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
Maybe you’re already familiar with that classic Permaculture tool known as the Chicken Tractor / Chook Dome system. No? Awright – in a nutshell: In this context, a Chicken Tractor is any structure that can be moved from place to place in a garden with a bunch of chickens housed in it.
The chickens living in the tractor do what chickens are so good at: scratching up the soil and turning it over, making short work of any greenstuff to be found, and spreading their manure the length and breadth of the space available to them (not to mention producing eggs and more chickens). Read More
