Happy Little Chicken Feet

Permaculturists are a lazy lot. We are always looking for ways to minimize our work/input. If you are working really hard, then it seems you are working against something. This is not good. This will wear you out. We should try to design a system that will work for us even when we are old. A system that older people and children can use and live in is the hallmark of a good system design.

I was washing dishes a few weeks ago and noticed the wild oats were taking over the garden space. I realized I needed chickens there. Chickens will scratch and turn and eat a space clean. If you time it right, they will clear it but leave much manure and good stuff. If you leave them on it too long, you will have no organic matter left in the soil and just a bunch of slimy chicken poo.

So we put the chickens on the back part of the fenced veggie garden space which has no beds yet. There were two compost piles that needed turning. One was two years old and the other about a year. The chickens went right to work. We left them on for about three weeks moving the fence half way through. It worked very well. Here are some pics.

Without Chickens (this is a very large pile of wood shavings barely visible beneath the oats; we are putting the chickens here next):

After the chickens have cleared and scratched the soil:


This is looking back on the area that the chickens were on with little McCloud savaging for left overs:


This was a massive pile of autumn leaves that had sat for one year. The chickens finely shredded this mulch and rooted out much of the bindweed that had taken over the pile. Now I need to decide what to do with this very special leaf mulch.

From the last place the chickens ran on I have a whole wheel barrel full of pine shavings and chicken manure. I plan on putting this beneath all the fruit trees on the swale. I have let it sit a few weeks to mellow. It will not be turned it. Just put on top to slowly release some good stuff to the roots below.
Here is the pond happy and full of water. At its deepest point it is about 9'. We built the pond below the house because this place just begged for a pond. The terrain was just right. But someday we would like to put more ponds in the landscape, some of them above zone 0. Our land turns green a lot slower than the surrounding land. There is a thick mulch of dead matter covering all the new green growth. This helps reduce moisture loss. I do think though that our land needs grazing of some kind. Mules or donkeys are a possibility some day.