Garden – Simon Sheridan

It’s the vegetables, stupid

I have been dabbling with gardening for about ten years or so, but it wasn’t until corona that I got more serious about the food-producing side, and that was mostly because I didn’t have much else to do during the two wonderful years of lockdowns that we got to enjoy here in Melbourne.

Coincidentally, 2020 was about the year that the fruit trees that I planted earlier in my yard were starting to come to maturity and generate decent yields. I then started to expand my vegetable beds. By 2022, I was getting decent enough yields that I decided to start measuring them to see what they were worth.

Now, I wouldn’t say I am active in any gardening forums, but I am a member of a gardening society here in Australia (Diggers club) and I’ve been to a number of permaculture workshops and know people in that space. In addition, I am always looking up gardening-related stuff online. What I realised recently was that I have never seen a single article, blog post, or YouTube video that addresses the question of the monetary value of homegrown food. Because of that, when I calculated my results, I got quite a surprise, which I thought might be worth sharing.

The results I’m about to present were measured in the 2022-23 year. It’s worth mentioning that, although my skills and knowledge had improved by then, I was and still am an intermediate gardener. If what I read online is correct, skilled gardeners are getting about twice the yield I got in 2022-23, especially for things like tomatoes. So, the numbers I am giving are on the low side, especially for the vegetables.

Another thing to bear in mind is that I only measured what made it to the kitchen, and that was less than what actually grew. So, again, the numbers are lower than what they could have been.

These caveats do not affect the overall result; in fact, when corrected for, they make the result even more stark. Let’s look at the numbers. I’ve rounded to the nearest dollar for clarity.

Vegetables:-

Crop	Yield in $ per m²
Cucumber	$45
Chilli – jalapeno	$32
Tomato – black Russian	$30
Tomato – cherry	$25
Potato	$10
Corn	$7
Carrot	$5
Garlic	$3

Fruit and nuts:-

Crop	Yield $ per m²
Lemon	$10
Pear	$6
Apple	$4
Olive	$3
Almond	$3

There are two other results that I had last summer that are worth mentioning here. Both berries and capsicums come in at about $35 per square metre, placing them in the top tier.

These numbers paint a very clear picture: the most valuable things to grow in the garden are summer vegetables, with the humble cucumber sitting as king on the throne! However, I suspect that tomato is probably the real king. This year I expect to get at least a 50% greater yield than I got in the summer of 2023, which would put tomatoes on top.

The real eye-opener from my point of view was the fruit. My olive trees still have some improving to do, but the apples, pears, and lemons are all producing at what should be close to their maximum yield. Despite that, we can see that the value per square metre is low. Trees, of course, take up a lot of space, so this makes sense.

The general rule here seems to be that vegetables are about an order of magnitude more valuable to grow than fruit. This is especially true in my climate, where I have a year-round growing season, and so any square metre of vegetable bed produces both a summer and a winter crop (and potentially even a third crop if I really pushed it).

The lesson from this is very clear: if you are looking to maximise your return on investment, you should grow vegetables first and only bother with fruit if you have space, time, and energy left over. Vegetables have other advantages too. As I mentioned, in my climate, I can grow vegetables all year round, and I can stagger the planting to get essentially a continuous supply as opposed to most types of fruit, which have to be harvested in one big bang.

This raises a fascinating question: why did I have to learn this myself? Why is this message not prevalent, at least in the gardening communities that I have interacted with? I have some ideas why this is the case, but I think the interesting thing is that this lesson was actually present in the original organic gardening movement. That movement distinguished between intensive and extensive crops.

It turns out that my calculations on the value of food exactly map to that intensive-extensive distinction. Vegetables are intensive, and they are distinguished from grain crops, which are extensive. Fruit trees are somewhere in the middle. This gives us a classic pyramid pattern:

For a fixed area of soil, the value of the yield is greatest for vegetables and least for grains, with fruit somewhere in the middle. Thought about another way, to get the same aggregate value from fruit trees requires far more land than for vegetables, while grains require even greater amounts of land. Given that the amount of area under cultivation corresponds to the amount of work required to manage it, less area equals less effort equals more value. Whichever way you cut it, vegetables come out on top.

