Lynda Hallinan gets clucky with a double-duty chook house
Lynda Hallinan fences in her free-range hens with a portable chicken coop that doubles as a soil cultivator.
It’s often said that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, but let’s not deny the power of a decent dessert to woo a woman too. When we were dating, my husband courted me not with roses and romantic candlelit dinners but with egg custard. That’s right. He charmed me with his homemade crème brûlée, that classic French blowtorched baked custard coated in caramelised sugar.
When I met Jason, he was the owner of seven chooks and a curmudgeonly rooster called Frederico, named for his late grandfather, who was similarly inclined. Frederico, I’m afraid to say, ended up in a roasting dish after one too many early morning wake-up calls, but his lady friends brought nothing but pleasure and protein. Between them they laid seven eggs a day, which explains why, despite being a roadbuilding bachelor, Jason’s culinary repertoire stretched to nine-egg omelettes, twice-baked cheese soufflé and the aforementioned crème brûlée.
As a child, we kept chooks in the orchard on our farm and I have fond memories of mixing their mash with molasses and collecting eggs by the dozen. But perhaps that’s why my mother never took to gardening for, as I soon discovered in Hunua, the idea that you can nurture a nice garden with a happy harem of free-range hens in residence is a complete fallacy.
Chooks are the original omnivores, scratching out a nutritious existence on a varied diet of insects, worms, seeds, weeds, grass and windfall fruit, plus any kitchen scraps and garden waste you care to throw their way.
Or at least that’s the theory. In reality, free-range chooks are locustlike looters who, upon liberation, immediately make a beeline for your vegetable patch to eviscerate everything in it. In a matter of minutes, these feathered vandals can undo weeks of work spent sowing seeds, lovingly raising tiny seedlings and transplanting fledgling crops.
Some gardeners are prepared to accept a degree of collateral damage as a fair price to pay for a supply of golden-yolked goodness, while others clip their birds’ wings or contain them in caged runs. I’ve compromised by letting our girls have it their way for six months of the year – in autumn and winter they have the run of the place, returning at night to roost in recycled wine barrel lodgings – but come spring, I revoke their parole.
For the past few summers, I’ve fenced them off in our small grassed damson orchard; however, earlier this year, one of our kunekune pigs, Apple Sauce, developed Houdini escapist tendencies and had to spend some time in there in solitary confinement. He rooted up the ground, turning it into a total mudbath devoid of vegetation, which meant I’ve had to seek new accommodation for our chooks.
If only, I sighed to my husband, I could find a way to force our chooks to eat all the weeds while leaving my flower borders and vegetable seedlings untouched. Sixty hours of sawing, hammering, nailing and painting later, we’d found the perfect solution: a permaculture “chicken tractor”.
Permaculture is a low-input style of organic gardening and food production with sustainability at its core. The idea is that, instead of using synthetic fertilisers, herbicides and petrol-powered rotary hoes to clear and cultivate the soil, you find
“In minutes, these feathered vandals can undo weeks of work.”
natural – and in this case, feathered – accomplices to do all the hard slog.
A “chicken tractor” is a chicken coop complete with a portable run that can be rolled into place to clear weeds, compost spent crops, improve soil fertility (they dig in their own manure), and cultivate the soil prior to planting. It’s also a predator-safe way for chooks to free-range around your property without hiding their eggs all over the place!
My vegetable garden is bigger than most – I have 36 beds, each measuring 2m x 2m with timber sleeper surrounds – so we designed a square chicken-wire-covered run that sits on top of the wooden edge, with a matching American barnstyled hen house painted in Resene Half Breathless and Bullitt. It takes two of us to lift the cage from bed to bed, whereas the hen house is socially mobile because we recycled the trainer wheels off our youngest son’s first bike.
In spring, who wouldn’t rather be sowing seeds than pulling weeds? I’m chuffed to have delegated this chore to my new garden maintenance crew. In their first week, they scratched out all the creeping speedwell around my emerging asparagus, chewed down the chickweed, laid waste to the wild rocket and hoovered up the rotten remains of my most recent crop of iceberg lettuces.
Meanwhile, with all the spare time I’m no longer wasting weeding, I’m going to teach my husband a few new eggy tricks in the kitchen, starting with how to make perfect choux pastry cream puffs to fill with crème pâtissière for a MasterChef-worthy Christmas croquembouche.