Meet My New Mini Tillers

I am a to-do list kind of person. I like checking things off, and have been known to write something down only to immediately check it off, just to feel a sense of accomplishment. Nothing makes me feel better than knowing something on my to-do list is getting done when I'm not even around. I'm not talking about a 'honey-do' list either. I'm talking about getting three loads of laundry hung on the line before you have to leave for the day, knowing they will be dry by the time you get home. I'm talking about perfectly timing the baking of bread, braising of a roast and boiling of potatoes so that everything is ready simultaneously.


Chicken-keeping has not been this kind of job. After a week or two of freedom in my back yard, the chickens began roaming over to the neighbors yard to scratch in her flower beds, looking for hidden bugs. This is not too much of a problem in February, but once the spring bulbs began to emerge I knew my neighbor would be out clearing her beds and wouldn't appreciate stepping in chicken poop. So I invested in 200 more feet of fence and decided to enclose a fair portion of the "back forty" as pasture. The added benefit was that it would reduce how much grass we have to mow all summer long. Within a week, the chickens had turned that 250 square feet of emerging weeds into a mud pit.

So back they went into the small chicken yard and I didn't let them out for nearly week. In protest, they flew up at the fence and rushed the door whenever I walked by as if trying to escape. They also began pecking and eating their own eggs. Chicken cannibalism. Nice. I get the picture. Let us out or the little one gets it.

Back I went to good old Tractor Supply, this time in search of some "step-in" fence posts and heavy-duty plastic fence. I had experimented with putting up some temporary pasture last summer, and knew I needed more fence and an easier way of moving the fence to new areas of grass. But since there was still no grass growing in the yard, I stretched the fence from the coop, around my vegetable garden and back again. The garden was mostly bare, but there were some weeds, broccoli stalks from last year, and plenty of leaves that had blown in.

Pretty soon, I started to appreciate how powerfully those chickens can scratch. Within a day, they were down to bare ground in spots, searching out seeds and sprouts and hopefully some grubs. In softer areas, they dug 5 or 6 inch holes and nested there in the afternoons.

I caught one hen throwing up so much loose dirt that it rained over her and she shook it off with delight, almost like a dog. Chickens use dust baths to keep off pests, but this looked like pure fun to me.

After two weeks they have begun to break down the tough oak leaves--I sprinkled some cracked corn in the thickest areas to encourage them to scratch around. The places I plan to plant potatoes, peas, lettuce and spinach in the next few weeks are outside the fence, and it won't be time to plant anything else until almost May. By then, I'm hoping there will be plenty of grass growing.




So meet my new mini tillers. They work all by themselves while I'm doing something else.