Intensive vegetable growing allows you to concentrate your efforts. You concentrate your watering, your digging (if you do any), and, most importantly, the organic matter you have available. That’s why composting and mulching are a natural fit for vegetable gardening but become less viable for fruit and grain farming at scale.

There is some interesting work being done these days on using teas to scale the benefits of compost to extensive crops. It would be nice if that turned out to be true. But even if it is true, you’re still doing extensive agriculture, and that means less dollar value per time and money invested.

Now, I mentioned that I had my theories about why the economic angle is excluded from consideration in gardening circles. Let me just give the most grandiose of those.

Most people would know that the Reformation created our modern separation of church and state. Another way to frame that is that it separated economic concerns from spiritual ones. That is actually unusual. If we look back in history, we find that economics, politics, and religion were all mingled together. In fact, temples and churches were often a place of economic exchange.

We have gotten so used to this state of affairs that we tend to think that any pursuit that is not overtly “economic” must exclude economics altogether. Could that be why modern gardening movements like permaculture never talk about money but frame their approach as getting in touch with nature or something similarly spiritual sounding?

The trouble with that, I think, is that I suspect we humans have an inbuilt economic compass. This is also a feeling, very similar to the feeling of being in tune with nature. I think we “feel good” when we do things that have economic value, and we feel bad when we don’t. This was the implication of David Graeber’s concept of bullshit jobs. People who have jobs that they know produce no value suffer anxiety. The opposite is also true; there is an inherent satisfaction to doing something of value.

In fact, I’d say that’s the number one reason to grow food. We live in a society where it is really, really hard to create value since everybody already has too much of everything. Doing something simple and straightforward that creates real value connects back to our economic instincts.

Solstice garden update and merry christmas

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.
Cicero

I thought I would end the year with a garden update given that it’s the summer solstice down here in the Southern Hemisphere. The garden has proven to be a sanctuary over the past two years in Melbourne where we’ve spent almost a whole year in lockdown. It was the one place I have been legally allowed to be outside without wearing the obligatory face nappy. It’s not lost on me that the drive to suburbia in the earlier part of the 20th century was in large part a drive to get away from the pollution and disease of the inner city. In some of the older inner suburbs of Melbourne, where property prices these days are astronomical, it’s still considered necessary to have your soil tested before growing food producing plants because those areas were previously set aside for heavy industry and heavy industry comes with toxic byproducts that decades later are still hanging around.

It was away from this pollution that the emerging middle class moved seeking the fresh air and clean soil of the suburbs. The possession of enough land to grow a garden was also considered a positive and prior to the wars everybody would have had a kitchen garden and a lemon tree as a bare minimum. In the postwar boom years the kitchen garden was replaced by a lawn. These days, there’s almost no lemon trees to be found and the lawns are a lot smaller. The new suburbs are full of properties that are lucky to be on 1/8th of an acre with a McMansion that stretches from one fence to the other. A garden of any interest is an impossibility on such a block. Although, this is no problem for most people for whom even mowing the lawn is too much of a chore. The reason people move to the suburbs now is not to avoid the inner suburbs but because they cannot afford the inner suburbs. The result is that the outer suburbs are more or less like the inner suburbs, at least as far as size of land goes.

When I made the move to the suburbs it was with an old fashioned garden in mind and so I deliberately chose a place in an older suburb where the new fashion of sub-division hadn’t yet taken hold. The house came with a lemon tree which, by a random meeting with the daughter of the ex-owner, I learned was planted in the 1950s by the original owners.

