Chicken Tractor Photos

Nest box and roosting area

With nest box door open for egg collection and cleaning

Nest box door closed

interior roof

side veiw, door open

opposite side from nest box door

Raised bed in December

          Although I swore not to do any yard work in December, I could not stop myself when I woke up to a clear, bright, cold morning. Digging in the rain is vile—and counterproductive to soil structure—but tossing leaf mulch and weeding the fig tree on a sunny day is a different story.

            I started by turning over the soil in the two beds that had been chicken tractored already. The first, most recently occupied, bed had a layer of chicken straw and poop over the winter’s leaf mulch. It needed to be turned. The leaves, straw, spilled food, and poop will compact and turn anaerobic if left untouched all winter.  It smells nasty and nothing will grow in it come spring. But, if I give the whole bed a rough toss, mixing soil into the organic matter, it will all break down, slowly in January and February and quickly by April.  I turned the first bed and then gave the older bed, which had just a layer of leaves untouched a toss as well. All the while, the chickens were having a discussion; they wanted to dig around in the beds themselves. Before I moved on, I let them out.

      

      The second project involved prepping a bed for the coop. There were still a few top-less beets (Thank you, Bunzilla), a leek, and some parsnips hanging out in the soil. The beets and leek were harvested quickly, but the parsnips were a challenge. Several were huge, reaching down into the clay subsoil under the good garden dirt. I dig and scrambled and tugged until they came out.  Two required the pitchfork. Kayli the fluffy cat walked the fence line, calling me over to scratch behind her ears. I stopped to oblige, then gave the final bed a quick toss and went in for lunch.

      

      After lunch, I returned to clean up the hedgerow on the north side of the house. Our fig tree has been slowly growing in the strip of land between our house and the neighbor’s driveway, which is nice because it is an excellent screen in the summer. But, it also collects weed seeds and vines. I grubbed out small hazelnuts, a holly, several armloads of wild clematis, a nasty vine that was once a rose but is now a wiry green  thing with thorns, and some nightshades, filling a garbage can with rough compostables. I did NOT start to prune out the suckers, although I was tempted, because, after all, it is still December and I will not work in the yard during December.

           

           

     

The Chicken Hug

           

pipes

 Our chicken coop is perfect-sized for two chickens. It is five feet by four feet, A framed, sized to perch on garden beds in the winter and under the laurel tree in the summer. However, we often have more than two chickens, because we like to keep the eggs coming, but cannot kill an old hen. We put them out to pasture. This is a problem; the coop that holds two ladies peacefully creates mayhem when there are four, still working out turf battles. For years, we fought with chicken wire and rebar to extend the run, but it was a huge pain, so we built The Hug. The Hug is a lightweight frame made from pvc pipe, bird netting, yarn, and a bit of duct tape. It is not elegant—yet—but it is highly functional and very inexpensive to construct.

1. Visit Habitat for Humanity to purchase the pvc pipe and the joints.
2. On a sunny afternoon, lay the pipes out on the garden beds to measure and cut to fit, using an old hack saw.
3. Join together with the pipe connectors.
4. Check for sizing on the bed.
5. Trim a little more off of the end near the fence, so it fits into the bed. Leave the coop end a little wider so the gate opens up inside of the Hug.
6. Re-assemble.
7. Wrap the entire thing in bird netting and sew on using old yarn. A snazzy color is nice. Duct tape the edges near the gate so that they do not snag.
8. Place on the garden bed, next to the coop.
9. Using old fence boards, create the “hug” effect by attaching the fence boards to the coop, jutting out to reach (or hug) the run. This fills in the gap between coop and run.
10. Lift the gate so that it becomes the ceiling between hug and coop. Attach to the upper pipe.
11. Let the Ladies out. Enjoy the peace of having four chickens who are no longer constantly bumping into one another.
12. When the weather gets worse, rig a sheet of used plastic roofing over the hug to keep the rain off of the chickens.
    

Cauliflower Cheese Soup kind of from Moosewood Cookbook, circa 1982

2 potatoes

3 carrots

a medium head of cauliflower

one onion

salt, pepper, dillweed to taste

Chop and boil in minimal water until soft.

While waiting, grate a cup and a half of cheddar cheese and about half a cup of parmesan.

When the veggies are soft, puree in two batches. Add the cheese to one. Pour back into the pan, add a couple of cups of milk (until it is as thick as you like it) and reheat slowly.       

Crop Rotation with Chickens

   

        It’s not easy to plan a large veg garden around a chicken tractor. When we first acquired two hens, we had three 4 by 10 foot beds and they could settle in by November if need be and stay until late March. Now we have nine beds, mostly 10 by 4 but several 8 by 4, and it has grown more complicated. The key is to remember your harvest dates, rather than trying to rotate the cole crops every three years. This year, the arrangement looks something like this:

Bed A: dried beans, probably Indian Woman, and some edamane beans

Bed B: Spring crops—mustard, peas, lettuce, radishes, kale, broccoli. All of which will be eaten by July (or August, if the kale lasts that long).

