January 20, 2013 – 7:00 am
We’ve been wanting to introduce ducks to our integrated animal systems for some time now. We’ve been trying to decide which breed to start with and where they would best fit, so we can maximise the Power of Duck at Milkwood.
Random opportunity seems to have decided for us, for now. Friends down the road are moving on, and needed to find a home for their load of Muscovy ducks – 4 drakes, 4 ducks and a couple of clutches of ducklings. What a fantastic breed they are. They even perch to roost. Read More »
January 3, 2013 – 7:00 am
We’ve been researching egg mobile models for a good while now, in order to figure out how best to get our small (but growing) flock of layers rotating through our paddocks, enjoying fresh pasture and laying eggs aplenty. In the end, as with most things, it came down to working with what we’ve got.
Enter the Chalet. Or the Sherman, depending on who you talk to (in reference to the sherman tank, as this thing is robustly constructed). Nick’s dad Karl kindly built us this construction a few years back, with the intention to put broiler hens in it. Now Floyd has converted it to an egg mobile of sorts, it’s proving an awesome pastured poultry unit. Read More »
November 8, 2012 – 7:00 am
Back when Costa was setting up his verge garden (the one that now beams into Aussie homes every Saturday night on Gardening Australia), he proved that chicken tractors will work just about anywhere, even on the verge.
As part of the preparation of taking his verge from grass to community veggie patch, Costa made a great chicken tractor out of a table with wheels and chicken wire, into which he put his ‘ladies’ when he was outside working on the garden… here he is in the process of taking them back to their run in his backyard one evening. Chickens in the city. Gotta love them.
We can’t wait to see Costa at our Serious Backyard Veggies course later this month…
Azolla is a native water plant with some seriously exciting attributes for anyone looking to develop closed-loop cycles for organic animal feed. It’s high in protein and minerals, fixes nitrogen, is palatable to chickens, pigs, goats, ducks and cows, and can be grown on any closed body of water.
At Milkwood Farm we have many emerging animal production systems, and we’re looking for cost and energy effective ways to produce organic feed for them, using passive and regenerative techniques. Azolla looks like a great tool for us. Read More »
The Gravity Chicken Run is now entering its second winter as one of the gravity-powered (and chicken powered) composting experiments at Milkwood Farm. We’ve made some modifications since last winter, and things are looking good.
As with all on-farm experiments, we’re learning as we go. But egg production is good and, as we continue to tweak things, all-round chicken happiness is high. Read More »
An Egg Mobile is a movable chicken house designed to house laying hens at night, who by day cluck around on open pasture. Joel Salatin made them famous at Polyface Farms, but who invented the concept I do not know.
Egg mobiles are different from chicken tractors in that they are designed as part of a free-range chicken system where the hens can venture well beyond their house to the limits of whatever fences them in (commonly electric netting in a farm setting). They are a darn fine idea. Read More »
February 18, 2012 – 6:00 am
Warning! This post contains chook-talk. Not much of it, as I am not the resident chook fancier of Milkwood, but still a bit.
In short, we have started breeding Blue Langshans, a heritage dual-purpose (ie good eggs and good eating) chickens, hopefully in quantity. Wish us luck. Read More »
Within our gravity chicken run, we needed a way to feed the chickens up off the ground. Mainly so nothing would impede the gradual down-hill slump of mulch we’re hoping this overall design will provide. The answer? Recycled palettes and assorted fabulous junk. Read More »
Within the Gravity Chicken Run, we needed a place for our chickens that was warm in winter and cool in summer. We also wanted it to be super easy to clean, cheap to build, and easy to keep our chickens healthy long term. So we came up with a design called the RawBale Chicken House.
Making a chicken house is a bit like being able to build your own fort all over again. Except now that you’re big, you have more skills to make something that will be not only exciting, but also useful and enduring. Read More »
Gravity and chickens are two of our favorite natural forces at Milkwood. Chickens scratch, poo, give eggs and good company, plus a trillion other benefits. Gravity draws things down. Great it you want stuff to end up down the bottom. Which, in the case of our gravity fed chicken house, we do!
For the past 3 years, our chooks have lived in our geodesic chook dome as it chicken-tractored its way slowly across our hillside. The result has been an emerging forest garden, its soil pecked of grass and ready for mulching and planting with edible trees and ground covers each time we moved the dome.
For this effort we thank our various chickens. Now, it’s high time to build them a permanent chicken run. Design time! Read More »
