Surburban Chicken House - Chicken Tractor
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Keeping Chickens In The Suburbs
How do chickens fare in an ordinary suburban garden? Very well indeed!
Here are ours scratching around in the dirt under the fruit trees as they love to do.
Chickens are a very useful piece of the food growing process, because of their excellent abilities to dig and scratch around, digging up grubs and improving and fertilising the soil as they go.
Where do they live?
Here’s the chicken house or “chicken tractor” or in Aussie slang “chook tractor” where they live. A chicken tractor takes advantage of chickens’ talents at digging and fertilising.
Its essentially a mobile house that you move from place to place, so the benefits can be spread around. It’s also much more fun for them because they get to dig in interesting stuff rather than the same place which will eventually turn into bare dirt . And remember happy chickens = eggs.
You can see it’s just sitting on the lawn in front of the swimming pool at the moment.
Inside The Chicken House
This particular chicken house has an upstrairs and downstairs. The chooks roost and lay upstairs which they access via the ramp. The particularly clever aspect of this chicken house is that the ramp pulls up, so when the chickens have taken themselves to bed just before sunset, all you need to do is pull up the ramp and the chooks are safe from foxes, dogs and other predators.
They seem to appreciate the feeling of security it gives and retreat there in any stressful moments e.g when the lawn mower is in action.
The Results
If you like the chicken house you can find out more about it and other similar ones from http://www.mountainarks.com.au/WentworthAFrame.html.
The guy who runs it is called Francis and is really helpful.
Permaculture For Sustainable Living
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Permaculture is a term used to describe human-created, self sustaining eco systems. Typically it refers to agricultural eco systems that generate food and raw materials without requiring (large amounts of) external raw materials or energy - such as fertilliser or fuel to sustain them.
This self sustaining facility is important because as peak oil and the subsequent "energy descent" impact society, high energy, mechanised, chemical-driven farming practices will become more and more difficult to practice. Essentially cultivation will once again need to happen on a smaller, local scale.