Sunday, October 18, 2009

Chickens in heaven

Incredible Hulk and Superman worked hard all morning on our latest project. They had to put up a temporary fence around the area we cleared and bordered. We hope when plants are growing in there that it will soften the hard edges of the fence, but it is really a necessary evil. Many people, like me, believe that there are no straight lines in nature...but we have to do what we have to do!



The need for this is to keep big white dog out and hopefully be a deterant to the chickens who, before the fence was finished, thought they were in heaven. As we added 15 bags of manure to the soil they decided to de-worm the ground for us. It was terrible to watch all those lovely earthworms be slurped up like spaghetti...but they were having such a feast I didn't want to stop them.



Oh...and Superman rewarded himself with a new toy....



While they were busy we banked up potatoes, planted more, weeded both gardens, watered all the baskets, picked spinach, planted spinach, picked strawberries, fed the lemon tree and granadilla's some Epsom salts (they were looking yellow).

We planted cucumbers and chillies, sorted out the seedlings waiting to be planted to get the strongest ones to grow and turfed the rest.

All in all a productive day! Now I need to watch the new area to get to know the sun and the length that it shines on certain parts before we plant it up.

4 comments:

Sonja said...

Does the fence really help to keep the chickens out? Mine can fly very high if I don't cut their wings from time to time. Do you let yours run free all the time? I want mine so badly to have freedom but they do a lot of damage. Do you have any advice?
Thanks for jou lovely blog, it means a lot to me!

Urban Homestead South Africa said...

Hi Sonja

They managed to get in this morning again, and mine do fly but they have their scratching places which they go to. They love the compost heap.

It's more for the dogs...

My chickens share the garden with the dogs. We keep the dogs inside with us for 2 hrs while the chickens roam then we lock them in the coop for the rest of the day.

Sonja said...

Thanks Wendy! But do you ever have trouble with them damaging your plants or vegetables?

Urban Homestead South Africa said...

Sonja,

We have fences around our vegetable gardens - much higher than the on in this picture. But they have got in to the gardens before and taken out - I mean totally anihilate - my seedlings! Very frustrating. And when I shoo them out they look at me as if they don't know what they have done - LoL!