The urbanpermie is back!

I've been out of action for a while for a very good reason - I was having such bad all day sickness! I'm now into the 17th week of the pregnancy and my energy is finally returning. Also I can now sit infront of the computer for a longer period without feeling so sick.

Naturally as a result of the past few months of inaction, my garden is also in a state of neglect. For a the first time in many months, my husband and I spent some good hours trying to catch up with lost time. We were pretty amazed that within a few hours, the garden was looking quite acceptable again. We're convinced that Permaculture principles works!!

All through winter, the chookies in the chook tractor were working around the vegetable beds, so I have well mulched, fertilized vege beds ready for planting. What I need now are seedlings for planting.

All the fruit trees are doing really well this year. I think it's because the Tree lucerns are doing their job in providing wind shelter. The pear tree is looking exceptionally well - it could be the comfrey plant planted at the base of the pear tree. I'll now work towards planting comfrey at the base of all the fruit trees. Having said that, the mandarine tree was loaded with fruits late winter has suddenly taken a turn for the worst and died. Not sure why.

As for the chook family, one chook died in winter. It was the weakest link and it just wasn't strong enough to withstand the constant wet and extreme cold we had this year. Sadly another chook was eating it's own eggs and were extremely noise, so it went too. That's a blog entry in itself. We are left with 3 chookies at the moment.

I guess that's me for the moment...

The chickens

Said the first little chicken

With a queer little squirm,
"I wish I could find
A fat little worm."

Said the next little chicken
With an odd little shrug,
"I wish I could find
A fat little slug."

Said the third little chicken
With a sharp little squeal,
"I wish I could find
Some nice yellow meal."

Said the fourth little chicken
With a small sigh of grief,
"I wish I could find
A little green leaf."

Said the fifth little chicken
With a faint little moan,
"I wish I could find
A wee gravel stone."

"Now, see here," said the mother
From the green garden patch,
"If you want any breakfast
Just come and scratch."
-unknown

From Fives, Sixes and Sevens

Chicken Glossary

I’m consistently confused by the different terms used on chickens (Generic term!?!). Anyway, this Chicken Glossary has come in handy to clear my confusion.

chick	A newly hatched chicken.
capon	A castrated male chicken used for meat.
cockerel	A male chicken less than a year old. These often make it to the barbecue.
hen	A female chicken more than a year old. These are the ones that lay the eggs.
pullet	A female chicken less than a year old.
rooster	A male chicken more than a year old.
egg	If you don't know, you shouldn't be keeping chooks!!!

The helpers in the garden

The Spring plantings have all finished and I'm doing the second round of planting for the summer season. And the chookies are such good workers that I really can't imagine gardening without them.

The chookies clear, prepare, fertilize and mulch the veg beds so well and quick that within 3 days the veg beds are ready for planting. To achieve that, all I need to do is to move the chook tractor to the target veg bed, and give them the barley straws on the 2nd day and to think up plants to plant at the end of the three day. How difficult is that?

They were under my Royal gala apple trees for 2 weeks, and so far the apples on the tree are looking excellent without any work from me. Maybe they had taken care of the cothling moths.

My only concern: soon I'll be running out for places for the chookies to scratch...
Possible solution: maybe I can load them out to gardeners who want to clear their slug and snail populations!!

Lightweight, Energy independent, Odourless Tractor....no such thing?

Just before you dismiss it as a crazy idealistic notion, it does exist. It's the CHOOK TRACTOR.

The chook tractor is an integrated part of our food production system in our evolving Mandala's garden. It is placed on grounds where grass or weeds or expired veg beds need to be cleared. The chookies will happily help themselves to the gourmet feast of slugs, snails, worms and a variety unwanted of greens. This reduces effort on weeding and moving the vegs to the compost heap.

Within 2 weeks, all the greens will be demolished and ground cleared of weeds and seeds, and the ground manured. If you place some pea straw or straws of any kind in the tractor after they've cleared the ground, they will happily eat all the seeds and hidden creatures and spread the straws nicely for you, and even add nitrogen to it as well. By the time we move the chook tractor to the next destination, the ground is well mulched and ready for planting.

If you want an extended area to be cleared but it doesn't fit the tractor, don't worry. Use chicken wire to create an enclosure and peg it down with standards (those use by farmers for electric fencing). If you want to keep the chookies in, use bird netting over the chicken wire. The chookies get to free range but only in the areas you like them to clear (and not your planted veg beds).

The Mandala garden in late August

Since I’ve read Linda Woodrow’s book “The Permaculture Home Garden” I can’t stop thinking about the Mandala’s garden working in conjunction with a chook dome. After measuring up the garden and deciding on the no of beds we want, Matt modified the design given in the book and build a pretty sturdy chook do me. We have since removed our square beds displayed in the earlier blog and replaced with round beds, with the help of our chookies. The Mandala garden is still in its infancy stage and I’m learning to garden with round beds instead of boxes. It takes a bit of getting used to.

May's Meeting

We had some discussions infront of the cozy fire and enjoyed the homemade preserve and jam on crackers, and fresh walnuts. The dicussions revolved around issues relating to sponses not sharing the same passion about permaculture and potential conflicts. We didn’t come up with any concrete answers but it was really nice that as a group we could provide support to each other in this respect.

Tara's Chook Tractor
Over the last 2 months, 3 more of the regular members have made or acquired chicken tractors in various shapes and sizes. One of the topics for June’s meeting will be on chicken tractors, to discuss the pros and cons of the various designs and possibly come up with a more foolproof design(s). And to come up with strategies to integrate the chook tractors into the next growing season.

WOW..that's a super jumbo!

Since we haven't bought eggs for a year, we didn't know that eggs could be bigger than those we got from our chooks. When a new member, Ginger, was introduced into the chook family, we were amazed at the size of the eggs it laid...(Ginger's egg on the left, and Broodie's on the right )


Behold, Ginger, the star

The backyard

This was the backyard in late summer. Matt took these arial pictures from the roof and I kinda of merged them together using paint. The picture is a little distorted but hey, you get "the picture"!

The veg beds were boxed in with macrocarpa sleepers so I lost the edges for planting. The plus side was we had a raised bed for planting carrots and parsnips. However, the entire design looked and felt a little rigid and boxed in and I didn't like the lack of "roundness". We're in the process of putting in lots of circle to go with our new chicken tractor. Stay tuned!! :-)

FIRST tray of Eggs!!

in April 2006 from our VERY FIRST two pullets given by a friend.

Broody (left) and Black Bird (right)

(Each chook has distinctive personality and features that tell them apart. The names are really our best effort to not get too emotionally attached to them for a good reason....)


It was a mixed feeling eating those lovely eggs - imagine the "pain in my heart" when my mother in law poached 6 of those eggs in one go for breakfast at our place....that meal tasted "bitter sweet"!! :-) Somehow eating eggs takes on a whole new meaning when you see where they came from. We haven't bought any supermarket eggs since last April.