Wednesday 14 September 2016

Gardening with chickens - another guide to (decidedly moderate) success

All summer long, the chooks have been cruelly denied access to the kitchen garden. Because stuff was growing there and all that.

Well.  In reality what happened was that the whole achy-breaky-heart thing spiralled me into an abyss of laziness, which in turn spiralled the kitchen garden into an abundance of weeds.  I know it's supposed to be good for you to get off yer bum and do something, especially if you've got a lovely garden to do it in, but I much prefer whining to counting my blessings.

So let's just say that I've been unusually careful with the angling and cropping of the pictures in this post. Keeping up appearances is, as you know, of tremendous importance on this blog.

Anyway, last weekend the time had come to do.something.about it.  So the chooks were let loose, and so was I (and my weed wacker).  They're very skilled at scraping the surface, though not exactly methodical. And they add fertilizer at the same time, so all in all they're a valuable asset when it comes to clearing out the sad remains.

And lookie here, how decorative chooks&flowers are - you can hardly see the weeds!!


It took them no time at all to carve out a tunnel :-)

The saying goes that "the early bird gets the worm".  Round these parts, it's more like "the reckless bird gets the worm".  Signe, the brown hen, knows no fear and digging the earth takes forever when she's around because she likes to sit on top of the shovel to get first picks at whatever crawlies that might appear.  Nevermind that she sometimes topples over when I lift up the shovel...



I feel the earth move under my feet
I feel the sky see the worms tumbling down
(what song is that again??)

Look at my assistants, getting down to work :-)

So. The garden wasn't a tremendous success this year. In fact, only the parsley and lettuce produced bumper crops and even they were bedevilled with weeds.  But that's the wonderful thing about gardening - there's ALWAYS next year. Needless to say, I've got grand schemes and plans, half of which won't come to fruition, but that's beside the point. There's always next year ...

Oh, and the achy-breaky heart? Pretty much done and overwith. Yay!


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