The chicken & vegetable dynamic

When we first built our home on 5 acres in Inverloch, we were adamant about being as sustainable as we could and setting our farm up to be low maintenance and functional by using the basic elements of permaculture. The chicken-vegetable dynamic is the perfect example! The chooks provide poo power (life-giving nitrogen) to our veggies and then our veggie scraps provide food for the chooks….. ahhhh…. the circle of life.

We have two chicken houses within our orchard that home 17 chooks. The reason we did this was to ensure the chickens were able to free-range in a large area (25m x 17m) but also to fertilise our orchard. As foxes can be an issue in our part of the world, we opted to build 2m high fences out of pvc coated chainlink fencing (bargain price off eBay – used of course). We actually got enough to lay a 1.5m skirt on the ground surrounding the orchard so if a pesky fox (or our cheeky dogs) got bored one day, they are unable to dig under the fence and play with the chooks.

The chicken houses are made from an old cubby that we picked up for free and an A-frame swing set someone was throwing out. (Both within an hour’s drive which anyone is willing to do because you can’t get cheaper than free!) With a few modifications using some of our stockpile of recycled timber and tin we had 2 functional chook houses.

We use straw for bedding in the chook houses and they love it. This is a great job for the kids…. however, it usually ends in tears just after the “straw fight” begins. When it comes time to clean out their bedding, we collect up all this nitrogen and add it to our compost, to the bases of our fruit trees or to our veggie gardens.

When preparing our veggie garden soil, we use a mix of our homemade compost (from food scraps, garden clippings, newspaper etc.), chook poo/straw mix from our happy hen houses, horse poo from our local horse lovers and a load of mushroom compost from our local garden supplies. We will leave this to settle and stabilise over the next week or so before we plant our seedlings.

Ideally, we would have liked to be planting this week – but you know those things called life, work and family….. they sometimes leave us time-poor! We will be planting the seedlings (that we struck 5 weeks ago) over the coming weeks in staged plantings so we don’t have to harvest all our produce at once!

“Seed you soon!”