Growing Your Own Food
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When I was growing up in England in the Sixties, my mother and Father used to have a vegetable garden with a whole host of produce.
Potatoes, green beans, peas, raspberries, apple and pear trees, carrots, cabbages, rhubarb and so on. Most neighbours had at least a few fruit trees even if they didn’t bother growing their own vegetables.
I think this was partially a hangover from the second world war and the rationing that prevailed in England during the late forties and early fifties. In fact growing your own vegetables in the cities was a major part of the UK’s food supply strategy during the second world war (and also used in the US from memory).
I remember the vegetable growing gradually petered out during the late sixties and when we moved house in the early Seventies was never re-established.
Growing your own food has started to become more common again. I think the main reasons people are:
- Concerned about modern farming and food processing practices and want the assurance of knowing what actually went into their food.
- Concerned about the security and cost of food supplies in the future.
Keeping chickens at home is part of this trend an doften mentioned as part of permaculture practices. Chickens do excellent work in fertilising the garden and removing pests from it and they produce eggs on top of all that - what a great deal!
Suggested Actions:
- Take an inventory of your home environment and what you can grow in the space you have. You can grow a useful amount of vegetables on a balcony and you can largely feed a family of 4 by intensively farming 120 sq m.
- Learn about gardening and food growing (permaculture is useful to learn because it is based on self sustaining systems which wil be important in future/
- Research what food trees grow well in your area and plant those first (because they take time to reach maturity).
- Consider keeping small, food oriented animals - chickens are just one example.
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.