Welp … it took me two [FULL] days to get the chickshaw built. What is a chickshaw you might ask? It is a chicken-rickshaw. Or, more specifically, a mobile/portable chicken coop. The design and plans (free!) are from Justin Rhodes at AbundantPermaculture.com.
The chickshaw is just one component of a larger permaculture system that involves using the chickens as one step in a multi-step process for preparing a plot for gardening. For example, for a given plot (say, a couple hundred square feet), first you might pasture your grazing animals on it (e.g. cows, horses or donkeys in my case). Then, you move the grazers out and put the chickens (in their chickshaw) in, and let them ‘scratch’ all the grazer’s manure into the soil. Tiller? We don’t need no stinkin’ tiller … just about 40 hungry hens that naturally shred EVERYTHING and eat most of it.
Then, you move the chickens off the plot, and maybe broadfork it a bit and add a few soil amendments (if needed) and prepare the soil into raised beds (or whatever). Plant. Grow. Harvest. EAT. Then, REPEAT (forever …). That’s what you call a sustainable food system.
Next, the dogs and I took some time today to mow and chop down all the weeds around and in our two geodesic domes. The domes have not been in use this year, so I let them get a bit over-grown. Yeah, probably shouldn’t have done that. Because of all the residual rabbit mature left in both domes, their soil is actually REALLY healthy, so the weeds grew much taller and denser than … say … my bucket gardening veggies. Something wrong with this picture. Anyway, we got the Vietnam-like forest of dense weeds knocked down, and mulched. Now I need to figure out WHO is going to live in them. I have a couple of options. I may create a nice herb garden in one of them, and prep the other to be a chicken coop for next Spring. Will likely over-winter the current flock in their existing barn stall coop. Might put the ducks in one dome during the Fall, so I can drain their pond and excavate it out some more (e.g. DEEPER!!!). We’ll see.
I was going to put some sheep in a dome, but I’ve recently learned how aggressive sheep can be in terms of going THROUGH their pens, rather than OVER them. I don’t think the dome walls are strong enough to keep a young ram from plowing through the existing wire mesh … but … I’ll continue researching the viability.
Happy Labor Day!