How not to make a chicken tractor.

After drawing lots of little designs and some larger ones on 1:20 scale with dusty scale rules, squares, and fancy pens from my old building design course which I bombed out of due to having not enough money for beer, I settled on a chicken tractor design that would cover half a veg bed and house four chickens in comfort. I could then rotate the tractor about the plot, keeping grass down, eating weed seeds and bugs, and harrowing the ground for me. I would have two tractors: one for eggs and one for meat. All would be simple, cheap, and easy...

...as long as I knew French and knew that cheap pine shrinks a bit when the weather's dry, which I didn't. I spent too much time explaining what I was after at the local builder's merchant and forgot to ask for untreated wood, and only remembered when I was taking the wood out of the car back on the Island. This meant planing the treated wood off every plank. The wood is pine from the Landes part of France - a vast sandy scrubland - and it grows very fast. This means the wood is sappy and expands with the weather. This means my nice smart coop, once tight as a ship's keel, is now sporting 5mm gaps between the planks! It's taken me weeks as well! I need a drink! I guess that the French aren't bothered about stable building materials - I used "volige", which are planks of wood used as roofing. Wish I'd just bought an "Eggloo" now and joined the trendy chicken set...

Big blisters

We're doing no-dig veggie gardening. This is to keep the top soil where it should be, with all it's micro-organisms and structure that plants find ideal to grow in. Also, the land here is where the ice sheets ended last ice age, so for every kilo of soil you have, you get 2 kilos of stones. As we're having 12 beds each 1.6m by 10m long, plus the 12x24 foot polytunnel, and 10m by 15m soft fruit area and 10 tree beds, I didn't fancy digging for some reason!



Here's our field, marked out ready for the veg beds - at least, the top 10 metre of it is. Rest is going to be grazed by our neighbours cows and sheep until we get the pigs, goats, geese, barley, kale and artichokes in.

K digging. We are digging trenches around the perimeter of each bed to help stop grass from encroaching - the trenches are the size of K's fancy hand-beaten bronze azada-hoe so we only need run it around the edge to keep it clean. Then cardboard goes on top of the grass, followed by manure, then black plastic to make sure the grass is killed off. We're doing this on the potato and squash beds, taking the turf off the pean and bean beds for liming (PH 5 here!), and I am double-digging the root beds. 100% pure daft in the head, me like - the ground is almost solid granite! I'll be a real man when that job's done, with hands like shovels and hair sprouting where it shouldn't.

These days instead of heading to a nice warm office to slip into a coma from sheer boredom, I spend the morning getting covered in brick dust while making loft hatches, or sawdust cutting wood for the fire, then after lunch (cabbage, bread, eggs) K joins me to dig in the freezing mud until we're knackered, then it's tea and cake time, then I get the fire on and we take it in turns to cook some combo of dried peas, potatoes, leeks and garlic for dinner. Then we sit in front of the fire and pretend to read when we're actually nodding off and I wish that I have made some beer three weeks ago.

Thoughts on micro farming.

Kristina's convinced me that we don't need masses of land to feed ourselves, although it would be nice anyway!

I've been looking into the idea of "micro farms", which is an idea to help "third world" people who tend to be a bit skint be less dependant on soya from the USA. You have about a hectare of land and grow everything on it you need, plus extra to sell.

Here's an aerial photo of the field:

Here's my idea based on a 7000m2 field plus a bit of garden:

The red line is the property boundary - this is the plan of "house no.1" as per previous blog entry. We've put an offer in because it's the best one we've seen, and also the first!

Green line is semi-dwarfing fruit trees spaced at 4m intervals with hedging/large species like cherry along the bottom: that's 40 trees in total.

Red arrows are the direction of the rotation.

A: 2 weaner pigs chewing their way through Jerusalem Fartichokes sown last year.

B: Fartichokes growing for pigs the following year.

C: Pasture which has been growing for 3 years, which the pigs will clear when they've finished the fartichokes in the late summer or whenever.

D: Pasture which has been growing for 2 years and is being cut for hay. Should get 10 bales from it based on average yields of 2 tons an acre. Pygmy goats only need 1kg of hay a day.

E: New pasture growing and being nibbled by rabbits and chickens in arks.

F: Spring-sown barley, which will have pasture under-sown so when the barley's taken off, the pasture is already growing ready for the chickens, etc. Based on getting 1750lb malted barley per acre (which is the grain minus 20% for wasteage), I could get 360lb grain, or 6 pints of 3% bitter for every day of the year. Belters.

G: Root crop, which is sown on land that had pigs on last year so it's nicely dug up and manured already. As I will be hoeing like mad here, it will be hopefully weed-free for sowing barley/etc next year. If I sow cabbages 40cm apart in rows 50cm apart I should get 800 plants, and about 900kgs yield if they grow to about 1.5kg each. Cushty. That's the animals fed.

H: Perennial crops like asparagus, hops, etc, and polytunnels for habanero chillies!

I: Our veg beds, based on the normal rotation of potatoes-legumes-brassica-roots.

J: Bees in nice top-bar hives. See http://www.biobees.com/ for info. Definitely getting into this.

K: Soft fruit.

L: Herbs.

M: Pond and wild flowers, etc.

So, every year we could get (with some Divine Intervention on our behalf) 200kgs pig meat, milk and cheese from goats, eggs, chicken, rabbit, honey, more beer than I can drink, more veg than it's possible to eat, bread (if wheat is grown instead of barley?), more fruit than we can eat (cider press for Christmas please Santa), herbs, duck meat (smoked), and a Farmer's Tan. All on less than 2 acres.

This place has a nice old stone gite as well, so might be an earner in summer if we play a "Biologite" card with a veg box, fresh bread, etc, and charge cheap rent.

Three days off and then back to the hunt

Breton working horse - who actually DOES work.

We stayed at a friends farm earlier this week and got some exercise at long last. O and J's place is fantastic: they bought an old dairy farm 15 years ago and have spent their considerable energies doing the place up, running organic veg to the co-op, farming comfrey for their patent fertilisers, wrestling their two kids, heading up an internet organic community of growers, playing in a band, hosting people with learning difficulties, and -I guess- occasionally sleeping. When they moved there, the place was still occupied by ancient Breton types in shawls and clogs, who hand milked their (30) cows, got their wives to dig boulders out of fields after ploughing, etc. Looked a bit more progressive now, but not much!

K sporting a fetching hat in the rhubarb

We repaid their boundless hospitality by weeding and hoeing the rhubarb and drinking all their beer. I was glad to be getting some exercise in the sunshine (in the morning before it got too hot anyway), and have realised that I am completely unfit and will have to suffer some sore muscles while getting up to speed on our own place.

Honey monsters getting ready

We left on the Thursday and then went and looked at 6 houses, all in one day. Must have drove 100 miles all in. All were disappointing, but for me, especially one which was advertised as an old farm with 13 hectares, for E170k. Some prat in the 70s had added a brieze block storey onto an old stone cottage and put the stairs up the outside (imagine going to the loo in the night in winter?), then extended the old stone barns with bare concrete blocks right across the front of the house. Then there was a gigantic steel hangar literally falling down opposite, and the next door neighbour had a shed in the middle of the complex for some reason. What did my head in was the land: absolutely beautiful rolling meadows and woodland that hadn't had a drop of fertiliser or pesticide on them for a decade. If I could take the land and build a wee house on it, it would be perfect. C'est la vie...

O & J's rather nice garden in the early morning

Off to see a smallholder from Pigs in France today to see what she does and doesn't do, then back to the hunt on Monday with another wad of houses to look over. 21 so far and counting...

Day off walking along the Blavet.