Early last December I fearfully snuck a look at what I, through clenched teeth, referred to as my vegetable garden.  The previous June and July I had carefully limed and cultivated the soil in preparation for the warmer temperatures to come (and we’re still waiting).  However, being a serf in the modern feudal lord system of the New Zealand dairy industry, I hadn’t exerted useful effort there in four months.  What met my eyes screamed more for a machete than a hoe and I thought I caught a glimpse of a Mayan ruin poking up above the nettles next to the plum tree, but it also might have been the compost bin.

 I began ticking off options in my head.  I could ask my children to pull the weeds, but to paraphrase a joke I once heard, “How many children with short attention spans does it take to weed a garden?...  Do you want to ride my bike?”  I could ask my wife to weed it but while I’m working she is busy taking care of the house and schooling the children, whom we intend to be significantly more intelligent than the vegetables we hoped to grow.  And while I could add it to my to do list, that meant I’d probably get to it three months later.  Then I remembered a device called a chicken ark or “tractor” (as it is often referred to due to the groundwork that can be accomplished with it) that I had seen in The Complete Guide to Self Sufficiency  by John Seymour.

The chicken “tractor” is basically a small portable chicken coop with an attached run.  The run either sits below the coop or projects off to the side.    The coop provides perches for the hens to roost on at night and a nest box for them to lay their eggs in.  The “tractor” can be moved by one or at most two people to areas of lawns or gardens that need cultivated and or fertilized.  Every time the “tractor” is moved the chickens get a new patch of grass and/or weeds to munch on.  In a way it’s like free range only you won’t have the feathered hooligans scattering your neatly placed mulch across the lawn or feasting on the freshly sprouted peas (I speak from experience).  If left for a long enough period of time the chooks will happily shred, scratch, and plow anything they don’t eat into the ground.  This scratching aerates the soil while working in organic matter rich in nutrients.  The chickens will also scarf up garden pests such as grubs and maggots that turn into annoying fruit and blowflies.  Lastly, anyone who has picked up a frightened hen knows what comes out of the fluffy end (and I’m not referring to eggs).  Chickens have a relatively simple excretory system where the urine is deposited as part of the dung.  This makes poultry manure richest source of nitrogen of all the animal manures according to Back to Basics and The Lincoln Farm Technical Manual.  The dung also contains higher concentrations of phosphorus and potassium making excellent fertilizer is also cultivated into the soil by the scratching hens.

Being short on time my first chicken tractor was formed from a slightly remodeled dog kennel.  An angle iron frame and a roof made from a steel drum made this “tractor” more comparable to an early steam tractor and it weighed about as much.  I moved the “tractor” every two to three days tossing in our kitchen compost for the hens to scratch through and work into the soil as well.  After about a month the garden was sufficiently cleared of weeds for the potatoes to go in.  Having cleared the garden, I moved the “tractor” onto the lawn next.  Not wanting my lawn to end up like a plowed field, I began shifting the “tractor” daily.  This let the hens have a fresh patch of grass every day, but it only left them enough time to scratch up the dead thatch and aerate the soil a bit instead of completely cultivating the area.  The patches where the “tractor” had been looked a bit scruffy at first, but after a rain had washed the nitrogen rich dung into the freshly aerated soil the patches filled in with thicker greener grass than previously had been present.  As a side note:  The hens won’t eat the grass down evenly so mowing is still required but I had to mow less often and my lawn was producing eggs instead of just sitting there looking nice.

Well it’s the end of June now and I have a 200 litre drum full of potatoes sitting in my garage.   The hens are back on the garden cleaning up the stubble, prepping the soil, and eating the wheat that sprung up from the feed they spilled the first time around.  We’ve retired the “steam tractor” and have on order a classy, easily portable, well designed “Ark Medium” from Blue Mountain Coops.  Designed with my own expert input, of course!