This Chicken Tractor Hack Saves Me HOURS in the Garden

Why did the chicken cross the road? To go and work in Mark's raised garden beds. You know, chickens are amazing and easy animals to keep, but you can get much more out of your flock than just eggs. Chickens can be good pets. They can turn compost piles and all that. But one fantastic way you can use chickens is just like this. A small mobile chicken tractor attached to a raised garden bed that's fully enclosed. It's only a temporary enclosure so you can move it around. But this allows the hens to safely till your soil, fertilise the bed, de-weed and de-grass it without you having to lift one chicken-licking finger. And I'm going to tell you all about it. Let's get into it. Having hens till your vegetable garden or even your orchard isn't anything new. It's just that the problem always has been, how do you control it? Because chickens can be pretty destructive animals. There's no difference to them between your good plants or your veggies or weeds in the garden. If it's nice, loose soil, they'll dig it up. If it's something that they like to eat, they'll peck and they'll destroy it and eat it. So to be able to isolate them in a raised bed has something I've thought about quite a lot over the years, but I've just never got around to doing it. And the reason why I'm doing it now is because it's a perfect opportunity. Down at the bottom end of our property, I have a chicken or poultry free ranging area. It's got electrification around the boundary. It's got a nice, good galvanised dog fence and it's got a small chicken wire mesh fence tacked onto that down the base to stop the smaller hens and that being able to run through it easily. It's probably about half an acre of free ranging land that is only just starting to dry up now. You can see how overgrown it is. And that's because I couldn't get any machinery down here like I ride on to mow around and keep the weeds and the grass down. And I don't have a flock anymore. And I'll briefly tell you why as I show you our overgrown and falling down main chicken coop. So here's our old coop. It's overgrown, which I didn't mind too much to have some vines. It's a passion fruit vine here and it was made of mostly local wood that I pilfered from around our property. And as you can see, the roof is falling down because a lot of those have rotted out. And down here is where I first built our chicken coop. It's still standing, still going well, a galvanised chicken shed. Pretty happy with it, except that with all this extra rain we've been having the last few years. Down the back here has been miserable. It's always damp and wet. In very heavy rain, I worry that the water's gonna come up one day and engulf the pen. Anyway, the reason I'm telling you this is that instead of fixing this up, which I could do pretty easily, I thought, why not make a complete change? And with my flock getting eaten and dispatched by a big goanna that you might've seen in one of my previous videos, I explained all about that. I thought I would just take the opportunity to get rid of this and relocate it up the hill a little bit further so that the hens will be drier. They'll have a whole new home, one that is better designed and better made, better for the chickens, and also better and more handy for us as well when we collect the eggs. I still wanna have this whole free ranging area available to our hens, even though we've had some troubles, but the way that I can utilize this area better is by putting the pen up here, close to the front gate, easy access for us, and a lot drier for the hens. It's amazing how about 20 or 30 meters can make such a difference in height when you're getting away from that bottom creek line. And the other thing I thought I would take the opportunity to do was to get a mobile chicken tractor and have the hens go on holiday in that chicken tractor because it can house 10, but I'll probably only use maybe four or five, maybe six max in that chicken tractor to help me with the gardening and the rest of the flock will be permanently based in here. And I will go through that build in another video, but essentially the hens will be rotated through and go on their little mobile chicken pen veggie garden working holiday adventure when I need them. So yeah, it took a bit of a shake up to get this moving. I probably should have done it years and years ago, but you know, that's how life goes, I suppose. You're pretty well cemented in your habits, but now that that habit has been turned on its head due to the last, well, 12 months of trials and tribulations with hens, I'm now changing that direction and I know it's gonna be for the better. I mean, just look at how happy the hens are already. And most of these are pullets. They've just arrived a few days ago and they're already adapting to their new slavery, I mean, working holiday. Where'd you go? Oh, you're back up there. So let me take you through a rundown of this setup. This design caught my eye. It was nice and compact, small, easy to maneuver around like a wheelbarrow. And