Using animals in the garden

I wanted to share how we under-complicate getting our garden ready for each season. I know we could get super technical and start talking about the ph levels of balancing acid-alkaline while getting just the right percentages of sand, silt and clay to form a loamy soil… but honestly that starts sounding like an over complicated recipe! I think if we follow the ecosystem of the farm it can simplify things for us. You need good soil. And if you have animals you might have some willing friends to help with that.So how do we tackle this? It’s pretty simple so don’t expect anything totally enlightening haha.

As soon as our garden is done for the season we turn the chickens out onto it! They use their natural instinct to scratch, peck and dig everything up. Meanwhile they are leaving manure all over the place. Who would have thought this could actually be a good thing?

Our sheep will gaze and munch happily on all the leftovers too! If you have goats they will eat beyond everything as well!

During the winter we slowly add our manure from the barn over the garden beds. That stuff is gold guys! But I eventually will need this turned and mixed in as we get closer to spring. Thats a big job so this is where we call in the pros. Only a day or two with pigs in the garden leaves me with everything completely mixed! You can run a simple temporary hot wire around the garden. Pigs are absolute masters at uprooting and turning up ground! This really doesn’t take long as all. They get in there looking for goodies and before I know it the whole garden is turned.

You can get creative and use your animals in so many ways that will help you plus provide natural fertilizer. It doesn’t have to be fancy set up and in many ways doing this is going back to basics! I’ve been so inspired by many of Joel Salatins practices. He uses animals in a way God intended them to be. But below here is a photo of some of our garden from years past and as you can see they are pretty happy, thanks to all the help from our barnyard friends.

“Soil is a living ecosystem, and is a farmer’s most precious asset. A farmer’s productive capacity is directly related to the health of the soil.”

Warren Buffett