What did you do in the garden today?

Letting the flock into the garden now and it will be open from now until spring planting. Will be deconstructing low tunnels and such soon and doing a general garden clean out. Won't be putting weeds in the coop this year, though, nor any left over tomatoes and such....those seeds germinate nicely the following year in the garden after lying dormant all winter long in warm compost.

It will feel good to get all of that cleaned up and out, making for a clean slate there once again. Hope the chickens find a lot of bug larvae in there before we start hauling new chips in Nov. That will be chip hauling month if we have some sources for them. Most of the garden will be needing some level of chips on there and I'd like to get at least 4 in. more overall.
 
I've had a poultry house / gardens in that gray matter between my ears for a while now.

Basically it's a poultry house (coop) with two doors that sits between two 50' x 100' gardens. So you could rotate the runs every other growing season. Poultry in one / veggies in the other - then flip them the next year. I guess it could work with smaller live stock also. With poultry if you deep bedded the coop and used barn lime, you could essentially use the deep bedding as mulch in the garden that year. Think of all the free fertilizer that the chickens would make in a year, which would be the following years garden.

I'm sure I'm not the first to think of this though.
 
I planted some cover crop in my raised coop bed to try and keep some of the grass and weeds out.

I need to haul chicken litter to the garden and cover crop that, but grass shoved up along the edges of one raised bed. I'll go out with the vinegar tomorrow since we have a few dry days.
 
Started to clean up the bed this week, and yesterday let the chickens into the garden.

Today I planted garlic! I love fresh garlic so I hope it does well. I love making garlic scape pesto too so that's something to look forward to in spring.
 
The weather and other commitments kept me out of the backyard the last week plus. I was thinking yesterday, if I want to grow anything for winter I'm going to have to get going and soon… I need to find seeds.
 
Getting some free round bales of mulch hay tomorrow to put on the garden and will call about other cheap mulch hay this coming week for the same. Switching from chips to hay now and am getting pretty excited about that.

Going to lay it in a foot thick all over and will also try to find square bales for making a raised bed to prep for spring as well.
 
spring will be here before ya know it! I just pulled the chickens off the garden and added another couple of inches of wood chips. They are breaking down nicely. I'm trying to keep them wet and speed decomposition as much as possible.


Next on the list is adding some trellis for the tomatoes and beans.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Latest posts

Sister Sites

BackYardChickens.com
BackYardHerds.com
TheEasyGarden.com
Back
Top