A Nappy for the Chicken Tractor to Collect the Manure

Seven days ago, I moved these chickens in this tractor for chickens to this large bird feeder. And you can already see the impact they have caused in this garden. It's amazing. They have completely eliminated all the weeds, except the ones that could not reach up here. And my shadow fabric for chicken tractor is working wonderfully. Take a look. This is fantastic. Better than my wildest dreams. But I don't think his work is done yet. And soon I will explain why. Let's get started. I think I'm going to have to give them some extra vegetables. We have too many flowers in this property. So these Nersium are totally edible. I'm not a big fan of them. They have a little wasabi for me. Well, yes, not for me. But chickens love them. And they are full of vitamins and are good, healthy and exuberant types of vegetables to eat. Well, get a little of that because we have many. These simply come out every season for us during the winter. Add some color to the garden. They attract bees, which in turn fertilize flowers, which contributes to the growth of these beautiful, fat, healthy and free from tomato diseases, the large varieties. Because during the winter it is cold here, even if we are in a subtropical climate. So, what you want to do is have as many attractants as you can in the garden to attract pollinators, especially at this time of year. That is why growing this type of flowers and letting other things produce seeds, such as certain herbs and even bad herbs, will help attract bees. And then they will find the little yellow flowers of the tomatoes and pollinate them while they do. But I didn't expect them to eat the field so fast. This is a very abundant food to grow. Let's also give them a little of this beautiful Japanese mustard. Look at the leaves it has. We don't like it that much anymore. I mean, I used to pickle the stems and you can eat the leaves in salads, but it's a bit strong. So you can only eat a small amount in a salad. You have these huge plants that are not wasted because they go to the compost and grow wonderfully. But they are a good food for chickens and grow easily. As I don't plant our Japanese mustard. It arrives every winter, just like the chickens that nest. So why not let them grow where they grow? It is usually around this field. And I let them produce seeds. Sometimes you can harvest those seeds and make your own mustard paste. I've done it before. But above all, as it blooms so profusely. It is a great attractant and feeder of bees for native bees. Other pollinators and also for European bees. Our honeybees, especially in spring. When it starts to bloom, just like this coriander. Now here, wonderful. And as most people know. It is important that things bloom during the winter so that the bees survive. In many places they don't have a very good winter. They don't have a soft winter. They have a pretty hard winter for bees. And bees have difficulties in our climate. Bees will have difficulties during the winter if there is no food or plants with flowers around. But as you can see. We have many flowers in our garden during the winter. And we do it deliberately so that our bees never run out of food. And we get more honey throughout the year than someone in a colder climate. This is a place where they need to store a lot of honey. So that the bees survive the hard and cold winter where nothing grows or blooms. And there are always some insects. Maybe a caterpillar or some stinky bugs. Or something like that in these leaves that act as small jewels. Nice little surprises for the chickens to dig them up and find. Okay, girls. Actually, it's not that it complements the food. Of course. The more you give them to eat food from your own garden and the remains of your kitchen, the less food they will eat. That's commercial, which is good. But it is also very healthy for them to incorporate these fresh foods into their diet. Because they will survive only with pellets. But I guess we could also survive with pelleted foods. That had all the nutrients we need. But it wouldn't be very nice, would it? And if you know the lifestyle of chickens, of course they are not the ones who sit down and eat a single type of food. They are herbivores. They are animals that seek food, insects, and a variety of foods. It's in their instinct. It's something natural. So I think the right thing to do is to give them a diet as varied as possible. And there are a couple of those stinky bugs. I'm not sure if those stinky bugs I told you are on the edge will eat them. The chickens are looking at them. I could put them close and see if they take some. Go ahead. Try them. Ron is moving. Go ahead. Don't you like it? Take it. Oh, come on. Someone. There must be someone who eats them. Boom. He left. Oh, good. Well, there you have it. They will eat stinky bugs. Very well. Let me distribute this. It doesn't seem to interest you much right now. But believe me, they will have eaten everything by lunchtime tomorrow. If you saw my other video, you will know that I have this mobile chicken tractor here at the end of this bed. At first, I only had a few chickens. Some of the old ones. And recently I have two new chicken enclosures. They are the L Man Brown. I had a black one. Fortunately, she died, but she was much older. And that white chicken too. I think the breed is horn-legged. And she's doing well. Now she's like the matriarch of the group. But yes, I had her here. And yes, even the two birds were progressing well in this small high garden for little birds. So what I did was renovate this garden by letting the chickens remove all the bad herbs. I got rid of all the seeds of bad herbs. Most of which, luckily, they eat them all. It saves me, I think, to plow the land, it saves me aeration and light plowing. They do light plowing and fertilize it at the same time. But most of the fertilizer, most of the poop, is when they are in the mobile chicken coop. At night, they are sitting there, pooping. It goes through the ground and lands in the grass here. So, what I had to do was collect and rake as much excrement as possible and put them in this shed to finish using them as fertilizer. And that works very well, except that a large part is lost in the grass here. And I don't like the fact of having to rake everything. So, I thought, what else could I do? And that's when I came up with