Bruce Morgan, a farmer from Australia, has figured out a great way to get his chickens involved in gardening around the house using a series of wire tunnels. Bruce, an Australian permaculturist, designed an intricate system of what he calls “chook tunnels,” chook being the Australian nickname for the chicken.
These tunnels funnel his hens all over his garden, allowing them to scratch, peck at weeds, and aerate the soil around his rows of vegetables. You might think of it as being slave labor, as Bruce puts it, “I don’t believe there is any point in having chooks if you don’t make them work for a living.” Wise words and so true! Of course “work” for the chooks is just normal behavior scratching, eating, pecking, and playing, which leads to long, healthy, happy lives for them and less work for you.
And as one person commented, “Dad used to get chicken manure in huge quantities from a local farm & spread it inches thick over the entire garden. It was too ‘hot’ until it had all been tilled & mixed and had mellowed for a week or more. Anything touched by it burned. If you move the chickens around [tractor, tunnels] they spread the fertilizer all over AND till it in for you as they go. This allows the heavy dose of nitrogen to bond with the comparatively plentiful dirt and brown compostable matter present & turns the powerful ‘instant’ fertilizer into a much milder extended release formula.”
In this system, chickens aren’t a tool to produce meat and eggs (although they could be that too), but a member of a broader system that works quite efficiently. Check it out below…
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Nothing new here, movable hen runs have been around for hundreds of years used in rotation on the fallow areas of a veg patch. They make a cracking job of weeding but they do ignore nettles.
