Soil Building Part 1 – Chook Labour

The biggest (by far) mistake that I see beginner food gardeners make is underestimating the payoff you get for soil building. Water, sun, the right plant for the season, heritage varieties, pest predators – they are all important, but nothing gives you more harvest for effort than building soil.

And one of the nicest surprises of moving into suburbia is the amount of “waste” just begging to be turned into soil. We use a lot of compost in our garden. A lot. We use worms, anaerobic ferments, and chooks to make it, and of the three the chooks are the heroes. (If you’ve followed me for a while, you would have guessed I’d say that). Eggs are a wonderful yield – this time of year we are giving away several dozen a week. The occasional adolescent rooster for meat is also a yield. But by far the most valuable yield is compost.

We would use a minimum of half a dozen buckets of compost a week in our 30 square metres of raised beds, and another half a dozen wheelbarrow loads a couple of times a year on the perennials. We sieve some and mix with cracker dust for seed and seedling raising, we use some for bedding in the worm farm, and we topdress beds every time we plant into them. And we just delivered a barrow load to the preschool for their vegie garden. If you’ve made compost in a pile, you will realise the volume of organic matter that goes into this quantity of compost. Which is why one of my mantras is that finding sources that are so easy that they hardly count as work is the most productive garden work you will ever do.

Part 2 and Part 3 of this “Soil Building” series will be about our worm and barrel ferment systems, but this Part 1 is about this incarnation of using chooks to process organic matter into soil. Over the last 40 years I must have explored just about every method for employing chooks in a mutually satisfying arrangement. I’ve had chook domes and free range and rotational beds. But this is the first time I’ve had to grapple with managing them in a small, suburban space shared with five other people, and with close neighbours. A rooster crowing at dawn is no longer a joy-filled alarm clock. Smells, flies, cats, dogs, foxes, rats, visual amenity, escapees, the potential for soil contamination – they all take on a different aspect. It’s been fun. But over the last three years we’ve developed a system that is now working very nicely.

The chook raising system here is a deep litter version. It’s very deep litter, so the chooks always have about 30 cm of material that mimics a forest floor ecosystem to scratch through. The chook run is directly onto the ground at the back of the back yard. It has a sturdy wire fence to keep rats out and a mesh roof that supports deciduous and summer annual vines for shade, and for taking advantage of the fertility of the margins. We throw tree prunings too big for the chooks to scratch around up onto the mesh roof to drop their leaves.

It has a raised shelter for roosting, with a corrugated iron roof, and a mesh floor so their droppings fall through it. In rain they shelter under it. It has nesting boxes accessible from outside so the kids can collect the eggs. But the big design feature that makes it work is the gate into the laneway, making it easy to bring organic matter in and compost out.

• There are five households now that tip their kitchen scraps over the gate (and in return are gifted with eggs in the spring egg glut season). Making this easy for them to do has been a big factor in making this all work.
• Every Sunday, we collect several boxes of bruised or damaged fruit and veg, and outside leaves of cauliflowers, lettuces and cabbages, from the local Farmers’ Market, at the same time we do our weekly shop for the things we don’t produce ourselves. The chooks are learning days of the week. I swear they know when it’s Sunday.
• We pick up an average of 5 buckets of spent coffee grounds – around 40 kg – once a week fom the cafè a block away. Dr Stephen Livesley and Sarah Hardgrove from the University of Melbourne have done some really valuable mythbusting research on coffee grounds as a soil amendment. The long and short of it is, spent coffee grounds are gold if they are composted first, and no more than 20% of the compost ingredients.
• We mow the vacant lot down the lane for grass clippings, and because the neighbour kids use it as a soccer and basketball field.
• We have a local source for wood chip from a tree lopper and add a 30 litre bucket full about three times a week This one has been really important. It buries food scraps and stops smells upsetting the neighbours. It stops the ground compacting and keeps the deep litter loose enough for the chooks to scratch through. Mixed with the high nitrogen of all the other ingredients, it keeps keeps the carbon/nitrogen ratio right.
• This time of year, we are adding a tray of ash every fortnight or so, that the chooks dust bath in then scratch into the litter. Along with their manure, it counterbalances the acidity of the coffee grounds and helps keep the pH of the finished compost neutral.
• The deep litter breeds an astonishing number of worms. Whenever I take some buckets of compost out for the garden, I also fork a bit of it around to expose worms, and the chooks feast.

We don’t buy feed for the chooks – all this is plenty for them and a nice omniverous diet. Especially since two of the households supplying kitchen waste have kids, so our chooks get quite a lot of tragically wasted gourmet lunch boxes. All these sources together would add up to less than half an hour a week, most of it multipurposed time.

(There’s Part 2 and Part 3 coming, the other two members of the soil building team – the worm bath and the seaweed barrel. ).