{"id":5340,"date":"2020-06-05T07:30:57","date_gmt":"2020-06-04T23:30:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/?p=5340"},"modified":"2020-06-04T20:23:41","modified_gmt":"2020-06-04T12:23:41","slug":"gargoyle-almond-chickens-egg-grapevine-blogjune-2020-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/2020\/06\/05\/gargoyle-almond-chickens-egg-grapevine-blogjune-2020-5\/","title":{"rendered":"Gargoyle, almond, chickens, egg, grapevine. BlogJune 2020\/5"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Part of the new chookyard. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

No more bending for eggs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other people adopted pandemic puppies or pandemic kittens, but I finally accepted that the arrangement I had for my chooks for 20 years was really not so clever, even though it sounded really, really ingenious. I held on to the theory of it way longer than I should have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With a bit of help I moved the chooks and had their enclosure rebuilt using mostly materials I already had.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA…<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The old enclosure was on a circular vege garden with a 2 metre radius. One side of the enclosure had a curve following the outer rim of the garden, with the other two sides straight, covering a 1\/3 segment of the circle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The idea was that the chooks dug and poo-ed in their enclosure, then after two months I rotated the whole enclosure around to the next third of the circular garden. The chooks would eat down the plants that had now gone to seed while I would plant the next lot of plants where they had just prepared the bed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

EXCEPT….<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I like to let my chooks roam free. In my small garden, that meant they would eat down my newly-planted veges, jump into the blueberries and eat the new fruit, scratch up the basil in the container gardens…or I would have to leave them behind wire on sunny days when they could be running and climbing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

SO…<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The new enclosure uses the curved frame from the old one on top of a limestone wall and lets the chooks roam under the almonds and feijoas…. but also has a hatch mechanism so that during the day I can let them out to fossick down three sides of my house. Each side is about a metre from the very high fence -line, with a mulberry courtyard and a lemon-tree courtyard along the way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I already had the guinea pig cage to shelter them in the yard, but by putting it on top with an access hole in the floor, and adding a front-facing door, I can now collect the eggs without bending down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Quite a bit of grain-throwing and greens-shaking at the top of the ladder was needed for a couple of days before the chooks would use the new area. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Part of the new chookyard. No more bending for eggs. Other people adopted pandemic puppies or pandemic kittens, but I finally accepted that the arrangement I had for my chooks for 20 years was really not so clever, even though it sounded really, really ingenious. I held on to the theory of it way longer…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"image","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Gargoyle, almond, chickens, egg, grapevine. BlogJune 2020\/5 #blogjune","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[4,463],"class_list":["post-5340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-image","hentry","category-blogjune-2","tag-blogjune","tag-blogjune-3","post_format-post-format-image"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3BXdd-1o8","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5340"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5340\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5353,"href":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5340\/revisions\/5353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}