Rachel : Thanks again for your terrific newsletter. It's always fascinating to hear how other chook-lovers do things! I wanted to send you these two photos and talk about the wonders of the circle of life in the garden with chickens. Before starting out on this journey I had heard and read lots about how well chickens and vegetable gardening go together and had even seen pictures of chickens free ranging among the veggies. I very quickly learnt that this is not what "going together" really means in this instance! Chooks can destroy a veggie garden and ruin 3 months work in about 3 minutes and so my chooks stay fenced very firmly in their own pen. It's pretty large, a corner of our 2/3 acre garden.

They very soon turned all the grass to dust. When we mow our very large lawns, all the clippings go into the chook run which they love. They eat it, eat the bugs from it, turn it over, manure it, aerate it and turn it into wonderfully rich compost for me. I dig that out and fill all my veggie gardens with it. Then that beautiful compost grows the most amazing organic vegetables. This week I picked 5 wonderful cauliflowers to blanch and freeze and I gave all the greens (a wheelbarrow full!) to the chickens who promptly fell on it and devoured the lot and so the cycle