the idea for the mobile chicken coop. So, all I did was get a shade cloth and fold it, join the ends, cut it more or less to size and then put some straps or a light elastic cord in each corner, tight enough to be able to pass it between the two rear legs, here, where the entrance and exit are, and the front, here. I had to put some additional screws, only one on each side, to have something to hook the cord easily. And then, basically, it just stays down there like a sling. And look, this has only been here for about three days. And it is already quite loaded with a lot of excrement. So that will allow me, once I finish with this bed, to be able to do the same thing I did with that bed, but I will have much more raw manure to be able to put here, water, dig, and put a blanket on top. And so it will be a complete cycle of the hands fulfilling their duty. As I said, doing everything they had to do. Get rid of the weeds, plow the land and fertilize the bed. I think it's a great way to get the chickens to work. Now, the reason I use shade cloth is because if it rains, it won't be like a mud puddle with water. The water has been raining too much lately, these last few days. I've been out. I've been in Sydney. I had to sign 1,500 books in Bucktopia, in the Sydney warehouse. It was a fantastic morning. They were really very hospitable. They treated me as if I were a kind of superstar. As if I were famous or something. It was great. I felt like a boss. But everything went well. I thought they would just throw 1,500 books at me and tell me, Well, here you have a lot, Mark. Can you sign them and let us know when you're done? And I thought, well, according to that calculation, I take the book, open it and sign it. It could be about 10 seconds. That means 10 seconds per book. That's 6 per minute. I think it was like that. Is it 6? 6 per minute? No. Yes. More or less that. And that would have meant 5 or 6 hours of book signing. And I didn't feel like it. But it turned out that they had everything planned. They had everything prepared for me. There were four people helping. Someone gave me the book already open, someone took it from me, and there were people who gave me a new pen when one was running out. And we had lunch there. We took a tour of the factory to show them the robots that collect the library books. They have about 138,000 books in their Bucktopia warehouse in Sydney, and about 30 robots go from one side to the other collecting the library books, and then they take them to the packaging station, where they wrap them in cardboard exactly the size of the book. Then, the cardboard cutouts go up through another conveyor belt and are recycled. So nothing is wasted. Then they are sealed, the fracking is put on them automatically. Then they go to a conveyor belt and are thrown into the exact container to which they are supposed to go, either to New Wales in the south or some other place in Australia. New Zealand, international, whatever. So it's great how everything works. And how long did it take to sign 1,500 books? Well, a little less than three hours. And you know what? Apart from the fact that my sight gets a little cloudy and I feel a little, I don't know, shine in the eyes. The hand did not bother me too much, there were not many injuries due to repetitive effort. I felt pretty good afterwards. So yes, it was a great teamwork and a very pleasant stay in Sydney. Yes, it has rained while I have been out. I wondered how it would go. And there is something protected, as if it were a kind of chicken diaper. But if it rains, it will not accumulate and a mixture of chicken excrement will form, which would not look very good, and it will become heavy and unpleasant. It will simply drain. And in the same way, after emptying all this in this canter to fill it with fertilizer, I can leave it in the canter and probably cover it with a blanket first and then wash it with a normal hose that is not high pressure. I will wash the shade mesh and it will be clean again to be able to place it again. I think it will work very well and it is very durable. I think it will work perfectly for the job I want. Yes, so why do I have them here? Well, I want to have them here just a little more time. I could even have them for another week. I want them to start working more. They have ignored all the leaves of all the weeds. Most, except some in the middle that they could not reach. But I think they can still do a lot more work. And since it has been raining, they have not been working a lot on the land. They have probably been hiding in the dry chicken tractor instead of out here under the rain. And when the land dries a little, it is when the chickens like to take a dust bath. And it is that action of simply bathing lightly with dust in several points what can loosen the earth and work it a little. I mean, not much. You don't need much, but a little work is fine. And then I will come and tear off all the remaining weeds from the stems, which the chickens did not dig up by themselves. And then I will make the old poop of the diaper and cover it all with a blanket like that other bed over there. I will let it rest a little because the chicken manure is quite volatile and can be very aggressive to plants, especially young plants and seedlings. So I will let it rest for a few weeks first and then I will start planting in it. Yes, the combination of the chicken tractor and these Birdies high garden beds. I am affiliated with both. One is from Oz Farmer and the high garden beds are from Birdies, made here in Queensland, Australia. You can also get them in the United States. But that combination of this high garden, of very high quality, very resistant, very strong, is working well. This is excellent. This is exactly how I imagined it would work. And yes, I think this is something that I will use for many years. I hope you liked the video. If you have, make sure to give it a big, I don't know, thumbs up to the chicken tractor style, and subscribe if you haven't already. It's not that subscriptions matter now. Just watching my videos and sharing them helps a lot. And, of course, buying a copy of my book now that they are starting to be sent will be of great help. We, the poor content creators, are always trying to make money. So anything you can do to help, I would really appreciate it. Thank you very much for watching. Goodbye for now. Greetings.