Good day, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, all at once.
Most of my chickens have been eaten these past couple months. And not by me, but by predators. This calls for a complete redesign and rethinking how they are going to be kept safe from the predators, when and how they get to roam, etc. My partner really doesn't want to do this but it seems I'll have to do it anyway and deal with her yelling at me afterwards. My only hope is to do it so well that it ends up working. I have enough experience behind me already so I have some confidence that I can do it. I also have resources (money!) which I didn't have before. I'm planning to spend this little money I have in significantly boosting the quality of our life and of the land so as to have a better functioning system in the coming years.
Essentially the idea is to cover the old pond (a small and dirty cement basin I made about 5 years back), and make a bigger, better one with pond liner and some water plants to clean the water. I am going to destroy their old houses and make a taller and better one to shelter them from the rain. I want to make a smaller patio for the chickens, one where I can actually keep them from flying away, and extend the pond to reach them there. If I manage to make a good pond, I might even thrown in some tilapia in there and see if I can get a neat little ecosystem running in there.
So far as structures go, this is all quite straightforward. The actual problem is not so much with making structures and whatnot, but on actually trying to keep a "self-sustaining" chicken run, and also a nice and comfy one at that. Right now my chickens depend mostly on feed and our scraps, though they do eat whatever products of the garden we don't eat, mostly bananas. I would like them to become 100% self-sustaining, without the need to buy feed at all. That is the biggest problem here. Since we have a fruit garden (or at least we're working towards that), I want to have as much as possible available to them at all times throughout the year. I also want to make the chicken patio as green as possible, that is, completely covered with high plants that will withstand their scratching and biting. I have a number of decent candidates for that, the problem is that they do require a period of growing to their full size before I can get the chickens in there.
This means a shitload of work ahead, as if I hadn't enough in my plate already. Add to that montly visits to my mother on a different state, which further reduce my time by about one fourth of the total.
I have meant to talk about things other than just my chickens, and so I was thinking of extending the series to a sort of "garden report", but I kind of like the title it has now. So I am thinking, perhaps I can keep the title but broaden the scope a bit, and talk about everything else in the garden. After all, chickens are not really an isolated element, but a very important part of the garden. What do you think? Leave your ideas in the comment box below!
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