Tilling the Garden on a Rainy Day

Today it rained yet again.  August has been one for the record books in terms of rainfall.  I am a little discouraged because I can't possibly pull up rows and plant the fall garden because the garden is muddier than its ever been.  The weeds have taken advantage of the situation and have grown tall and lush.  It may be my imagination, but as we walk to the barn to milk the cows, I think I can hear the weeds mocking me, reveling in their apparent victory over me while claiming the area reserved for edible crops.  It is a sad state of affairs.

When weeds take over

I am not one to give up easily.  Russ was in from college and I enlisted his help on an experiment.  I have no idea if this is going to work or not, but I'm going to give it a try and report back to you after a couple of weeks.  Russ and I erected two cattle panels across the weed-infested part of the garden and secured them with t-posts.

Putting up a cross fence

When I first thought of this idea, I first thought of putting the goats in there, but putting goats in the overgrown part of the garden would require moving them in and out daily since we're milking Annie (momma goat) and also sharing the milk with Darla and Jane (two of her kids).  I don't have a gate and it would be too much work to put a garden gate to the pasture right now.  Maybe later.

My idea involves chickens.  I decided to put some chickens in the garden and allow them to till it up for a couple of weeks until I could get in there and plant.  I threw some rice near the garden as you see below and as they ate, I caught 15 hens and threw them into the overgrown portion of garden. This will be their new home for a couple of weeks while they work the garden for me.  I made a couple of make-shift nesting boxes for their egg-laying out of old buckets.  Russ and I had to place some hog panels against the cattle panels since the openings were smaller and chickens were escaping through the holes into the productive part of the garden.  I don't want them scratching up our sweet potatoes and peanuts!

Nesting boxes in the garden area

I have a big tarp laid out on the ground in this weedy section, too, hoping to kill all weeds underneath it due to lack of sunshine.  You can see the imprint underneath the tarp of the old rows from the spring garden.  The furrows catch and hold rainwater and that will be the hens' water trough for a while until there's no standing water.

Water for the chickens

The chickens were very confused and nervous at first within the confines of their new garden home. They bunched together nervously near the fence, looking at their buddies in the pasture, clucking wildly.  When chickens get nervous, they stop laying eggs.  The first day we put the hens in the garden, we collected exactly ZERO eggs.  I knew this would happen.

But then, they seemed to settle down and began to do what chickens do - SCRATCH.  They first began to scratch in a big pile of composted cow manure that I throw over the fence, alternated with cardboard.  I expect this area to be really cleaned out in no time.

Additionally, I throw rice over the fence for them to eat and they scratch through the weeds, seeking for and finding the rice while scratching roots and eating bugs and grass.  Of course while they are tilling the garden, they are also pooping and this is fertilizing the garden area.  I may throw an additional 5 "tillers" into the garden, because I'm impatient.  I'll post pictures of the chicken-tilled area of the garden in a couple of weeks and we will compare the "before" and "after" shots to see if this experiment was a rousing success or a failure.