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Circular chicken tractor mandala gardens - another way for chickens to help in the garden.

 
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I posted about my chicken tractor mandala garden on my blog here





I first found out about this way of mandala gardening from Linda Woodrow’s The Permaculture Home Garden She provides a design for a complete system that involves fruit trees, wild animal habitat, annual vegetable beds, and chook fodder plantings, with chickens being rotated around in a homemade chook dome. It all fits together so beautifully, with each element benefiting another, and it inspires me to grow food in this way.

I am in a colder climate (zone 8b/9a) with less sun in winter, with limited flat land, and am working on my own way of doing this that’s suited to my land and climate.

Here is a video from a warmer climate than mine, about their chook dome mandala garden:


The rest of my blog post about my experience gardening this way can be read here.
 
Kate Downham
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Location: Tasmania
1841
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Yesterday I moved the chickens on to their next bed.

Today I was reminded of another benefit of this way of gardening - chickens find potatoes!

The chickens seem to find hidden potatoes that I didn't know about with their scratching and searching behaviour. The potatoes end up on the surface of the mulch.

Not only did the chickens give me free potatoes, they have also helped to reduce disease pressure from the potatoes hiding in the same spot year after year.

Thank you chickens!
 
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Hi Kate!
I’m excited to find your post, and also your blog link, as I too am a great fan of Linda Woodrow and her awesome systems.

How has it been going for you after a year? Are you still working on the same system, or have you adapted it further? Also, about how big are your beds?

I’m currently trying to design an adaptation of the Woodrow system as described in The Permaculture Home Garden (a 12 bed rotation where the chooks move every 2 weeks) to suit the location I’m in. Despite being on almost 2 acres, I just don’t have enough space for that many beds without clearing trees, which I don’t want to do. So, I’m working around the trees, on a south facing slope (in the Southern Hemisphere, so its the shaded slope), and also in an area where any plants have a lot of pressure from Kangaroos, possums, wombats, cockatoos and other parrots etc.

So, because of all this I’m looking at creating 6 beds of approximately 4m diameter, that are enclosed in fox proof/snake proof mesh up to about 2m high (on star pickets) with a tee tree pole dome over the top (we have lots of very tall tee tree) covered in larger chicken wire or preferably a heavy weight netting (so long as the birds can’t get tangled in it).

The idea is that I will move the chickens from one ‘roundhouse’ (as I’m calling them) to the next every month, and each one will keep the chooks in (when they’re in there), and everyone else out (all the time).
So the chooks and produce are both protected.

This is similar to the design Linda Woodrow is using now (info via her blog), as she had to stop using a moving chook dome due to the resurgence of native animals on her property after many years of restoring the forest. She just couldn’t compete for the harvest. I Also like the idea of only moving the chooks monthly as it allows me to plant to a lunar calendar. And I’m not sure I’ve got the capacity to manage planting out every fortnight!

We have quite a few dead trees to clear up, are on very poor clay (little top soil- the area was mined for gold) and are on a slope, so I’m thinking of putting the wood down on the beds first as a bit of a mini Hugel, and also to level it up a bit. Sort of like you do with a keyhole garden - wood down the bottom, then layer browns and greens. Ive got A LOT of leaves, and access to horse manure. So I’ll make the beds raised on all that, with wood chip pathways down the middle and plant it out with chook weeds (dandelion, chick weed, milk thistle, plantain, kale etc) and let the girls work it over a couple of times before I put in seedlings.

At least, that is the plan!

I guess it depends on how hard it ends up being to put those low hulgel chook roundhouses together.

Anyway, so that’s my project at the moment, and I just wanted to share my particular adaptation!

Thanks for the info on the tarp cover to keep the chickens dry and happy. That’s the bit I’m most worried about, but I gather I can move the tarp to the next roundhouse when I move the chooks. We’re in a temperate climate here but it does get frosty in winter and roasting in summer (and sometimes also randomly cold in summer and hot in winter just to keep things interesting).

Cheers, Caitlin.

 
Kate Downham
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Location: Tasmania
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The chicken tractor system is going really well. I’ve expanded it to another area, which is sloping, so I am trying to make two slightly terraced levels with three circular beds on each level, so I now have 14 circular beds in total. My beds are around 4 metres in size each.

For both of these areas, I’ve been able to enclose each of them in a 50 metre length of electric poultry net, which keeps the wallabies out when it’s tight and zapped with a strong solar energiser, and keeps almost all the possums out in the same conditions.

