The Chicken Tractor

We are housing our 6 chickens in a second hand chicken tractor. Matt is in the process of building a permanent coop, but you know how things are, it's taking a while. :)

Our wonderful tractor. So glad we were able to purchase one second hand from a friend. It was less than half the price of a new one and in excellent condition.

The plan is to have the orchard area fenced off so the chooks can free range while being safe from the dogs (there has already been an incident, but we won't go into that) and the permanent coop will have a little chicken door we can open from the inside to let them out into the orchard (once we cage the trees and build the fence of course).

 

The girls working over our horribly grassy and overgrown veg patch. The a-frame to the left is the half-built permanent coop with the orchard area behind waiting to be fenced.

Until then they are in the tractor being let out to roam around for a couple of hours in the afternoons once the dogs have been put away. We've moved the tractor onto the veg patch so they can get rid of all the grass and plant remnants and get it ready for more planting. Once they've done their bit we'll move them onto another section of overgrown veg patch and plant out where they were. We'll keep moving them around, following their progress through the garden with seedlings and directly sown seeds. Hopefully this will prove more successful than our last lot of vegie gardening which was an abysmal failure!

 The area where the tractor was for about 2 weeks. Grass is gone and the soil has been turned over and full of valuable chook poo. We've now sheet mulched and are waiting for seedlings to be ready to transplant.