Old eureka lemon still producing beautiful fruit all year round

Sadly, the subdivision trend has now arrived in this area too. Just this year the property at the end of my street was split in two. It was once a quarter acre with a number of big fruit trees near the fence. I admit to helping myself to some of the peaches when walking past a few times (the owner didn’t seem interested in them). But the peach tree, perhaps planted around the same time as the lemon tree on my property, is no more. Along with the others, it was uprooted to make space for a huge house which takes up basically the entire block. Where I used to reach over to grab a peach you can now touch the side of the house, that’s how close it is to the fence. This kind of subdivision has been happening in Melbourne for two decades now. It’s all inflation, of course. The prices of properties continue to go up as the size of the land goes down. The median house price in Melbourne is now more than a million dollars and is completely untethered from underling reality much like the rest of our society these days.

One of the valuable things about a backyard garden is that it provides close contact with reality. This year I’ve had to battle aphids who did some damage to one of the apple trees before I managed to get them under control. I had to learn the hard way that the grass I planted, even though it said “drought proof” on the box, is not suitable for the climate where I live so I’ll have to plant something different once summer is over. And I’ve also had the usual battles with pests, although this was the first year I remembered to net the almond trees before the cockatoos got to them so baring unforeseen circumstances I should get an almond harvest for the first time.

I’ve also been in the process of changing the design of the garden from the original edible forest garden concept to an orchard-and-separate-veggie-garden setup. In the process I added 5 new fruit trees which brings the total to 25 along with 3 grape vines and a number of passionfruit vines. In addition, I added about 8 square metres of veggie gardens to bring the total to just under 20. I expanded my composting operations with the aid of the chicken manure from the coop and I have achieved another goal which is to grow all my vegetables from seed. Next year’s goal will be to grow all vegetables from seeds which I saved myself. Now that high summer is here, there’s nothing much to do except sit back and harvest the goodies.

I’ll be taking a break from blogging for the next few weeks to knuckle down and see if I can’t finish off my fourth novel “Once Upon a Time in Tittybong 2: Catch My Disease” (yes, the theme is heavily influenced by corona). I wish everybody a Merry Xmas and a happy new year. Doing either of these things now amounts to an act of rebellion so embrace your inner rebel and remember the Devouring Mother wants you miserable.

Here’s some updated garden pics.

A new addition to the front yard contains perennial veggies, herbs and flowering plants for the bees and butterflies

The giant peppercorn sucks up all the moisture from the soil, so these beds are all raised wicking beds which cuts back substantially on the amount of water needed for irrigation and turns this part of the garden into a productive area

The “orchard” has apple and pear trees to the right, newly planted olive and mandarin in the middle and lemon and macadamia to the left

I introduced Diogena, the cynic chicken, in an earlier post. Here she decides that the dry, warm, secure environment of the chicken coop is not to her liking and has decided to start roosting on, of all places, the pipe that leads from the gutter to the rainwater tank.

Like a true cynic, getting ready to sleep under the stars

Garden Update: 6 year Anniversary

I realised just last week that this autumn is the 6 year anniversary of my attempt at establishing an edible forest garden. Honestly, I thought it was much longer. It feels like a lifetime ago that I spent the summer devouring the book Edible Forest Garden by David Jacke, marking out the dimensions of my yard and drawing up intricate plans for the different guilds of trees, shrubs and ground covers. Since those heady days, my grand designs have tested themselves against that pesky fellow known as the real world. What better time to then to do a garden update post and see how they fared.

How it started

How it’s going

Espaliered dwarf Fuji, Gala, Court of Wick apples 2016

No longer espaliered dwarf Gala apple 2021

Hojiblanca Olive 2021 (it’s in there somewhere)

If there is one thing which separates the photos on the left with the photos on the right it’s the lack of shrub and ground cover layers on the right. That’s right, the edible forest garden concept did not work out. There were two primary reasons for this. Firstly, and perhaps not surprisingly, was the failure of a number of the shrub and ground cover plants. This wasn’t just the failure to survive (that was a relatively rare problem) but the failure of the plant to ‘take over’ the niche and keep out weeds. This was mostly my failure in understanding how the plant would grow. Most of my problems were in the ground cover layer where you need a variety of plant types including spreaders, clumpers and a few others whose names I forget. There are niches within niches. If you plant only clumpers, a spreader weed will find a niche and take hold. Once the layer of cardboard and mulch had disappeared, weeds became a major problem. If I had one recommendation to people starting new edible forest gardens, it would be to over-plant. Of course, that costs money if you are not propagating the plants yourself. But if you don’t do so, you’ll end up with weeds galore.

