Ode-ometer to my wheelbarrow

Sometimes I think it would be interesting to put an odometer on my wheelbarrow. I must push it miles. I fill it with weeds in the veggie patch and push it up to the chook pen to empty it. The chooks go crazy scratching through the weeds and dirt, eating the greens and grubs. When Floss is here, loads of horse poo from her paddock also get barrowed to the chook pen and dumped. The chooks scratch through that as well. The same with the soiled bedding from the goats’ shed. All piled into the wheelbarrow, pushed up to the chook pen and dumped. The chooks work their magic on it all then. Scratching around and combining it all, adding extra nutrients in the form of chook poo, eating the grubs and weed seeds.

The goats like to ‘help’ with the barrowing.

There is a slight slope on the chook yard so gravity and chook-scratching do their work in slowly piling the whole mixture in the bottom corner. From there I take over again. I shovel the mix back into the wheelbarrow and dump it on the garden. Lazy compost I call it. It would be better if the chooks did a more thorough job of eating the weed seeds. But they don’t, so the weeds germinate in my garden beds and I pull them out, fill the wheelbarrow, push it up to the chook pen, dump it … you know how it goes from here.

In an ideal world, there wouldn’t be a hill or much distance of any kind, between the chook pen and the veg patch. But the chook pen was there when we bought the place. It’s a deluxe affair, completely enclosed and fox proof, with two swish houses (neither of which the chooks sleep in, I should add; they sleep on the roof of the small shed, despite my many and rather determined efforts to train them otherwise). It also contains a small orchard of fruit trees - apricot, plum, peach, pear, nectarine, quince and apples. I’m not about to move the chook pen. The veggie garden is where I established it. Yes, I could have chosen to put it closer to the chook pen and soft fruit orchard. Instead, I chose to build it lower down the slope, close to the house, where I can look out the kitchen window at all the jobs that need doing and duck out to pick a few beans or herbs for dinner. So, I push the wheelbarrow between the two, weeds going one way, lazy compost going the other. Perhaps making the composting method not so lazy after all.

Of course I could build hot compost heaps in the veggie patch, thus killing the weed seeds and saving myself so much barrowing, but then the chooks wouldn’t get all the fun of scratching nor the greens and protein from the weeds and grubs. And I wouldn’t have the pleasure of watching them enjoying themselves. I admit my system is flawed but it is still a good one and it works for me. For now at least. I do supplement my lazy compost with the plastic bin type compost, in which I put things I know the chooks shouldn’t have, such as rhubarb leaves, and things I want to add to my garden but not via the lazy compost method, such as seaweed, as well as the scrapings from underneath where the chooks sleep, which is far too rich to go straight onto the garden.

That compost too - the stuff from the black compost bins - gets loaded into the wheelbarrow and taken to the veggie patch. Deliveries of mulch for the garden? Shovelled into the wheelbarrow and carted to where it is needed. Bales of pea straw to mulch the citrus trees? Same.

And in autumn and spring, when we are busy raking leaves and sticks and burning them, I again find myself pushing the wheelbarrow. The other wood that we burn, the logs that come into the house to be burnt as fuel to warm the house in the depths of winter, also travel from the woodshed in the wheelbarrow. Usually, it’s Rob pushing it on those occasions though. Which I guess means the wheelbarrow works harder than me.

See you outside,

Jill