Our Swank New "Grand Chicken Hotel"

Some of our chickens, staring toward their newly arrived accommodation.

My husband has kept chickens since we moved out into the country more than six years ago, but we have never had a permanent structure for them. He has, over the years, built them several shelters out of lumber, small-gauge wire fence and blue tarps, around which he stacks straw bales in the winter for protection from wind and cold.

These have worked well enough most of the time, although they aren't very roomy in winter, and don't provide any protection from gnats in early summer, which can kill chickens in bad years (we lost three during this year's wet, gnat-filled May, which was really sad and upsetting).

So we resolved to spend the money to get a better structure for them before winter came. I contacted a local builder who has listed a number of small chicken sheds on Craigslist and he built us one to order in a "mini-barn" style and delivered it to us the other day.

The new chicken shed arrives by truck...

...is backed up to the right location...

...is unloaded...

...and is set in place. Puppy looks on approvingly.

A new grand chicken hotel worthy of our noble birds. The screen door can be locked to keep out foxes, etc., while the outer door can be left open for ventilation until the very coldest (or gnattiest) days.

There are two other windows, which can also be opened for ventilation, four nesting boxes and two roosting bars.

A thick layer of wood chips makes it a soft place for the inhabitants.

And a closeable run door affords entry to the fenced-in chicken run.

A very nice addition to our Kitchen Garden area.

Our chickens were a bit suspicious of the new shed for a few days, but they have started making short incursions into their new accommodations and have already laid a few eggs in there. I think they will be happy in their new digs, and we feel better, now that we are able to provide them with a nicer home where they can be snug in winter and safe from gnats and larger predators.

Thanks for reading! -Beth

The Kitchen Garden: 2014

I haven't posted much this summer about our Kitchen Garden. It's largely my husband's domain, although I designed and laid out the garden, and I help him by starting seeds occasionally, replenishing the mulch in the paths and the compost in the beds, plus other random tasks. But I confess that I'm usually so much more enchanted with the state of my flowers in bloom that I've largely neglected to post photos of the vegetables that we've grown.

Here are a few photos of our vegetable bounty from the last month or two:

A photo from back in July of the "greens" section of the Kitchen Garden: onions, celery, cabbage, chard, Brussels sprouts and carrots in the center.

Okra in August. This usually grows pretty well for us (and it's delicious pan-fried in oil with onions and curry powder), but this year we allowed it to be shaded out by the numerous self-seeded sunflowers that grew up around the okra plants (so pretty!), and unfortunately the plants didn't bear much. We'll know better next year: Okra like sunshine!

Pumpkins and watermelons last month.

Potatoes harvested in late August.

When we pulled out the superfluous sunflowers, we found this hoard of old cucumbers that my son had grown and left in a pile, which we thought was funny.

Eggplant.

Some beautiful tomatoes.

The peppers did very well this year too.

Pumpkins against a backdrop of sweet corn gone over. We'll let the corn stalks stand
over winter to provide some windbreak for the chicken pen behind (to the south).

Winter squash.

Rainbow-colored chard. Quite pretty, I think.

A photo of the overall layout of the Kitchen Garden, taken in July. The front two rows (eight beds) are for cutting flowers (my domain), although I believe that I'm going to downsize next spring, using only the first four beds on the left. I just don't need that many flowers, and I know I can grow them more efficiently (and with less work) in half the space. I'll have fun over winter re-designing these beds on paper and deciding which flowers I like best for cutting.

My husband and I are still learning much about vegetable growing, and we make mistakes all the time. But I believe that we're becoming more knowledgeable each year, and the Kitchen Garden improves each season.

Thanks for reading! -Beth

Recap of 2013 in my Gardens (Part 2)

In my last post, I wrote about finally getting the gazebo I had been dreaming about for the past five years, but there were two other major garden improvements that I made progress toward in 2013, one of which was:

The Kitchen Garden

We (mostly my husband) had attempted to plant a large garden at the top of our field area since 2009, but each year it had been less than successful. The area (fairly large, about 30' by 60') tends to be soggy after rain, since water from about a quarter of our property pools there. My husband had planted a typical midwestern vegetable garden, planting in rows, which he would till between and hoe among to remove weeds. But because of the dampness, he often would not be able to use the tiller or hoe during the often-wet month of June, so by July the whole garden would be waist-high in weeds. Two years in a row we actually just mowed down the whole thing in August, it was that bad. 

