permaculture

Chook heaven

A friend texted me this evening to alert me to Costa's Garden Odyssey, which had a segment on chook domes in a mandala garden at Purple Pear Organics in the Hunter Valley. The garden looked fabulous; it followed the Linda Woodrow design, but didn't seem to have the 1-m strips round the edge of each circle. Also, their gardens were much neater and tidier than mine!

Our mandalas have gone wild in the recent rain, and last weekend we moved one of the domes onto an extremely verdant circle. Bruce wasn't sure that the chooks would cope, he also thought they'd escape as we lifted the dome up to get it over all the plants. Happily, his fears were groundless. The chooks were so excited by all the greenery that they plunged straight into it, apparently with no thought of escaping, although one did get stuck between the wire of the dome and the plants pressing against it, so I had to go in and knock over a few plants to free it. Within days, the chooks had stripped all the leaves and the cirle is now looking quite bare. Here are some photos of the chooks when we first moved the dome, plus me trying to get back out of the dome (the door is just a bit too high for me).

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Small scale and square!

Over the years, several people have commented that they like the mandala system but don't have room to set it up. Well, here's a solution. The friend who first put me on to Linda Woodrow's book has set up a mini-system in the back yard of his townhouse in Canberra. He likes straight lines, so has created a set of squares in a patchwork layout, rather than a circle (he did the same when he was running a full-size system, using a dome with a square base).  At present he is running the system with two chooks - a bantam and a young standard barnyard chook that will grow to a medium size - but is thinking of downsizing to a single chook. 

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Foxes, protection and potting mix

To answer the many questions from Janelle:

• Foxes - The dome is not fox proof. Last year we lost several chooks one night - a fox got in through the lid of the old oil drum we were using as a nesting box and yanked out 3 or 4 chicks. At the time, the dome was parked at the far end of the garden (away from the mandalas and way past the end of the dog's running chain). We moved the dome closer to the mandalas and extended Woody's running chain, and have had no more problems. So, we think that the only thing keeping foxes at bay is the dog.

• Protection - I used to worry a lot about the chooks not having enough protection from the weather, and I put up some shade cloth around the base of the original dome, but now they have very little protection and must be reasonably happy because they are producing lots of eggs.
  The flatter, geodesic dome works better for us than the original design - the flatter top makes it easier to give the chooks protection with the tarpaulin that goes over the top. We extend that tarpaulin to the ground on the side where the wind usually comes from, we also spray them with water when it gets really hot. I have thought of experimenting with sacks filled with straw, to make some sort of cover for the top, but haven't got round to that yet.

• Spreading out scraps  - our mandalas are on a gentle slope, so all the material we chuck in ends up in a heap at the bottom. We just pull it all to the middle of the circle and redistribute it before planting.

• Potting mix - I used to make potting mix to Linda's recipe (one third each of compost, sand and worm castings), and her seedraising mix (which I think was pulverised cow manure and sand). However, I've lost my enthusiasm for seed raising, so I buy seedlings from the local farmers market instead (where I can get all sorts of heirloom varieties), and just throw a handful of worm castings into the hole when planting out the seedlings.

Geodesic dome plans needed!

Good to have lots of comments on the blog recently (although I would point out that my name is Hilary, not Denise!). Thanks to Megan for the information about the permaculture course in Canberra - I'm disappointed that I don't have the spare time to attend the course.

The garden is looking great after recent rain. We're harvesting cauliflowers, fantastic broccoli and cabbages, plus masses of feral parsley.

However, the main point of this post is to respond to Donna's comment about the geodesic dome plans, which has disappeared from the web. It's several years since I built my dome, and I no longer have the print out of the instructions from Hall's Creek. A friend built a slightly smaller dome at the same time (and eventually passed his dome on to us) - but he too discarded the instructions. So, if anyone out there can help, it would be great to get a copy of the plans.

Geodesic dome

There's been some nice feedback on the blog in response to the Earth Garden article. Jan asked about the design of the geodesic dome. Since this is something people often ask about, here's a link to the Hall Creek Farm site, which is where I found the instructions for building the dome (after putting 'geodesic chook dome' into Google!). The site gives instructions for many different sizes of dome, from 10 to 30 metres squared.

