The chook house was moved

Please note the title. It was moved. I did not move it, in fact, I wasn't even in the garden. Tim and Cameron moved it. Last time though I was in the garden and I did help move it (though Tim and Nathan did most of the work). I wish I had gone. I would have done those fussy, girly things that always smooth the way. As it was, it was a busy weekend and so late on the Saturday afternoon the boys manhandled, prodded, dragged and forced it across to the next two beds. Then dark descended, they got in the car, drove it up the garden driveway and shined the lights on their wobbly structure. A few judicious pulls and then they hopped in the car and came home for dinner. Who knows what the chickens thought!

"Thanks for moving the shed", "No problem". However, the next morning, nice and early, Tim was up and back down the garden. As I finished my coffee and Sunday morning newspaper he arrived home, somewhat relieved to tell me the fox hadn't got into the many gaping holes left over from the previous nights' moving. Later in the day, we both went down and tidied up a bit - levelled the beds so their house would sit flat, sewed up a few more holes in the chicken wire, moved the hay bales into the new spot. For the next week or so, it took on a bit of lean until Tim had another spare moment and then he braced the structure a bit more.

You can see the two beds where it had previously sat. There's still a bit of hay scattered around and the ground has been turned over many times by those restless creatures. Probably the worms have gone but the soil has been fed and the weeds and couch have been dug up.

Here's the new front door, facing the other way. I read somewhere that chickens don't like being disturbed. Ours haven't complained in ways that I understand. I feed them organic grains, lots of greenery from the garden and almost all our fruit & vegetable scraps (lovingly transported down to the garden for them). The worms and ducks do get some of the peelings. Worms don't eat much and the ducks get to free range our home garden (at least some of the time) so as a compensatory mechanism I spoil the chickens. So far, despite the 6 monthly relocation experience, they seem pretty happy.

You can also see that I harvested all the pumpkins and built a vine mountain for the chooks to rake through. They climbed up on top of it at first but seemed disturbed by the size of it and then left it alone to do it's usual job of rotting down.

Then, while I was down in the garden I took these photos to mark the progress of the winter greens.

So, I now have two beds growing food for the family, two beds of chook house, and four empty beds - three will have green manure sown for the winter and one will receive the root crops - onions, garlic for now - later the rest - carrots, beets, turnips etc.

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