Bed C: Garlic and ceremonial wheat, to be replaced by sprouting broccoli and fall cabbage.

Bed D and E: potatoes.

Bed F: pole beans and yellow wax beans

Turn the corner and move up the other side, to….

Bed G: vines—zucchini, squash, pumpkins, cucumbers

Bed H: Summer crops—chard, lettuce, beets, collards, fennel bulbs, and more broccoli

Bed I: Alliums and roots—scallions, leeks, beets, carrots, parsnips (if they sprout).

Tomatoes and peppers grow out front  where the driveway used to be in black tubs.

Next year, each shifts over bed, so garlic is planted where the potatoes were this year, etc.

The chicken coop will be placed on the spring crop bed in early September, when I go back to school and they can no longer run all over the yard anyways. A month later, all of the beds will be covered in leaves for the winter.

This system works well for us because it leaves beds free at predictable times. When I tried to plant by crop, there were always a few random plants still producing right when the bed needed to be chicken  tractored.

Weekend Breakfasts….

Pancakes—from the 1955 Betty Crocker’s cookbook

1.5 cups of flour—half wheat, half low gluten white

1 t BP

.5 t BS

.5 t  salt

1.25 cups of buttermilk

1 egg

2T oil

Add berries from the freezer….This is just enough for two people, at least in our house.

Waffles—from Molly Katsen’s Sunlight Café

 PREHEAT THE WAFFLE IRON!

1 c rolled oats

1 c flour (I sometimes use half whole wheat)

.5 c oat bran

.75 t salt

1 t BP

.25 t BS

2 T sugar

1.5 c buttermilk

.5 c water or milk

2 eggs

3 T oil

Once again, add berries from the freezer to the batter, esp. raspberries.

Soil Maintenance in Raised Beds

Waiting for chickens

             Being a serious gardener is not about growing the purple-podded peas and heirloom tomatoes, searching the catalogs for new and exciting varieties of potatoes. It’s not about new and fancy gadgets, or garden art and colored flower cages. It’s not even about planting your own starts on a rainy day, slipping them into the ground under the cloche just before the hail sets in. Being a serious gardener is about maintaining the soil. And it is not easy, nor for the faint of heart.

            A few years ago, veggie boxes were all the rage in Corvallis. I’d see them out on my evening walks—a raised bed, four by six feet, filled with Fertile Mix and one tomato, a six-pack of lettuce, two types of basil, and some strawberry plants. Nothing wrong with that—it is how we all start out. All summer, the gardeners watered and harvested and bragged. “We have so many tomatoes we can’t eat them all!”  The neighbors benefited and were inspired to plant their own boxes. And so it went down the street. But, there is a small snag in the process; one I discovered myself my second year of gardening. Fertile Mix is fertile…for the first year. The second year, all of the soil nitrogen is bound up breaking down the woody debris and plants don’t grow. They sit there in the bed, tiny and yellow.  I saw this pattern everywhere. Discouraged gardeners stopped watering. Strawberry plants shriveled. The soil compacted. By year three, the frame sat, half empty and full of dust.  People renewed their CSA subscriptions and returned to the grocery and farmer’s markets.

           

Chicken Tractor

            We hit the same snag and bought chickens. The chicken coop sat on the garden beds and I tossed the soiled straw down from the perch and nest box, a perfect blend of nitrogen and organic matter. It was Transformative.  Sunflowers grew eight feet high. No more yellow plants! Fewer slugs and pill bugs!  The next year, I began hauling in the leaves off the street in the fall and piling them onto the beds as well. Over the winter, they slowly rotted down, adding to the organic matter in the soil. The next year, I realized that, if I gave the bed a light turning right after the chickens moved on, the soil biology came into contact with the fresh organic matter more quickly and facilitated aerobic decomposition, which was much faster. So, now, this is the system, starting in early October:

·        Pile leaves on every bed.

·        Place the chicken tractor on  the first empty bed.

·        Toss down straw and poop every week.

·        Move the coop about every three weeks.

·        Turn the bed lightly after the coop has been moved.

·        Add ash from the fireplace whenever possible.

·        Plant in the rough bed, usually under a cold frame in the spring.

·         Toss a handful of Bio-fish in with every plant.

·        Mulch with straw or more leaves in the summer, after the hoses are down.

Post Chicken Tractor

If I did not have chickens, I’d still use leaves in the Sunbow system, where we pile them around young plants right after weeding, as summer mulch. But chickens do make the system work better.

Black Bean Chili—the perfect potluck food

Starting in the morning, toss about six cups of black beans (ours are locally raised), and adobe pepper, and several garlic cloves into the crockpot. Cover with water and cook all day.  The long slow cooking is essential to the flavor of the beans!

About an hour before guests arrive, sauté a large onion, a red pepper, and some carrots in a frying pan. Add salt, basil, oregano, and chili powder—and some more garlic to the mix. When the onion is soft, add to the beans.  You can add other veggies too, like frozen corn, but purity can be lovely.

Serve with warm cornbread. Everyone else can bring the salad!

Lightly turned