The weed opportunity

"We don't have a weed problem, we have a weed opportunity."  

The Joneses

Chooks like grain, and grain is not always practical to grow in a domestic situation.  Sure we're planning to plant some native grasses for seed along the edge of the chicken coop when we finally get around to building it, but in the interim we're buying in a sack of grain and pellets every few months to supplement the girls free range diet.  Buying in anything takes energy and money, so this is a good place to apply your mind to closing the loop in your own garden.

Well, remember our chicken / legume guild from a few weeks back?  The idea was to build up our soil in the front yard using the power of the almighty legume, while also using the plants as fodder for the chooks.  The chooks in turn would eat / scratch / aerate the piles of legume plants to build up our soil at the side of our property, while the discarded plants keep the dust down and gradually turn themselves into soil.  (This is covered in more detail  in this blog entry).  So far this experiment is going well.

Anyway it's been raining which means the soil is moist and weeds are easy to get out.  Our prospective vegie patch is still full of weeds, so it's been a good time to pull some out and add to our "weed / chicken guild".  We thought we'd post a few photos.

Weeds in bed with the lilli pillis and broad beans. Yum.

The girls at work in under 30 seconds.  Everyone's happy.

Our chickens (Marjorie, Penny & new edition Ethel) love weeds so there's none in our back yard.  In fact, if we didn't have the front yard fenced off from the girls, we'd have no weeds left for them at all.  How tragic that would be.