![\"\"](\"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/garden-rows.jpg\" "\\"garden")
<\/a><\/p>\nEnough to make a farmer cry tears in her bacon.<\/p>\n Luckily, I own way too many animals<\/span> a diversified farm operation.\u00a0 Pigs aren’t the only crop-grazing, dirt-tilling critters around here.\u00a0 (Although they are the most delicious ones.)\u00a0 The chickens were my next best bet for turning under the garden.\u00a0 They’ll eat the majority of greens and even what they won’t eat they will trample down or scratch up by the roots.\u00a0 They love digging through mulch and soil for grubs and bugs and create light fluffy, perfectly mixed piles of compost.\u00a0 Sure, the raised beds would have to be reshaped after the chickens flung the contents around, but reshaping light, loose debris with a pitchfork is a whole lot easier than turning the soil with a shovel, hoeing the remaining weeds and clods, and then leveling with the iron rake.\u00a0 A whole lot easier.<\/p>\n Too bad the pen creation wasn’t as easy.\u00a0 Because chickens need one thing that pigs really don’t.<\/p>\n Predator protection.<\/p>\n The garden is surrounded by an 8′ fence to keep out critters.\u00a0 But that fence is made of chain link which is easily scaled by the opossums and raccoons that feast on unprotected chickens around here.\u00a0 Our chickens had to be secured at night if they were going to be separated from the livestock guardian dogs and placed in the garden.<\/p>\n Good thing I still had a chicken tractor in the garden.\u00a0 Kind of.<\/p>\n What I had was an 8 year old chicken tractor.\u00a0 Which worked fine when I got my first 4 chickens.\u00a0 Those chickens were moved merrily around the farm, enjoying fresh grass and bugs every day and the security of a locked coop every night.\u00a0 Of course, I only used the chicken tractor in that capacity for 1 year.\u00a0 Chickens, being like potato chips, are way too addictive to have just 4 of them.\u00a0 I mean, have you ever only had 4 potato chips???\u00a0 Unless the kids only left 4 potato chips in the bag.\u00a0 Or worse, they left just enough dregs of chips to equal 4 full chips if you tip the bag and funnel those dregs directly into your mouth.\u00a0 Not that I’ve ever done that….<\/p>\n So by the next year I had a substantial flock of chickens.\u00a0 Too substantial for a movable pen so they had to have a permanent stationary coop.\u00a0 Since they had a permanent stationary coop, we had to let them free range to get the healthiest chickens with the healthiest eggs.\u00a0 Once they were free ranging we had to put up a fence to keep loose dogs and daytime predators out of their pasture. \u00a0 Once we had a pasture there was no reason not to fill that pasture with other critters like ducks and goats and sheep and pigs and ponies.\u00a0 As soon as that pasture was full of critters, it only made sense to get a livestock guardian dog to guard all those critters.\u00a0 And then that livestock guardian dog needed another livestock guardian dog as a friend.\u00a0 Because, really, can you imagine the pressure of all that responsibility?<\/p>\n Yes, I know.\u00a0 That’s kind of the equivalent of looking at the potato chip bag with its pathetic chip dregs and saying, “Screw it, who wants to go to Walmart for another bag of chips?”\u00a0 And then coming home with 4 full bags of chips—sour cream and onion, salt and vinegar, barbecue, and ridged.<\/p>\n Please.\u00a0 You know you’ve done that, too.<\/p>\n Anyway, the chicken tractor got demoted.\u00a0 Initially it was used in the barnyard for hens with newly hatched chicks.\u00a0 Then we built a brooder room in the barn.\u00a0 So it was moved down to the garden for the guineas.\u00a0 The guineas did a decent job of eating garden bugs without destroying the veggie plants.\u00a0 But they were too loud for the neighbors.\u00a0 So the chicken tractor became an excellent garden shelf to set tarps and row covers when not in use, to stack all varieties of sprinklers, spray nozzles, and hose connectors, and to hold rolls of bed edging.