Tag: mulch

Chicken move timeline

With getting ready to garden, a large part of that was getting the chickens ready to move. With the easy coop we built. Read more about it, below.

Chicken Coop

The net moves quickly which with the rotational chicken grazing plan. That is why we bought it .

The chickens enjoyed the move, at least we didn’t hear anyone complain, and within an hour the net and charger was set up and the chickens were in their new home.

With three 25ft by 50ft beds they have plenty of work to do . The plan again is to let them stay on one garden bed and plant on the other 2. With only doing this on one plot so far, we are already seeing improvement in our plants.

As you can see the chickens are already fast at work . Only a month in and they have already picked everything they wanted.

The only thing left for us to do is go in and knock down the things they did not want and then to start giving scraps, wood chips, and give them a compost pile to work .

The garden results this year were fantastic. We planted two sections – one that had the chickens on it for 6 months and one that only had compost spread by us on it. The chicken prepped garden grew over twice as fast and produced ten times the vegetables. We knew it would help, but the level of success was even more than expected.

With the limited land we have getting ten times more out of the same space just makes sense.

As you can see, it is time for the chickens to move again, to till this plot up and let us get to planting!

Barn Expansion

Almost as soon as we nailed the last board on the barn redo, we started planning a barn expansion .

We had talked about doing a round of meat chickens and needed a place to put them. We talked about putting them in the electric netting set up like our egg layers, but the place we like to purchase from were out of stock.

So because it is never a bad thing to have another pen area to lock stuff up in, we decided to build one.

The left hand side of the barn had enough space for what we were after.

The barn made it easier by already having one wall up, so we just dug the holes and made it semi level.

We went with the metal around the bottom just like the rest of the barn. We like the look and it helps with splash up form the rain stopping eventually rotting boards. Around the top was easy with some fencing wrapped around. The roof we put up the same clear panels as the green house and used some tin we had taken off the barn to give more light in the rabbit area.

Lined the inside of the bottom with rocks, to make it harder for anything to scratch out or dig in. Finished the floor with wood chips, added a door big enough for a wheelbarrow and it was ready for chickens.

We raised out 25 Cornish cross in the pen without much trouble. Only had one loss towards the end , not sure what happened. After processing we had over 150 lbs of meat in the freezer.

In the future we might do a round of ducks or maybe turkeys in the addition, we prefer to raise them on grass which will be the plan, but its nice to have a place to lock them up if need be.

The bonus is the deep bedding that is being broken down by having the animals in there, all the plants on the homestead will benefit from it.