Now that I essentially have a 2 mandala system, I can work more on putting perennial feed plants and annual chook fodder into the rotations to reduce brought-in feed. It will still take some time to figure out the best plants for my climate for this though, and how to manage it all when some seasons there is a lot more to be planted than other ones.

One ‘happy accident’ with the system has been the wild rocket/arugula that I started off in one bed thinking it would be annual - every time the chickens go on to the bed, they eat the rocket down, and then it comes up again really nicely within a few weeks, so there’s this fast-growing supply of tasty perennial rocket that gets fertilised and weeded every time the chickens go over it.

Your idea of having individual enclosures for both chickens and plants sounds like a good idea. I’ve wondered about that myself, as wildlife-proofing is a big thing to think about here too. The 2 metre height of your idea sounds good, because I can’t imagine crouching down gardening in a chook dome for long. One thing I can think of that would change would be the way that you plant the beds out - instead of having the most-picked plants around the edges of the dome like in Linda’s book and the system that I use, you might have a keyhole path through the middle and have the most-picked plants right next to that, or to figure out if a different system of paths works well for you. I think she also uses the edges of her enclosures to grow climbing plants too.

Incorporating hugelkultur into it as well sounds like a great idea! Between that and the chickens you will have beautiful soil and a productive garden. I’d be keen to see photos and a progress update as you go - please feel free to share it in this thread or elsewhere on Permies.
 
Caitlin Mac Shim
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Thanks so much for your reply Kate, that’s so interesting! Good to know the electric netting is working for you... I’m planning on having muskoveys rotating through a few areas and will be relying on electric netting keeping them in and foxes out during the day. Some wing feather clipping will most likely be in order too I reckon.
I’m impressed you are now managing 14 beds. That’s heaps. I hope I’ll be able to grow enough for our family (5 adults and a 3yr old) in the 6 beds, but will have to see how I go. There might be a couple more places I could fit in another if I really squeeze it in, but my feeling is those spots will most likely be too shady.
Given we only have 6 beds, I’m going to be growing the chook fodder around the outside of each roundhouse - imagine the roundhouse, surrounded by a ring of woodchip path, followed by a ring of dwarf fruit trees (on the southern side where they fit) and chook fodder. So I still have to chop it and chuck it to the chooks but at least it’s  close by. I just don’t want to loose more bed space to chook fodder...so it’s a compromise. Not as elegant as Linda’s true system though - one day I hope to have a space to try it out for real!
Also, my beds aren’t in a lovely circle. They’re strung out down the slope in the only patch of sunlight I’ve got! So lots of walking up and down the hill for me.

You mentioned access within the beds. Yep, because of the ‘fence’ of the roundhouse, access is from a keyhole path down the centre, with a shorter cross path in the middle. I imagine a 3m long path down the dead centre (stopping 1m from the opposite edge) and then a 2m long path crossing at the centre (stopping 1m from each edge). Then from most of the bed it’s a 1m reach max, with a couple of awkward areas that will need stepping stones. It’s a bit weird to explain but I’ll see how it goes and add more path if I absolutely have to. I don’t want to lose bed to the path but am trying to be philosophical about it and calling the woodchip paths my free range worm habitat lol. Actually depending on how deep the beds get I might try using straw bales for the paths as the worms would like them even better. And maybe I can use it to mulch the beds with after they’re planted every 6 months and replace with new ones. I’ve kind of got an idea of shaping the beds like you do with a keyhole, so they’re on a slight rise to the edge and easier to reach.

I’ll Definitely take photos as I go. First step the other day was cutting down some old dead trees (they weren’t big enough to be housing anything thankfully) and making some giant bull ants furious. I guess in truth they were housing the bull ants. Well the roots were anyway. I wish I had the chickens now to get them on to the bull ants. These guys were about an inch and a half long. Terrifying.

For chook fodder, I have had great success growing amaranth here in the melbourne area. It produces a LoT if seed and greens also. I’m sure you’ve probably tried it already, but thought I’d mention anyway. Otherwise I find the easiest chook food to grow is weeds lol - dandelion and chick weed and cleavers especially. Things that grow themselves and produce lots of seed like silverbeet and kale. I don’t know about a legume but maybe pidgin pea (although I haven’t tried this).
Best of luck with it and let me know what chook fodders you try and how they go. Thanks for sharing all the info!
 
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