Chicken Tunnels

Sooooo..........our gardening planning has begun. Today, hubby and I had our first conversation about next years garden. Right now, as most of you know that every year we move the chickens and turkeys to our garden for wintering. They are working the soil and fertilizing it for next year. We also use our goat poo in our compost pile to make rich compost that is added to the soil in the spring.

 

We have a pretty big garden that is over 3500 sq ft. with very nice soil but our problem is that weeds also love our soil!!! We are not spring chickens anymore so getting down and weeding the garden is not easy. So in order to keep the weeds down we are looking for ways to still plant a traditional garden but to have more weed control. Last year we tried boxes but with no rain, they just dried out and blew all over, same 

with newspaper. Also, hay and straw are not an option as I have asthma & hay-fever and molding hay sets off my asthma something fierce. 

My chickens and turkeys love being in the garden, they are always trying to sneak in for dust bathing and insect hunting. Rarely, do they eat too much of my crops, but love to get snacks of spinach, lettuce or tomatoes. Those are their favorites and I always plant extra just for them. 

This year, I want to try chicken tunnels to see if they can do the weeding for me and keep my poultry happy by letting them in the garden, too! What I'm thinking is to run a long tunnel semi permanently along the back of the garden and then make a couple of smaller portable tunnel rows. We would have to make close-able openings every 3 ft for the portable tunnels to connect to the main tunnel. I was thinking the portable tunnels could be 8 ft long and we could hook 3 of them together to make the row. They need to be sturdy but fairly lightweight so that I could move them by myself. 

Anyway, this will be a project that I will be researching and engineering all winter with hubby. Can't wait to see what we come up with come spring.