Mr Pink
Songster
( Sub Title ) A Husband's Attempt to Keep up with his Wife's Ever Expanding Garden !
I was thinking about submitting this as an article but decided to parse this out on the forum side to maybe get others to chime in on their experiences with same topic .
Our eventual end result is garden compost via chicken ... the entire project started innocent enough when Vegan woman married rural landowning redneck ! Polar opposite lifestyles is an understatement ( at least when it came to health and eating habits ) The best way I can discribe my wife is City vegan , Vegan for purely health reasons ( absolutely non political reasons ) but a city girl and bought her tofu at walmart
I ( we now ) live in a very rural area of Missouri where extra garden produce is traded , give away as a matter of being neighborly ... didn't take long for my wife to understand the difference between garden fresh and grocery store crap SOOOOO yours truly was building garden beds in short order !
Being a country boy I had a little knowledge of gardens , compost and chickens but to be honest most of it was helping with Mom's garden or Grandma's chickens when I was a kid ... chores I tried to avoid in my adult life but found myself being semi forced back into ( I love my wife ) ANYWAY while trying to decide how exactly I wanted to attack this project I ran across all the Back To Eden Paul Gautschi videos , simply put the wood chip method . I watched hours of "why it works " and many " why it dosen't work " videos ... in a nutshell my take away from all of this was LOTS of carbon ( IE: wood chips or leafs ) and nitrogen ( green manure or animal / chicken manure ) basic composting 101 .
Carbon was fairly easy , while I did chase the tree trimming guys around and accumulated some impressive wood chips piles ...LEAFS are a more constant and available source and with the help of a large commercial size mower with a collection system leaf mulch compost piles became a norm on our property but they lacked the " finishing" touch .... enter chickens !
Last year while planning the chicken coop and run my wife suggested that a greenhouse for starters would be awesome SOOOO since I love my wife so very much plans for our GREENHOUSE chicken coop and run were made ! Now our entire reasoning for chickens was compost my entire plans revolved around a deep little coop BUT mainly a deep little run that would produce ample amounts of finished product so as I delve into this post keep in mind that everything done is for that purpose .
So here are the numbers ... had a 24 x 24 concrete slab poured to accommodate a 8 x 8 used shed for coop and 16 x 10 greenhouse I built ( this gave me plenty of walk around room and rain run off area ) and then plans for a 24 x 36 run area to butt up to coop . Run has 6 foot sides with approximately 9 foot peek in middle.
All was built wire strung cover was hung electric was hooked up ... 4 months before chickens were bought 12 inches of leaves was added to run ( of coarse 12 in of loose leafs compact quickly ) The process had begun ...
Continued >>>
I was thinking about submitting this as an article but decided to parse this out on the forum side to maybe get others to chime in on their experiences with same topic .
Our eventual end result is garden compost via chicken ... the entire project started innocent enough when Vegan woman married rural landowning redneck ! Polar opposite lifestyles is an understatement ( at least when it came to health and eating habits ) The best way I can discribe my wife is City vegan , Vegan for purely health reasons ( absolutely non political reasons ) but a city girl and bought her tofu at walmart
I ( we now ) live in a very rural area of Missouri where extra garden produce is traded , give away as a matter of being neighborly ... didn't take long for my wife to understand the difference between garden fresh and grocery store crap SOOOOO yours truly was building garden beds in short order !Being a country boy I had a little knowledge of gardens , compost and chickens but to be honest most of it was helping with Mom's garden or Grandma's chickens when I was a kid ... chores I tried to avoid in my adult life but found myself being semi forced back into ( I love my wife ) ANYWAY while trying to decide how exactly I wanted to attack this project I ran across all the Back To Eden Paul Gautschi videos , simply put the wood chip method . I watched hours of "why it works " and many " why it dosen't work " videos ... in a nutshell my take away from all of this was LOTS of carbon ( IE: wood chips or leafs ) and nitrogen ( green manure or animal / chicken manure ) basic composting 101 .
Carbon was fairly easy , while I did chase the tree trimming guys around and accumulated some impressive wood chips piles ...LEAFS are a more constant and available source and with the help of a large commercial size mower with a collection system leaf mulch compost piles became a norm on our property but they lacked the " finishing" touch .... enter chickens !
Last year while planning the chicken coop and run my wife suggested that a greenhouse for starters would be awesome SOOOO since I love my wife so very much plans for our GREENHOUSE chicken coop and run were made ! Now our entire reasoning for chickens was compost my entire plans revolved around a deep little coop BUT mainly a deep little run that would produce ample amounts of finished product so as I delve into this post keep in mind that everything done is for that purpose .
So here are the numbers ... had a 24 x 24 concrete slab poured to accommodate a 8 x 8 used shed for coop and 16 x 10 greenhouse I built ( this gave me plenty of walk around room and rain run off area ) and then plans for a 24 x 36 run area to butt up to coop . Run has 6 foot sides with approximately 9 foot peek in middle.
All was built wire strung cover was hung electric was hooked up ... 4 months before chickens were bought 12 inches of leaves was added to run ( of coarse 12 in of loose leafs compact quickly ) The process had begun ...
Continued >>>