\u00a0 Plus, a place to stash rocks where they were out of the way of the lawnmower but available for holding down paper mulch or hammering in garden stakes.<\/p>\n The downside of the chicken tractor being used as garden shelving was that it hadn’t been moved for about 6 years.\u00a0 And as I assessed it’s chicken holding capacity, I realized there was no way it was moving ever again without falling completely apart.\u00a0 Which meant that if I wanted to use it to protect the chickens as they turned over the summer garden, it had to stay in place.\u00a0 The fencing had to come to the chicken tractor.<\/p>\n Combining the immobility of the chicken tractor with the haphazard arrangement of the beds to be turned over, I figured trapezoids, parallelograms, and rhombi were a pipe dream.\u00a0 Heck, quadrilaterals seemed unlikely altogether.\u00a0 I gathered a variety of cattle panels, fencing rolls,\u00a0 PVC pipes, rebar, tarps, shade cloth, hay twine, and set to work.\u00a0 I ended up with a decent straight stretch over the squash.<\/p>\n The rest of the pen was a free for all.\u00a0 Where I ran out of cattle panel, I used some flexible plastic netting.\u00a0 Even though I could have easily cut the netting with scissors, I didn’t bother.\u00a0 It would easier to roll it back up on the roll when I was done with the pen if I left it in one piece.\u00a0 Besides,\u00a0 the intact roll added a little extra support to the wobbly PVC pipe post.<\/p>\n If the panel or fencing had squares that a chicken could squeeze through, I attached some of the garden edging.\u00a0 I also left that on the roll instead of cutting it.\u00a0 For the same reasons as above.\u00a0 Plus, cutting wire is so successful at creating sharp ends that poke me despite my best efforts to avoid injury that my hands and legs start to spontaneously bleed whenever I get out the wire cutters.\u00a0 Just to get it over with already.<\/p>\n When I ran out of cattle panels, fencing, and edging, I just started making do.\u00a0 One section of the pen was created with an unused utility gate with the gaps covered by a trap, some shade cloth, and a scrap piece of field fencing.<\/p>\n Tractor Supply and Southern States can claim whatever they want.\u00a0 But “For Life Out Here,” whatever is laying around the farm works just fine “For Those Who Do.”<\/p>\n I hung a piece of shade cloth for lounging under in the heat of the day.<\/p>\n I used some bamboo garden stakes to add extra roosts to the chicken tractor and I set the water trough right beside it to discourage the chickens from hopping onto the roof of the tractor and then hopping out of the pen.\u00a0 I knew the chickens were capable of getting over the few 3′ tall sections of cattle panel but I hoped they had an incentive to stay in (lots greens and bugs) and no reason to get out (chickens hate to be separated from rest of the flock).<\/p>\n Overall, it was a success.\u00a0 What the pen lacked symmetry, it made up for in purpose.\u00a0 If it’s durability was in doubt, that just made it easier to take down when the job was done.\u00a0 If the design was indecipherable, that just meant it would be harder for the chickens to find their way out.\u00a0 After all, several times as I tied fencing to posts and attached shade cloth or garden edging, I found myself trapped inside the perimeter or wandering the outside of the fence trying to get back in to where I had been working.\u00a0 If I couldn’t find my way out, surely the chickens couldn’t either.\u00a0 Probably.\u00a0 Maybe.<\/p>\n Then in went the chickens.\u00a0 I chose 8 of the older hens plus Michael, the less dominant rooster.\u00a0 I added a couple sheep to help with weed control.\u00a0 Although the sheep’s role in the garden was short-lived.\u00a0 (Flexible plastic netting and PVC pipes might hold chickens. But they don’t hold sheep.)<\/p>\n Now I’m just letting the chickens prepare the fall beds while I prepare to can tomatoes and pickle peppers.\u00a0 In between rescuing the couple chickens that fly out of the pen, then pace the fence, frantically looking for a way back in.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n