Our hen coop has been turned into a recycling plant and the chickens recycle all of our kitchen scrap food and garden waste back into eggs and compost.  It’s really important to us to have a good supply of organic compost that we can use in our garden in the future.  I’m strictly against anything that is not of a natural origin when it comes to feeding my vegetable and fruit plants, at the end of the day its my kids that are eating them and I like to think that they are eating something healthy and nutritious.

We are really new to growing our own fruit and vegetable plants but have been trying to implement natural growing methods and no dig systems using permaculture ideas and techniques.  At the end of the day everything is trial and error here in our garden but this spring we did get a good supply of really fertile soil from our last dig in the chicken composting area.  We also found a load of old pottery pieces, glass bottles and a coin dating back to 1918, as far as garden digging goes its pretty interesting around here!

So the first system is basically a large fenced off area in the chicken coop where the chickens are free to scratch around and eat what they like from the food and garden waste.  They enjoy our scraps and they also enjoy the seeds, weeds, grass etc. we throw in there also.  We continue to do this from spring to spring and then dig out what has broken down into really fertile compost.  As you can imagine the chickens also poop all over the area as they forage and this also adds to the fertility of the compost.  It is the perfect natural solution for the vegetable garden.

We also have a simple pallet made compost area in the vegetable garden where we put all sorts of garden waste in.  This might include our grass clippings, weeds, chicken straw waste from the garage chickens and other food scraps that we don’t give to the hens.

Our hens literally do eat anything and everything, there diet varies massively from the organic GM free pellets we supplement them with the super foods in our smoothie and juice scraps. They are very healthy and all of our rescue hens come back to full health pretty quickly once they arrive due to such a healthy and varied diet.

The best method we have found is the composting area in the chicken pen, this is due to the fact that the compost has additional soil food in it as a result of the constant hen pooping.

Anyway that’s enough about hens, poop and waste, back onto some more interesting subjects soon!  The link to the video is below 🙂

Love and Peace!

Angie xxxx