The second problem is a problem with the edible forest garden concept here in south eastern Australia. Thick plantings tend to attract rodents and rodents tend to attract snakes. Although I have never seen a snake in the garden (I have seen rodents), there have been sightings of the eastern brown in this area and stepping on one while tending to a fruit tree is not my idea of a good time. The risk is magnified if you have young children. For this reason, I think the edible forest garden concept doesn’t really work in a suburban setting unless you are planting only one or two guilds and keeping them nicely separated from the rest of the garden.

So, a couple of years ago, I abandoned the edible forest garden concept. The fruit trees are still there, however, and I have opted either for grass as the ground layer or a mulch/chicken manure combination which makes a lot of sense now that I have chickens free ranging in the garden and which will both fertilise and reduce water requirements. These are both low maintenance options (especially with the help of the chickens in keeping down weeds and grass) and also allow room for children to run around and climb trees as well as lazing about on the grass or enjoying the cool shade of a tree in summer; all activities that don’t work in the edible forest garden concept.

The garden is now converging on its final design and it’s going to end up as an old-fashioned orchard with separate vegetable garden. How very traditional! Maybe the old folks knew something after all.

Along the way, there have been a number of fallen soldiers who either couldn’t handle the Australian summer or just don’t like the soil in this area. Among them are a number of avocados (oh, how I would have loved to have avocado trees but it just ain’t happening), a cavendish banana, two figs, a lisbon lemon and a washington orange. Fortunately, the only fruit tree that was here when I arrived is still going strong; a eureka lemon which has had a bumper year. Given that lemon prices at the supermarket here often exceed $1 a lemon, that tree really is an economic boon which probably explains why back in the day if you only had room for one tree, you planted a lemon.

The fruit trees I planted are only five or six years old but the yields so far have been impressive. The pears produced heavily last year and the apples this year. I also got some very nice grapes this year. The olives are growing well but, olives being olives, it will probably be another five years at least before I get any decent harvests. The almonds are growing slower as they are in the more difficult conditions of the north facing the front yard and I have not irrigated them at all. Considering that, they are doing very well. They do produce fruit now but the cockatoos clean the fruit out in mid December well before it is ripe. One day, if the yields get big enough, I might attempt to net the fruit but at the moment it’s no great loss.

This autumn I’ll be adding one more olive and one more pear to finish off the orchard in the back yard. I’ll also be turning the side of the house into vegetable beds. I have room for one more tree in the front yard and have dreams of a beautiful big elm tree to provide shade in the summertime. Still tossing up between that option or perhaps a couple more olives which will enjoy the heat and provide more food (in another ten years!).

The Diogenes Chicken

Over the past year I have inadvertently become something of an amateur ornithologist. When the corona business arrived, I was on a break from paid employment while I worked on my second and third novel. That break ended up lasting a lot longer than I thought and also included the writing of my book on the corona event. Nowadays, I’m back in a paid job but am working from home. I live about half a kilometre from the Werribee River with a major bird wetlands only about ten kilometres from my house so the area is rich in bird species. As my work desk overlooks my backyard, I get to watch as they come and go. Birds seen in my area on a normal day include, in rough order of size: sparrows, New Holland honeyeaters, willy wagtails, starlings, Indian mynas (grrrrr!), rainbow lorikeets, blackbirds, spotted doves, quail, wattlebirds, magpies, cockateels, galahs, crows and sulphur-crested cockatoos.

