Does anyone move their garden?

[LovinLife]

While on the subject ...

Zip ties even make great boning for use in sewing projects! Just get the BIG ones.

What is boning?

 

[Bubblingbrooks]

While on the subject ...

Zip ties even make great boning for use in sewing projects! Just get the BIG ones.

What is boning?

Think Corset

 

[Farmfresh]

Think Renaissance Festival - wooo hoo!

 

[LovinLife]

Think Renaissance Festival - wooo hoo!

Ohhhhh! Boning! I get it! I bet those zip ties work good for that, however I'm more of a Bluegrass Fest girl.

 

[Marianne]

Rotate crops, and manure and compost
Lots less work.

Now, an exception to this, is if you have chickens, build a double set of pens for them, several feet wider then the size of the garden you want.
You want one pen on each side of the coop.
Prepare the soil, and on one side, prep with lots of compost and manure. Plant as usual.
Let the chickens have at the other side for the year.
The next year, rotate sides!

Yes! The only thing I was going to add to this was a small section in the center with a little garden shed to hold tools, a potting area and a sink that you can hook a garden hose on. Attach another garden hose on the drain, rinse garden soil off veggies before you bring them into the house and use the water on your plants.

Now I have to get back and read the rest of the posts...maybe someone else already came up with this or something better.

 

[Marianne]

My mom used a two sided run/garden, and it was a failure because once she got a garden area big enough to meet the garden space need, it was too big for the chickens to keep weeded. Of course, having one that big is the only way your chickens get enough forage - they need weeds to eat. But that meant that when we went to plant again, we had a nasty weedy patch to dig up again. It was just WAY easier to build the soil consistently in one side.

I remember she switched it one year, then went back to the first side and there it stayed.

It helps to have a heavy mulch (I use straw and garden debris) or a cover crop to keep that one side from sprouting weeds so badly. I don't have an actual compost pile any more. Most everything gets tossed out into the garden. I do have a little area that has more 'woody' kinds of stuff, like sunflower stalks, that take longer to break down. I never till. The soil texture is great as it is...except for one patch of clay that I'm still working on.

I leave all the garden debris in a few piles and let the hens in. They earn their keep just in garden cleanup. The only exception was my green bean plants. For three seasons I have been fighting blight. Last year I contained it better by carefully picking each crappy leaf as soon as it showed signs of blight, and into the burn pile it went. This season I'm planting them waaay away from that area and going with a different variety of bean.

We learn something every year, don't we!

 

[lwheelr]

You can do that when you have only one garden patch. But when you try alternating that garden patch with a chicken run, weed problems develop.

A cover crop has to be tilled under or grazed off before it goes to seed. Either way, the side that the chickens are in goes to weeds, eventually. Actually, it ends up more like bare dirt on the end nearest the chicken coop, where they've scratched it most heavily, and tough hardy weeds at the other end. The fertilizer distribution ends up the same way - all on one end, and packed down so you really can't rake it anywhere. And since the weeds all grow on one end (away from where the chickens are scratching most), the worm populations tend to migrate all to the weedy end, and away from where the chickens are hunting them. Winter recovery ability varies widely by area, but overall, it just isn't the best way to build good soil, and if you want a garden that produces well year after year, you really have to build good soil.

We were not in an area with a long enough growing season to have time to harvest more than one crop, or to plant a cover crop after the regular crops were harvested, so any value from them was not possible.

I agree with my mother, in the assessment that the double chicken run, with a garden grown alternately on one side, is an idea that looks good on paper, but really doesn't work out well in reality. It is an idea that has been around for more than half a century, and I think if it really did work well, it would have caught on a bit better. As it is, all it did was increase the work necessary to maintain a good garden - and it is enough work as it is, I'm not real fond of complicating the tasks.

The picture in the article shows a dinky little garden that isn't big enough to plant more than a summer salad garden, and maybe not even that. Heck, even my mother-in-law, who only planted a vegetable garden to please herself, and never really canned or froze any of it, had a bigger garden than that. Once you get it big enough to be worth growing (even doubling the size), the problems begin to become apparent.

Using chickens in the garden is a great thing. Alternating chicken pen with garden, not so much.

 

[Farmfresh]

I do the alternating thing. I have chickens in the garden space all winter.

I also use a heavy straw mulch in combo with the chickens. I have a pretty high chicken to sq ft of garden ratio as well. I just plain do not have any weed problems. The last weed to go was crab grass, which I did have to manually pull, but by using the straw with the hens my soil has been in nice condition each spring.

Added to say : I also feed table scraps at the farthest end of the garden space. This seems to keep the chickens hunting in a wider area.

 

[lwheelr]

I'm not saying it doesn't work to put your chickens into the garden in the winter. That's a different thing. Weeds don't grow as aggressively in the winter, and it is a shorter time period. Using chickens for garden cleanup is effective and helpful.

The article mentioned earlier in this thread talks about alternating years - garden one year, chicken run the next year.

I'm just saying that swapping the garden and chicken run every year leads to a heckuva lot of unnecessary work, and can seriously interfere with the process of building better soil.