Gardening

 

 

New Book: Free-Range Chicken Gardens by Jessi Bloom

Wednesday, January 18th, 2012

They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, and while I’m admittedly biased in this case — that’s a real-life Garden Coop chicken coop in the background of the cover shot! — garden designer Jessi Bloom’s new book Free-Range Chicken Gardens is as lush and inspiring as the chicken paradise featured on the front.

Enter to win a free copy, plus other chicken stuff. See details below.

The premise of the book is simple: how do you best integrate chickens into a backyard vegetable or permaculture garden. Bloom does a wonderful job of showing you how, drawing not only from her own experience as a garden designer and chicken keeper, but also from the experiences of a diverse group of chicken gardeners she profiles throughout the book.

Topics covered include all the basics of keeping backyard chickens plus how to create a plan for a chicken-friendly garden and what plants to include/avoid in your chickens’ day yard. The illustrations are clear. Kate Baldwin’s photos are gorgeous.

Seriously, if I were a chicken, I’d want to live in this book — or at least in one of the gardens featured in this book — one of which is the handiwork of horticulturalist Alana Meyer. Alana’s sumptuous Washington State garden adorns the book’s cover along with the chicken coop she built using The Garden Coop plans and her own two hands.

CONTEST: Enter to Win a Chicken Garden Kit

Through February 17, 2012, the book’s publisher (Timber Press) is running a contest to promote Free-Range Chicken Gardens. One entrant will win a free copy of the book, chicken feed and supplies — even free plans to build your own Garden Coop or Garden Ark chicken coop. An email address is all it takes to enter. Here’s the contest page. Good luck!

Have you read Jessi’s book? Follow her blog? Leave a quick comment and let us know what you think, what you’ve learned, and what you’ve been inspired to do with your garden and chickens.

Tags: Chicken Feed, Sustainability, The Garden Coop, Vegetables
Posted in Books, Food and Nutrition, Gardening | No Comments »

Make It Your Own: Bree’s Garden Ark, Portland, Oregon

Tuesday, August 16th, 2011

This Garden Ark chicken coop was built to fit perfectly over the raised gardening beds.

Bree built her Garden Ark mobile chicken tractor to fit perfectly atop the raised beds in her Portland, Oregon vegetable garden. And she trimmed the skid ends to work as handles. Here are some notes she shared about the project. . .

I have eight garden beds the same dimensions, and my plan is to move the ark along twice a year or thereabouts, fertilizing and composting in place. I tinkered with the dimensions slightly to have it match the footprint of the beds. And I reversed the egg door and double door sides so that the full panels would be on the south and west sides for better weather proofing and optimal chicken viewing.

The plans were great! Thanks so much for such detailed instructions. By the way, I found it much easier to work with the hardware cloth on the roll. I left it on the roll as I laid it out and stapled it, and then cut it after I’d secured enough to know it wasn’t going to start curling up on me. This was especially helpful for the longest stretch of cloth covering the front and top.

Finally, I’m proud to say that as a newly single mum, I did it all myself. Every bit. I had help moving it, and that was it. It really is possible for one woman who is reasonably handy to do this herself.

Thanks to Bree for sharing her ideas for building and personalizing The Garden Ark. If you’ve found this post helpful, let her know in the comments below.

Tags: Mobility, Portland, The Garden Ark, Vegetables
Posted in Gardening, Make It Your Own | 3 Comments »

Compost Cupcake

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

We had to move our “Green Machine” compost bin a few feet to make space for a garden path. When we pulled the black plastic shell away, we were treated to this, well. . . hmmm. The fluffy-white “frosting”  is actually our family’s most plentiful carbonaceous material: shredded junk mail. Dig in!

Tags: Compost
Posted in Gardening, Just for Fun | No Comments »

Growing Gardens’ primer on double-digging and sheet mulching

Wednesday, April 7th, 2010

Great post at Growing Gardens’ blog on how they prepare vegetable beds for their garden installations. They use a combination of double-digging, a method that loosens the soil to a depth of about two feet while incorporating rich compost, and sheet mulching, which involves layering newspaper or cardboard with compost, leaves, straw, and the like.  

We’ve used both methods separately and together in our own veggie gardens with great results. What’s more, the abundance of composted chicken manure we get from our hens makes a super fertilizer to mix into a newly prepared bed. That’s right, it ain’t all about the eggs.

Tags: Compost, Double Dug, Growing Gardens, Manure, Sheet Mulching, Vegetables
Posted in Gardening | No Comments »

Guest article at The Urban Garden Project

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

I’ve got a guest article up at The Urban Garden Project offering seven tips for building a garden-friendly backyard chicken coop. Check it out, then click around The Urban Garden Project site for more tips on backyard gardening, square foot gardening, chickens, and more.

Thanks, Ben, for inviting me to post!

Tags: Cleaning, Fencing, Guest Post, Materials, Mobility, Neighbors, Pests, Predators, The Urban Garden Project, TimberPro UV, Wood
Posted in Coop Construction, Gardening | No Comments »

Living on the edge

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

I’ve been thinking more about the Bjarke Ingels talk I posted about last month. You know, I almost can’t believe this now, but when we were building our first coop, I wanted to tuck it out of the way in a far corner of our yard.

Luckily, a friend of mine who’s into permaculture happened to come by at the right time and suggested that we move it closer to the center instead. He explained that one of the principles of permaculture is that life happens on the edges. When you create edges, as with a garden bed or structure, it opens up new possibilities for viewing, using, and organizing the space.

So don’t hide your coop. Show it off, and see where it leads you next. Think about things like vining plants, flowers, edibles, rainwater catchment, compost bin, tool rack, hammock or sitting area, clothesline, or even housing for other animals. Have any edgy ideas to share?

Tags: Location, Permaculture, The Garden Coop
Posted in Coop Aesthetics, Gardening | 2 Comments »

Growing greens in the chicken yard

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009

While we feed our chickens a high-quality organic feed, we also like to make sure that they get plenty of greens and grass. They love grazing, and fresh greens improve the amount of vitimins in the eggs as well as the fatty acid profile of the yolks. Yet it took just a few days for our flock of 8 to completely denude their daytime grazing yard, a 200-or-so-square-foot fenced area next to The Garden Coop. (more…)

Tags: Chicken Feed
Posted in Feed and Grazing, Gardening | 2 Comments »