One of the things I have learned about birds in the last year or so is that mimicry is a big thing and not just within the same species but across species. For example, I put in a bird bath in the early summer of 2019. It was a very hot summer that year but not a single bird looked at the birdbath for more than a week. One day, an enterprising blackbird landed a took a drink. Within ten minutes, all kinds of other birds were drinking and the bath has been a hit ever since. The same dynamic played out with my pear tree. Again, a blackbird was the initial culprit who learned that the fruit was mighty tasty. Another blackbird joined in. That was ok because there was heaps of fruit on the tree and I noticed that if I just threw a pear on the ground the blackbirds would bicker all day over it and the damage was mitigated. The real problems began when the New Holland honeyeaters saw what the blackbirds were doing and decided to copy. The wattlebirds then copied them and I had to take defensive action to save the remaining pears (fortunately it was mid autumn by that time and I had already eaten a majority of the fruit anyway).

As I posted about here, I have recently added another species of bird to the garden: chickens. It’s been fun to observe their behaviour. Like the other birds, copying is a big thing for chickens. A week ago I was eating a bunch of grapes off one of my backyard vines. I threw a few grapes to the chickens assuming they would eagerly devour them but they showed no interest. Then, just yesterday, one of the chickens tried a grape for herself off another vine. The others saw her and instantly rushed over to see what this new discovery was about. All of sudden, the chickens were mad about grapes. Fashion seems to be a thing in the bird world as much as the human.

Another thing that birds and humans share in common is a social hierarchy. The human one is far more complex and there are multiple hierarchies across different domains. Nevertheless, we also have the equivalent of a pecking order which is why the behaviour of one of my new chickens reminded me of an old story about the Greek philosopher Diogenes. But, before we get to that, let’s meet the chickens.

First up is the top hen, a black Australorp. She’s a beautiful bird with shiny black feathers who is noticeably larger than the others and doesn’t mind throwing her weight around especially when food comes into the equation. She’s especially hard on….

The number two chook: a blue Australorp. Blue is a moody bird who is clearly the smartest of the group (by contrast, the black Australorp seems quite dumb). What she receives from the top hen she dishes out to the next hen down the line:

A rhode island red. Also a very attractive and smart bird. She’s actually a little bit bigger than the blue Australorp but just doesn’t have the fire in the belly and backs out of any engagement.

Which leaves the fourth hen who, for reasons that will become clear in a moment, I have named Diogena.

A floppy comb is sometimes thought to indicate sickness but with Diogena I have a feeling it’s a fashion choice. A little bit punk rock.

Diogena is an Ancona breed. Originally, I had assumed Diogena was the bottom chicken in the pecking order. When I got the chickens home the first time, she seemed to integrate the worst. In fact, I was worried she was sick as she didn’t seem to eat and wasn’t socialising with the other chickens. But she slowly integrated with the group and began eating and everything settled into a nice rhythm. Diogena is clearly the smallest chicken of the group, another reason why I had assumed she was bottom rung on the ladder. Then something interesting happened.

I was giving the chickens some zucchini as a treat (they love zucchini and I don’t). As a good chicken owner, I try to apportion the treats geographically far enough apart that every chicken gets at least some. But as the treat gets devoured and supply runs short, inevitably the pecking order is asserted and the top chicken hoards whatever is left. The black Australorp ruthlessly enforces this rule at such times and on this occasion had successfully chased the blue Australorp and the Rhode Island Red away. Diogena, in her normal fashion, hadn’t contested the treat. She will eat one if thrown her way but otherwise stays out of the fray. However, on this occasion she decided to wander over to the Black Australorp and help herself to some zucchini. I watched on expecting her to get the same nice hard pecking the others had got but was amazed to see that not only did the Black Australorp not peck Diogena, she forfeited the zucchini to her. This got me thinking and I realised I had never seen Diogena either peck or be pecked. She seemed to be outside the pecking order.