it was sort of the perfect size can take 10 hens for me to be able to utilize in this type of raised bed situation. I'm not using the ladder here at the moment. You really only use the ladder if you've got this set up in a contained area where you can let the hens out onto the ground. So for now I've had this makeshift ramp that goes from the chicken tractor through into the garden bed. It's not perfect yet, and I'll probably change the design. This is sort of prototype territory for me, but I'm having fun experimenting and it works. So that's the main thing. It's got nesting boxes here on the side, which there are no eggs at the moment because the pullets are not gonna lay for another couple of months, at least I reckon. So it's completely self-contained. It opens from both sides. It's got places for them to roost. It's nice and comfortable. I've got a feeder. I've got its drinkers. I've modified the drinker set up in here so that it is on the inside instead of on the outside. When you make this coop up, it comes flat packed. What they recommend you do is have the drinkers on one of these galvanized legs here, which is all fine if you've got this set up in a enclosure or a safe area for your hens to come down that ramp that I showed you and then start sort of hanging around and free ranging. And then they can come and have a drink here and then other nighttime, go back up the ramp, shut the door and they're all safe inside there. But of course that's not the setup I wanted. I wanted to join it to a raised garden bed and I wanted to be able to keep these hens locked up until I wanted them out as well. So I wanted them to be able to get a feed and a drink if they needed it. So that's why I've got everything contained in here. And even when you're moving this around, the water containers don't leak. They don't move around, hardly any mess, no fuss. This did take me quite a long time to put together, five hours, but I'm no good flat pack DIY guy. The materials of the chicken coop are very good and it feels nice and sturdy. And most importantly, it just seems to work the way I expected it should work. But there are some modifications that I'm gonna do to it. Firstly, I think I'm gonna insulate the inside. I'll test it out first with getting some proper insulation just tacked onto the inside here, like you would do for normal shed roofing, because I reckon it's gonna get pretty hot through summer. And I'll monitor that, probably put a thermometer in there. If it gets way too hot, what I'll probably do is maybe put a bit of a shelter or some shade over the top of it. Maybe a small tarp over the top and we'll see if that makes any difference. But the other thing I'd like to do is amend this door system here. It's not too bad. It's a little flimsy. I mean, it's very basic. You just pull a knob out and the door closes up. You pull it up and put the knob back in the hole and the door's open. But, you know, you have to come down and manually open and shut this thing of a morning and of an evening. So I'm thinking I could just attach a automatic door onto this battery operator that opens up at dawn and closes at nighttime or just before dusk when the chickens are back in. As for the raised bed setup, I just noticed this has come off. I've just got the netting held on by clamps. It's a few different types of clamps. You only need small clamps to clamp them onto these Birdies raised garden beds, which is another affiliate of mine. They're fantastic galvanized raised beds. Some of mine are over 15 years old and there's not a spot of rust on them and they're still going strong. And speaking of strength, it helps that you've got a nice, good, strong, stable raised garden bed to be able to attach this netting and just clamp onto really easily. It really doesn't have to be this tall unless you're growing tomatoes or something like that in your raised garden bed and you don't have your chickens in it. And initially that's what this frame was for. So like I said, this is a bit of a prototype for me. I'm definitely going to design something that's probably about maybe a meter off the top of the garden bed, maybe a little bit more, give it some extra headroom and probably more like a rectangular box type of setup. And the galvanized mesh will just give it some more safety, maybe in case a hawk tries to come down and even get caught up potentially. And I think galvanized mesh, even though this was easy and fast to put up, would probably just be more suitable and quicker anyway for this type of setup. But if you've got some ideas for me how to improve this setup, let me know in the comment section below. I'd love to hear them. Yeah, that's my chicken tractor raised bed setup. I'm really happy with it. And I think it's going to be a fantastic asset to our vegetable garden. So if you like this setup in the video, make sure you give it a big chicken working holiday mobile tractor raised garden bed thumbs up, share the video around and subscribe, hit the bell if you haven't already. Thanks a lot for watching. Bye for now. Cheers.