Full Circle

I started gardening when I was young. I don’t remember the exact age, but I have vivid memories of my mom’s small vegetable garden when I was growing up in the city. She grew the standards: tomatoes, lettuce, zucchini and brussel sprouts. It was hardly “farming”. When I moved out on my own (now as a young mother myself) I was able to talk the landlord at my apartment to let me have a garden. As long as it didn’t grow into the parking lot and wasn’t unsightly, he was fine with it. I dug out the grass of my new 3ft X 7ft garden by hand and “beefed-up” the soil by adding potting soil. This was by far the most well-tended garden I have ever owned. Weeding a garden this small was a piece of cake!
I planted tomatoes, sunflowers, peppers and even cantaloupe! This garden was the only one to actually produce a cantaloupe in all of my gardening years… and was by far the most tasty I’ve ever eaten. I had been officially bitten by the gardening bug… the only bug bite that I will remember fondly.

Fast forward to today. Our garden space now totals about 500 square feet. This is just for growing food. ( I’m not counting all of the flower beds.) When growing food on a larger scale, one of the questions that come to mind is “how do I fertilize a garden this large?” Enter our chickens. Not only do our chickens provide us with eggs and meat, but we get plenty of manure, too. During the summer, I leave one of my garden beds unplanted. As we clean out the chicken coop, straw and manure gets piled in this bed which works as a “holding bin” until the fall. Once the gardens are done for the year and plants removed, we pile the chicken manure and straw onto the rest of the beds. The final big “cleanout” of the coop in fall provides us with one last layer of manure.

We leave the manure and straw on the beds to compost through the winter. The top layer of straw on the beds doesn’t really break down, but acts more like a mulch. By the time spring comes and the temperatures are warm enough to work the soil, we can either till these beds or plant directly into the composted manure. The soil underneath the straw is black and full of nutrients for our garden plants. This year our sweet corn grew fantastic and even in a small space (4 – 5 rows about 5 feet long) provided enough for several meals. Our tomatoes, peas, pumpkins, popcorn and zucchini did quite well, too.

As our chickens free range into our gardens, they snack on bugs (their preferred outside snack) and weeds. They do eat a small amount of my garden plants, but with as much space as the chickens have to roam, the impact is minimal. While they’re out eating, they “drop” extra fertilizer in the garden which breaks down the next time it rains and adds more nitrogen to the plants.

The extra nutrients from the bugs and green plants eaten by the chickens help produce a better tasting (and healthier) egg…. Bringing the cycle full circle.