Terra do Milho

Category: Chickens

  • Using chickens in an orchard as Medfly pest control.

    Using chickens in an orchard as Medfly pest control.

    Using chickens in an orchard as Medfly pest control is an very effective way to get rid of the flies in an organic orchard. Chickens are very useful animals. They provide you with very nutritious eggs without a big effort and chicken meat is also good to eat. Apart from that you can also use them to prepare your vegetable garden; or to keep your orchard free of Mediterranean fruit flies or Medfly.

     

    These little flies breed during the hot month in the area where we live. They lay their eggs in fruit, there the eggs come out and the worm produces a kind of enzyme that destroys the fruit from the inside. It then looks mushy and brown and is not tasting good anymore. It can destroy your whole fruit harvest.

    In latin the small fly is called Ceratitis capitata. Since we are growing organic certified fruit we can and do not use chemical treatments and we have to search for more natural ways of pest control. So we looked into the life cycle of the fly and discovered that after the larvae have grown in the fruit the larva or sometimes the whole fruit drops on the ground, the larva becomes a fly and the fly destroys the next fruit by laying an egg in it.With chickens you can interrupt the cycle from taking place. We have very positive experiences with using chickens.

    The first fruit that is endangered is the St.Antonio plum it ripens around St. Antonio’s day which is the 13th of June. It depends a bit on the weather whether there are just a few or many flies. As soon as the plums start to ripen we put our electric chicken fence around the terrace where the plum trees are, put our portable chicken house under the trees and move some chickens in, mostly 5  or 6. The chickens love to eat the larvae,  they even pick them out of the fallen fruit and prevent the larvae from becoming a fly.

    After the plums the first apples start ripening, so we move the chickens to the apple terrace. By the time the pears are ripening the flies are almost gone. They do not have a chance.

    Last year we had the chickens free ranching and we did not have a single infested fruit. The free ranching of the chickens however can be problematic if you have non walled terraces like we do. The chickens can destroy the terrace banks, so we prefer to fence them in.

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  • Prepare your vegetable garden with chickens.

    Prepare your vegetable garden with chickens.

    Did you know you can prepare your vegetable garden with chickens? Chickens can help you in your garden and orchard in many ways. We use them as our little helpers. One of the things we use chickens for is to prepare the vegetable garden.

     

    A month before we start  the garden, we fence in the area where we want to make the vegetable garden. We use an electric chicken fence with a portable fence charger with a battery feed. It has to be powerful enough to charge the whole grid of the fence. It not only keeps the chickens in but also keeps the animals that want to eat the chickens out.

    The chickens will eat all the weeds and weed seeds that are on the plot. Which will make weed control in the garden very easy at the beginning.

    For 100 m² you will need about 5 chickens for a month to do the job. They will need a small shelter where they can roost and a place where they can lay their eggs, fresh water and some extra food. We made an A-frame chicken house with handles so we could carry it around on our steep land. For the future I will make one from lighter material that can be moved easily.

    On the plots where we have vegetables every year I want to make permanent chicken houses, so we only need to move the chickens. We move the chickens during the night in the dark when they are not so active. We put three chickens in a jute bag, the once that can carry 30 kg of grain. They stay very quiet in the bag and three chickens are easy to carry. If you think that is still to heavy you just put in two chickens. Sometimes we had a group of chickens that would just follow the chicken house wherever it went, but unfortunately this did not work with all the chickens that we had.

    At the end of the month I start bringing some extra compost to the plot. I just make small piles here and there, the chickens will spread it and clear it from weed seeds that survived the compost making process. After that we simply take the fence away and use a rotavator to soften up the earth because the little chicken’s feet make a dense crust at the service of the soil we have here. This might be different with the type of soil you have. Then you can go ahead and start organizing your vegetable garden and start seeding and planting.

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    Prepare your vegetable garden with chickens