Ok, bit of a weird title.
I have been keeping chickens in my suburban backyard for about 10 years now. They started in a small coop and run which than went became a larger run, then half the yard until, eventually, I let them roam everywhere.
Anyone who has chickens will know that they destroy everything! Not just by eating plants, but by their perpetual scratching and digging. For a long time, I had a huge number of very large trees in the backyard, so I didn't really mind. It wasn't much good for growing because of the shade and roots, so the chickens had a mini forest all to themselves.
But last year my landlord decided to remove all the trees and what I ended up with was a kind of sandy, desert wasteland. Pretty tragic really. Not only did it take all the lovely shade away, but the process removed any topsoil that was there and left behind a whole lot of churned up sand.
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| Half way through tree clearing |
I was pretty dismayed, but I'm a big fan of regenerative farming methods and Holistic Management and was very familiar with people like Joel Salatin and Alan Savory, so my thoughts went straight to something like, "how can I use my chickens to fix this backyard."
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| Scalped |
Of course, I don't have cattle, so I can't start mob grazing. But nevertheless, I decided to view my backyard, which is probably about 250-300sqm, as a kind of paddock, and use the chickens in a kind of rotational grazing pattern. It meant dividing the backyard into cells circling around a central common space.
After lots of thinking and sketching, I finally settled on a plan and for the last 6 months or so, I've been working to implement it.
Here are some sketches of what I've been working on:
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| Bare Bones Before & After |
The central space is a fenced in pool area, the pool having never been useable. So I started by building the new coop inside that space then fibreglass patching all the cracks and holes in the pool and converting it into a pond with plants and fish.
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| New coop with window I added |
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| Chookie's door! |
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| First plants in the pool |
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| Goldfish added to help control mozzies & algae |
Next I built the first 2 fences and gates. The whole block is on a slope with the high point being at the back fence and then going downhill all the way to the house. Of course, that causes a problem with water run off and erosion, so I dug some basic swales in zone 4 to help with the problem.
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| Chickens investigating swales |
Then it was time to seed zones 4&5 with a whole lot of different grasses and green manure plants. That was last autumn and here how those zones look now, 5 months later!
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| Zone 5 - before |
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| Zone 5 - now |
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| Zone 4 - before |
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| Zone 4 - after |
So after years of the girls being allowed to roam all over and about 6 months of work from me, this week was the girl's first week of being confined to a zone. They are in zone 5 at the moment, as well as still having access to their central pool/coop area. I'll see how long it takes for them to start getting through all of that green, then move them on to zone 4.
Fingers crossed, by working together, we can repair the backyard and start rebuilding topsoil. :)
