruit trees to deal with the fruit flies and other nasties. And so, that's always really been my goal. The problem the coop that we got the chickens with hasn't exactly been very moveable. It's large and heavy (solid timber) and in spite of the wheels, it's not very moveable across uneven ground. Plus, there's wire across the bottom of the coop, so they can't actually scratch up the ground, dust bathe, or dig for worms. Very frustrating.

Also, while I let the girls just forage through the garden for a couple of weeks, my vegie garden was showing signs of exhaustion. Plus, Hainan has a habit of climbing onto a plant and basically scratching it to death. (Ever seen a chicken use a bush as a scratching pole? Seriously.) So I knew that sooner or later I was going to have to come up with a longer-term solution or I wouldn't have a veggie garden.

Cue the creation of a mobile chook pen (not coop) in which I put the girls during the day, locking them back in the coop at night so as to be safe from urban predators. (Cats, mostly, possibly dogs and urban foxes.) I've picked a spot in the shadiest corner of the garden for summer, and in winter, I'll put them either back where they started, or possibly up on the porch step, facing out into the garden. I'll decide once winter gets here - it's another six months yet!

So right now, the coop is here in the north western corner of the garden, almost right up against the house:

The pen, meanwhile, is in the sunniest spot in the yard, where I want to grow the productive fruiting annuals: corn, tomatoes, cucumber, etc:

And a wire tunnel joins the two, which I fashioned myself. I really need to refine it better (and make it neater) because the tunnel edges are kind of scratchy and they don't fit together very well. Right now, when I want to move tunnel pieces around, it's a bit of a production. The tunnel needs better modularity, and possibly some flexibility for getting across the yard...

And, of course, as always happens when wire is involved, there are war wounds...

Ultimately, I fear the wire is winning!

But the chooks seem pretty happy - the enclosed pen has some old vines I tossed over, and a plastic mat that serves as a shade against the hot midday sun. And I toss them the scraps to eat and scratch around. And they've happily dug out and mulched the area I want to plant out tomorrow! EXCELLENT!

I put them in a penned area yesterday with a few older plants, and Hainan rewarded herself by climbing the brussel sprout and trying to scratch it dead. On the other hand, they did find a few curl grubs and peck/bash hem dead. (They don't like the big ones, just the smaller ones which they can swallow whole.)

This is a picture of Hainan trying to kill the brussel sprout, while Honey digs for curl grubs:

As you can see, Hainan knows how to go about it.

We've started getting eggs - most likely from Honey. The first one was teeny tiny:

That's so small, it fits between the 2" wire gaps in the base of the coop!

Comparison with some other eggs.

Left is Honey's 1st egg, centre is an egg from a friend's home-ranged chickens who've been laying for nearly a year now, and the last is a commercial size.

She's produced nearly one every day for the last week, except for Monday. And we lost the one on Thursday, because I think she laid it while perching and then someone stepped down onto it, breaking the shell...

We eagerly await the day we discover two eggs in the coop!

Anyway, this morning, I moved the pen over, and the space beneath is pretty much ready for growing (I had to dig up some of the grass - the girls hadn't dug quite deep enough to pull out the runners):

Tomorrow is the installation of an irrigation system, and planting/planting out day, particularly the perennials that I'm growing between the coop stations.