Backyard Rotational Grazing with Chickens

 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. 

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."

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:

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.

New coop with window I added

Chookie's door!

First plants in the pool

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.  

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!

Zone 5 - before

Zone 5 - now

Zone 4 - before

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.  :)

Grocery Challenge

I heard a lady on ABC Radio talking about how she feeds her family of four for $40 a week.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-23/money-saving-expert-feeds-family-for-40-dollars-a-week-heres-how/8727940

 Apparently, they had gotten themselves into a lot of debt by living in Melbourne and just enjoying city life.  But at some point they decided they needed to focus on getting their finances in better shape, so they moved to the country and she implemented this $40/week grocery plan.

It hit home with me and I decided to see if I could do the same.  I'm only one, not four, but I've decided to still use her plan, but adapt it to my eating habits.

She advocates supermarket shopping once every 10 weeks and then having one and a bit cook days where most of the results go into the freezer.

Today I have to stay home to wait for an iiNet person to come and set up a new internet connection, so after a week of preparation, last night I picked up a massive grocery order from Coles (I think the poor click'n'collect guy was a bit freaked out by the volume of stuff) and am having my cook day today.

Grocery Pickup

It's just taken about 2 hours to sort out all the groceries and label all my containers and I'm now ready to begin the actual cooking.  8am...here we go!

Let's see if I can turn this...

...and this...

into this!

Workbench VII - Installing the Saw

Finally!  I managed to get the circular saw bolted to the plate.  I cut two slots - one at 90deg and one at 45deg.

Table saw of death - highest point

Changing the depth is pretty easy

Underneath - switch on with a zip tie

When I put it in, I realised that the cord pushes into one of the metal cross beams on the base.  I might get away with it, but it makes putting it in tricky and I think it might cause wear on the cord, so I'll probably borrow an angle grinder and cut a piece out for it to fit.

Cord obstruction

Next, I need to work out a fence solution.  :)

Workbench VI - The Insert

Today I bought a pattern bit so that I could do the insert for the saw.  It scared me half to death cutting in to my lovely bench top!

I checked the level of the bench again this morning and somehow it has developed a bow.  I'm not sure what has caused it, but there is definitely now a slight sag in the middle.  I'm not too concerned, even after all the routing I did to get it flat, but it did make inserting the plate a little more difficult.

I got a piece of 12mm mdf and cut a square.  I was originally going to do a rectangle, just a little larger than the saw, but I thought that it might be a good idea to make it square so that I could change the direction of the saw if I need to.

Cutting a square is harder than I thought though, but I got close enough in the end and then got set up to cut the hollow.

It took some serious tweaking to get the depth right, and cutting out the square with the jigsaw was painful!  There are some pretty crazy rough edges, but I'm happy enough for now.

Routing done ...

... then the cut

The plate is a little wonky and it doesn't fit in in every direction, but I'm done for now.  I feel exhausted.  Another day, I'll get back in there with a sander and see if I can make it a little better.

Workbench V - Last bit of flattening

And this is how it looks now!

I think gluing those end pieces on worked ok.  I did end up adding some pocket screws underneath, which I did by hand and they ended up being a bit of a mess.  (Pockethole jigs are really expensive!)  But they did the job and are hidden anyway, so who cares?

Also, when I routed the two end pieces to match, I didn't extend the side sleds out far enough, so even though I tried to adjust, the weight of the router kind of pulled the skid down a bit and now the very end of the bench slopes down.

I'm not too worried at this stage.  I suppose I could take off the last end piece, add a new one and relevel the whole thing.  But I'm not a carpenter and I suspect that it really isn't going to matter that much to me.

And if I find that I can't live with it after a while, I can always come back and fix it later.  We'll see.

Next will be making the table/circular saw insert.  I need to get a pattern bit for my router to do that and I'm both excited and terrified at the idea of cutting into my beautiful top!

Workbench IV - Flattening finished ... almost

Today is the last day of my holiday and I'm finishing off the flattening process.  It's looking pretty good, I reckon!

I'm definitely not going to be able to stand those router ridges though, so filling and sanding next.

BUT...I made a huge mess of one end.  When I got to the halfway point, I decided to lift up the skid and start in from the other end.  But obviously something happened to the bit in the process.  I think it started coming loose, but I didn't notice that either.  

So when I started at the other end, it was way too deep, but without a reference point, I couldn't tell.  And then, at about the third pass, the whole bit came loose and made a huge gouge in the surface.  Way, WAY too deep to fix.  

omg

How didn't I see this?!

I don't know how I didn't notice, but I think I imagined that this end was a lot higher than it actually was.

So there's is no way I can fix or live with that!  So I cut off the whole end which then made my whole "too short" issue even worse.  I had two short pieces left over though from the laminating, so I'm trying to see how gluing those onto the end will work.

I want to believe that the glue will be strong enough to hold them, but if I decide to eventually put a tail vice on, it will need to be really sturdy, so I'm contemplating adding some pocket screws underneath.

Workbench III - Flattening

Today was router day!  I've been struggling with the temptation to buy a router for a couple of months now, but I promised myself I wouldn't buy any more new tools until I absolutely need them.

And I knew today that I couldn't go forward without a router.  J said that he would be able to borrow one from someone at work next week, but I wouldn't get that for another week or so and I really wanted to keep the ball rolling.

So this morning, I went off to Bunnings to buy the AEG 1350E plunge router.  Morley had sold out and I discovered that it's actually a promotional item and they won't get any more stock.  It's rrp is actually $225, but Bunnings were selling them for $99.

The sales guy checked around for me, and the only place that still had stock was Malaga - 1 left!  So feeling it was meant to be, I went screaming up to Malaga and got it.  Yay!

I also picked up some cheap melamine & plywood to make the sled for the flattening process.

First, I tried to get the bench base as level as possible on the ground, then I screwed the top down.

Then I cut the melamine into two pieces and attached them to the sides.  This was a tricky process and I probably could have done with another pair of hands, but seeing as there weren't any, I partially nailed holes into the boards and then, with the level balancing along the top edge, made little adjustments and then hammered them into place.  Once I'd done the other side too, levelled with each other, I went around and added screws too, to make sure there was no movement with the sled moving across the top.

It was an interesting exercise because up until this point, I would have said the surface was fairly level already.  But, hooley dooley, it was nowhere near!

Once I'd put the sled together...

The sled showing router gap

.. and got the router onto it, I realised that I'd made the rails too high because I couldn't get the bit to reach the lowest point, which seems to be this corner...

So I took a bit off the high point at the opposite corner ...

The sled on the rails

... and then took off the side rails and did it all again, much lower this time.  That did the trick and now I've started flattening in earnest!

I'm finding that I can do 10 passes at a time.  It's a pretty big bit (1" straight Diablo) and I don't want the motor to get too hot.  Plus, holding the trigger down means I have to grip it really hard and after 10 passes, I need to un-cramp.

Rails down and starting in earnest

The fallout...

... is immense!

It's leaving behind these little ridges, which some people seem to think you just leave to give the surface a bit of texture to hold your work.  But I don't think I'd be able to stand it!  Once the router passes are done, I think I'll go back with a sander and smooth it off.

But one step at a time.  The lesson I'm learning from this project is patience.  Every time I pick up a tool, I want to race to the ending somehow, but I'm trying to slow it all down and just focus on one thing then another.  No cutting corners.  There's no deadline.