The vegetable garden back in 2011.
This is after hours of pulling out grass, which you can still
see surrounding the sweet corn, at far left.

So I decided we needed to change things. The vegetable garden is mostly my husband's domain, and he was quite dubious about my idea to plant in slightly-raised beds outlined by lumber and surrounded by mulched paths, but he agreed that we needed to try something different.

In Fall 2012, my husband tilled the entire area and leveled it with his tractor. Then our very kind neighbor dug post holes (our handyman had tried to do this, but the drought that year had rendered the ground impregnable, so our neighbor kindly brought over his tractor and attached post-hole digger), so that we could erect the six posts to make our chicken enclosure to protect them from marauding foxes. On the north side of the chicken enclosure, I laid out 4"x4" lumber that our handyman had cut into a large number of 4-foot, 6-foot and other lengths, to form a series of about 30 beds of various sizes and shapes. My husband and I then used bolts to attach the lumber. That was all we managed to do before the ground froze in 2012.

The new layout, before paths mulched, beds filled or
drainage trench dug along left and front sides.

In May of this year, after the stress fracture in my right leg healed and I was able to work in the garden again, I mulched the paths between the beds (it took about four pickup truck loads of free mulch from the local landfill) and filled the beds with a little dirt and mostly with compost (also from the landfill, three truck loads). 

Also, after consulting with a field tiling expert about the waterlogging, who would have charged me at least a $1,000 to dig a swale or a tiled trench, I decided to dig a shallow trench myself and put plastic tile tubing and gravel in there. I dug a 90-foot long trench along the west and north sides of the garden, about one foot deep and one foot wide, putting the dirt in some of the garden beds. Then I laid tile (perforated drainage tubing) from the home improvement store (only about $25 for a 100-foot long tube) and bagged gravel (about 100 bags at a total cost of about $200). This was a lot of work, but it seems to be working fairly well, essentially raising the entire level of the garden by a foot so that the water no longer pools there.

It was June by the time the garden was completely ready to be planted, but even though we didn't get most of the vegetables planted until mid-June, we still had a very nice harvest. Below is a closeup detail of the layout of the garden:

Just above (north of) the chicken enclosure is a wood bench with climbing roses 'New Dawn' planted on either side (along with some self-seeded sunflowers this year). The six large beds had large-area vegetables such as corn, potatoes, squash and watermelons, as well as perennial asparagus and a gooseberry bush in the lower left bed. The annual vegetables will be rotated among the beds each year.

The next tier up of eight smaller rectangles will be used for strawberries, and our two children each had a bed for flowers or whatever they wanted to grow. And a few beds were used for zucchini, okra, Brussels sprouts, cabbages (which did especially well) and leeks.

The third tier, which consists of two ornamental-shaped bed layouts, were used for tomatoes and peppers on the right, and carrots, celery, spinach, kale and eggplants on the left.

And the highest tier of eight rectangular beds, at the entrance to the garden, were reserved for my cutting flowers. I can never make myself cut flowers for inside the house if I have to cut them from a bed near the house, so I planted these beds with annuals and perennials for cutting. I grew iris, tulips, zinnia, bachelor buttons, cosmos, love-in-a-mist, dahlias, phlox, mums, ox-eye and shasta daisies, wallflowers, carnations, delphiniums, larkspur, snapdragons, achillea, painted daisies, gaillardia, coreopsis and brown-eyed susans. I'll decide which flowers I like cutting the most and plant more of them next year, and may move some of the perennials that don't cut as well.

Cutting flower beds.

Late summer, taken from the garden entrance.

We need to put more mulch on the paths and perhaps a bit more compost in the beds next year, but all in all, I think the garden turned out quite successfully in its first year, despite the 2013 drought. Even my husband admitted that the new garden was much easier to maintain than the old row-planted garden: the mulched paths allow access even after heavy rain, the 4"x4" lumber is comfortable to kneel upon while planting and weeding, and the outlined beds reduce the area that weeds can take over. This was perhaps our best improvement of 2013.

My next post will cover the final main garden improvement of 2013, the North Border.