One of the hazards of raising chickens is collecting eggs in your pocket and then forgetting about them. Usually this works out OK, especially if your hens are getting enough calcium in their diet. Sometimes, however, you inadvertently crush them. It is a good idea to go out with the sole purpose to collect the eggs, rather than collecting them while you happen to be out & about (insert my Canadian accent, for the perplexing delight of my American friends).
SustainableScientist has been getting a lot of traffic this past year for the composting fence we built in 2009. A lot of that traffic comes over from Willi Galloway’s DigginFood site, where she featured our fence during its construction.
Currently, the fence needs to be fed. It is asking for another 12″ of material to top it off. Don’t ask me where the fence filling goes; it’s not like there is compost falling out the bottom. Still, it continues to provide an interesting visual barrier, and we have no trouble keeping it fed with the pruning of our many shrubs. Weeds and other vegetable debris I prefer to add to the bins, which produce compost that I can put back into the garden.
Composting Fence in 2011 with chicken train cars in foreground
I thought it was time I featured some other fences (“enough about me; what do you think about me?”), as a resource for those interested in building their own compost fence.
When I was designing my fence I could find only two references for composting fences, both local to the Seattle-area. One was in the yard of local garden architect Jennifer Carlson, the other was built by the Boy Scouts for the City of Lake Forest Park.
Finally, I recently saw a composting fence on a trip to Whidbey Island. It was just NE of Penn Cove Pottery on Highway 20. They used straw to create the barrier and welded mesh wire sheets to hold it all in. I don’t know if it was intentionally, but I like the swoopy wave effect of the straw layers. I wish I had used these sheets rather than the thinner, rolled wire, because the sheets are much more rigid than the rolls; whereas my fence filling bulges to varying degrees, the sheets allow for a relatively flat plane. They have also added facing to the posts to hide where the grid has been attached to the posts. Very tidy.
Composting fence in Coupeville on Whidbey Island, WA
From the garden: lettuces, baby kale, baby spinach, first strawberries, cilantro flowers.
Confined in the side yard during the past year, our chickens had scratched their way to a barren wasteland. I decided to try a little chicken-exclusion experiment to re-grow some vegetation, both for them and for aesthetics.
Improvising a pen, I planted crimson clover seed inside the protected enclosure. It grew beautifully.
Greta, Baracka, Rocky trampling the fresh clover patch
Within seconds of moving the pen to start a new area, the wee devils were trampling the fresh clover patch.
Day 1: Trampling
By the following morning, it had been trampled and nibbled nearly to death.
Day 2: Nibbling
The final coup-de-grace was the scratching.
Day 3: Scratching
I had thought that with their expanded run the re-growth experiment would have a chance. Apparently, some things do not scale linearly…
CHECK OUT THE CHICKEN FOOD FENCE I BUILT LATER!
Sustainable Scientist 