The instructions are very detailed, but it's a good idea to have a picture of what the completed dome should look like on hand when building it. This will help in visualing how the bits of polypipe should fit together. We failed to do this, and various members of the dome-building party nearly came to blows! Luckily, it all ended happily, and the geodesic dome has been fantastic, really strong and much easier to move.

One mistake I didn't mention in the Earth Garden article was my decision to plant mint in the edge guild of the first mandala. At the time I was trying to get rid of an annoying weed that kept appearing in that part of the garden - a weed that I later identified as comfrey, something I now treasure and am doing my best to encourage! Two of the three sorts of mint I planted in the edge guild really took off. They just about killed off the comfrey, and formed a huge mat of mint that was invading the asparagus patch and the adjacent circle. Today I attacked it with a large hoe and ripped the whole lot out (or at least all that I could see). I plan to keep an eye on it over the coming weeks, and get rid of any mint plant that appears, and hope that the few remaining bits of comfrey root bounce back.

Chook escapes

We've had lots of escaping chooks over the past couple of weeks, mostly due to the wire around the base of the two domes either coming loose or falling apart. The main cause of this is our dog Woody, who spends a lot of his time trying to get into the domes. He's after the food scraps rather than the chooks (if they escape he takes no notice of them).

First, much of the netting around the main dome came loose and a couple of the smaller chooks repeated got out. They made a huge mess of the no-dig garden I had carefully created around the edge of the second mandala. We fixed up that dome, but at the weekend Woody made a hole in the netting round the second dome. The black rooster got out and decided to attack the brown rooster in the main dome. In trying to pick a fight he managed to get his head stuck through the wire. Luckily, my nephew was in the garden and was able to pull the black rooster out of harm's way before there was too much damage.

We fixed up that hole, but obviously not well enough, because this morning we found the black rooster, the mother hen and seven little chicks running around the back yard. Unfortunately I had to go to work, so had to leave Bruce to chase the rooster round the yard with a fishing net (I understand he was out there for some time before he caught the beast).

Photo of second dome

Here's the new dome, complete with Orpington-cross rooster (the broody hen and the new Orpington-Barnveld hen are jostling it out in the old oil drum at that back of the dome that serves as a nesting box). In the foreground you can see some of the many feral lettuces that have popped up in recent weeks, and a pest-guard bag that is protecting a small silverbeet, which would otherwise get shredded by our resident sparrows.

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Second dome

This weekend it was too cold and windy to go out taking photos of the garden. However, we did buy a new chook, a beautiful golden-coloured Orpington/Barnveld cross. Rather than put her in the main dome, where she'd be at the bottom of the pecking order, we've given her a home in the second dome, which a friend gave us a few months ago. Like our orginal, the new dome is a geodesic polypipe and wire construction, but it's a bit smaller than ours, and has a much more robustly constructed door. We put the new chook in there and gave her the Orpington cross rooster to keep her company. Then we found that one of the other chooks had gone broody, so we moved her in there too, to give her a bit of peace and quiet (in the main dome, the other chooks were sneaking in beside her to lay their eggs). So, in a few weeks we may have a brood of little chicks in there too.

New dome

The chook dome has been getting progressively more bent and decrepit, so this weekend we invited a group of friends over to help take it apart and rebuild it as a geodesic structure, which I found instructions for on the web.

The instructions for measuring and marking the pipe were fine, but when it came to assembling the thing, they proved to be somewhat deficient. Of course, everyone had a different idea about where the piping should go, and things got quite heated (there was even a suggestion at one point that the women should go away and make tea, leaving the men to sort it all out!!!). However, eventually someone had the excellent idea that we should ignore the written instructions, and just make our dome look like the picture, and suddenly it all came right. Here is the brand-new dome ...

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... and here is the dome-building crew (as you can see from the shadows, it was nearly nightfall by the time we finished the framework!).

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Then disaster struck ...

An hour after the photo in the previous post was taken, disaster struck, in the form of a howling gale. One minute we were sitting outside drinking coffee, the next we were struggling to stop the whole dome from taking off (we had foolishly ignored the advice in the book NOT to connect the tarpaulin directly to the dome).

We managed to push the dome back into shape, but it's looking a bit the worse for wear (some of the polypipe is irreversably broken). The chooks seemed totally unphased by the events, even at the height of the gusts, when they were stuck in a small portion at the front of the dome that hadn't been flattened by the wind, all they were interested in was fossicking in the straw!