Farm Lesson #27: Never Underestimate A Chicken's Curiousity

Broccoli seedling doing well in one of our raised beds.

Unfortunately, the one thing we most desperately need these days is the one thing you can't grow on a farm: time.  I was already behind in the vegetable garden when our free range chickens discovered the tender young lettuce and broccoli seedlings. To preserve the plants we kept the chickens locked in their run this past week while I hustled together a 250 foot permitter fence around our kitchen garden.

Normally we only confine the chickens to the run once a week or so when we know that no one will be home all day to watch them, but it was preferable to loosing all our veggies.
It was my fault for assuming the chickens would have enough space to roam that they wouldn't venture all the way to the other side of our property where the garden is located. So all the time I could have been using to get our peas, cabbage, and rhubarb in the ground was spent on the fence. Not to mention the tidy sum of cash required for all those posts and that much chicken wire.

At least while I was throwing a fence together, Bethany was hard at work planting the 130 trees we received from the Missouri Department of Conservation.  We are in desperate need of a wind break on the hill where our house sits. I think Bethany is getting tired of picking up toppled rocking chairs on the porch.  Bethany also planted a heavy dose of native fruiting trees like choke cherry and service berry around the chicken coop to supplement their food in the summer.

Now that the garden fence is finished I hope to catch up on planting, but there's always things on and off the farm that require our attention. We'll do what we can when we can, and try not to curse time we don't have.