2025.10.07table of contentsIndex
- The eggs are coming in great! Even the chickens that didn’t lay yesterday?
- Daily chicken coop cleaning | The first step to composting
- How to deal with slugs and snails | Results of feeding them to chickens
I’m Mariko, a permaculturalist, sharing my thoughts on “playing, living, working and studying” from New Zealand!
The eggs are coming in great!
Despite the unpredictable weather, we have four chickens in our home. They don’t have names yet.
So far, they’re not fighting and are living together happily.
On the first day, we got three eggs. Today we got three more.It seems to be we get 3 everyday. Hope?
The chickens that didn’t lay yesterday seem to have laid two eggs in one go. We are so grateful.
By the way, for those of you who are wondering, “Don’t chickens lay eggs without a male?” here’s a little explanation.
Chickens lay eggs even without males. These eggs
are not fertilized and do not develop into chicks, but these are the eggs we eat every day.
It’s like a menstrual cycle in a woman’s body:
eggs that didn’t develop inside the body are expelled – these are the “eggs” we receive.
Daily chicken coop cleaning.
Cleaning a chicken coop is hard work.
If you don’t do it every day, the chickens produce so much feces that it becomes completely covered in it…
There are lumps about the size of eggs scattered all over the place.
It would be easy to clean up if they were all like that, but some of them are really messy.
The chickens would drop it anywhere and trample it down…
I realized that daily cleaning of the chicken coop is essential.
However, chicken manure can be used as fertilizer for the fields. This is something I’ve been waiting for.
I’m looking forward to the day when I put soil in a bucket, mix the manure in, and it will become compost. I wonder if I can sell it?
Because if it was me, I would buy it.
Slugs and Snails are good resource for Chicken.
In the permaculture community, we go out into the garden after dark with a bucket and a touch.
They pick up wandering slugs and snails and feed them to the chickens.
Slugs are the enemy of the garden, and they will eat up all the new vegetable shoots overnight.
Slug-repellent pellets would be a breeze, but I’ve stopped using pellets for about three years because I’m aiming for a natural vegetable garden.
As a result, the yield is very low, and we can only expect to harvest enough for our family to eat.
I immediately put on my beanie and jacket since it was cold at night and headed out to backyard. I found the crawlies there was enough to fill a 500ml plastic bottle in just five minutes… (I won’t take any photos)
No wonder the vegetables are growing so slowly.
Then in the morning, I tried giving the slugs and snails to the chickens…
They weren’t care about the crawling foods.
The slugs get tangled up with the pellets and end up in their mouths, but that’s not the case with the snails.
Hmmm…The shell is smooth, so maybe it’s hard to eat?
So I had no choice but to crush the shell…(Yuck!) and to my surprise, Chickens liked to eating them.
Ugh… I guess they won’t eat it unless I crush it…
Living with chickens every day is full of little discoveries.
Perhaps permaculture is all about this kind of “life of experimentation.”
