Friday, August 22, 2008

chookville

I am now a woman with chooks.

Three point of lay Brown Shavers are now settling in to their home in our backyard. The poultry palace isn't quite finished but I used a bit of masking tape in lieu of nails on the last details and Favourite Handyman can make changes later next week when they are in the run fossicking.

They've got water, grit, pellets, wheat, a tray of sand as some kind of dust bath and lots of straw in the coop. I'm keeping them locked into the coop for the first two days to get them used to this being their home.

We didn't have any time in reasonable weather to shift the poultry palace from it's building site to our preferred first spot. So as the forecast this weekend is for rain, more rain, heavy rain and thunder, I expect they will live on the building site for a while after all. I assume they will peck up all of the lawn the run is sitting on and am now thinking it will become another garden spot. It will be fairly exposed to the wind and perhaps I should plant some kind of lowish windbreak after the chooks move on. I don't want anything high as then sun would be lost. Might be useful for low growers like beetroot, lettuce, radishes and some herbs. Straight after chooks would be too rich for carrots I gather - makes them fork. But some more garden would certainly allow me to plant more of the herb seeds that I own but don't yet have enough places for. Perhaps it is what I need to get me breaking up the garden away from just patches around the periphery of the lawn. It would be very fantastic to eventually have lots of curves and a somewhat magical effect of walking round the corners and finding surprising things in the new garden vista. We don't have to have one big rectangle of lawn edged with plants always.

I seem to have misplaced the camera which is even worse negligence on my part than usual. Perhaps there is someone else to blame but I'm not confident on that one.

1 comment:

Sharonnz said...

Congrats on the new arrivals!