Apart from food, the other main way the pecking order is enforced is over who gets which roosting position in the coop. Higher is better and, in my coop, closest to the wall on the higher roosting bars is the most coveted position. Once the hens had learned to use the roosting bars, inevitably it was the two Australorps on the upper bars and the other two below. This was the way it was for the first few weeks. Occasionally, the Rhode Island Red would get above her station and jump up top but the blue Australorp would kick her off down below where she belonged. Until the day in question, Diogena had done her usual thing of casually roosting at the bottom and avoiding any disagreements. But not this day. This day Diogena decided she was going to roost on the top bars. Not just that, but in the coveted wall position. I thought for sure that she would be booted back to her place but yet again, the black Australorp just ceded the ground and took up a position below.

It was at this point that the story of Diogenes the philosopher came to my mind. Diogenes is the best known member of the Cynic school of philosophy. The word cynic meant ‘dog-like’ in Ancient Greek and the Cynics, Diogenes in particular, were known for living on the streets or in the woods or wherever they pleased. The Cynic philosophy is a fascinating one and was a prelude to the Stoic philosophy. It eschews social convention and encourages people to live according to their own nature in whatever way they see fit. One of the most famous stories that encapsulates this is the one where Diogenes was lying in the sun and Alexander the Great, who had heard about the great philosopher, came to visit. He asked Diogenes if there was anything he could do for him and Diogenes replied “step to the side, you are blocking the sun.” It is said that Alexander later asserted that if he was not Alexander, the most powerful man on earth at the time, he would rather be Diogenes.

These stories might be apocryphal but they do reveal something very important about social hierarchies which is that the most ‘freedom’ (in a very general sense of the word) is found either at the top or at the bottom. Interestingly, it seems that Alexander knew that and respected Diogenes as an equal. I am probably massively anthropomorphising the situation, but I think the same dynamic is going on in my chicken coop right now. In any case, I am pleased to have Diogena – the Cynic Chicken – in my backyard.

“I’m sorry, ma’am. We’re gonna have to ask you to leave. This is a respectable roosting bar.”

A change of technology

This week I deleted my Twitter account and introduced my new chickens to their just-finished chicken coop. These two events are seemingly unrelated. I didn’t intend for them to happen at the same time. In fact, before last week I didn’t even know I was going to delete my Twitter account. Nevertheless, they did happen almost simultaneously and I’ve had this idea in my mind the last few days that there’s something to this coincidence that might be relevant for the future. Twitter is a technology and so is a chicken coop. Could this change of technology be symbolic of the kind of future that is headed our way? Let’s speculate.

I’ll start with the technology I stopped using: Twitter. This year was the ten-year anniversary of my joining Twitter. I was prompted to sign up by colleagues at the job I was working in at the time. Twitter had been around for several years by that point. I had heard good things about it but hadn’t felt the need to join. But I was glad I did. I instantly came to like the platform. The challenge of trying to say something worthwhile in 140 characters appealed to me. But the main cool thing about Twitter was that it introduced you to random things you otherwise would never have been exposed to. It was possible to listen in on interesting conversations between experts in some field. It was quite common to get a hearty laugh out of Twitter and also to be exposed to something interesting or profound. Tweets featuring links to full length blog posts or new products were common. Famous people would drop interesting bits of information, often quite personal. In fact, most people seemed to treat Twitter with a disarming honesty that belied the completely public nature of the platform. You really got a sense of what people were thinking that seemed to be uncensored and unfiltered.

All came to an end spectacularly in the last few weeks with a mass censorship drive that included the President of the USA but the writing had been on the wall for some time. Trump had already broken Twitter. Around the time when he announced his run for the Presidency I had to unfollow a large of number of people whose tweets I had previously enjoyed because their entire Twitter feed had become an anti-Trump rant-fest. This only got worse when he became President. Of course, it was all part of the Trump show that he barged his way onto Twitter or the evening news or whatever and forced the people who despised him to bend to his will. As somebody with no real stake in US politics, I have to admit I found the Trump-on-Twitter show very entertaining. Watching the President of the US sack somebody, or threaten some other country with military action or trade tariffs or whatever live on social media was fun to watch. But it pretty much destroyed the platform. Trump did what he did best and sucked all the energy around himself. But that just meant all the energy came to be about politics and therefore became toxic energy.

Twitter was doing its best to destroy the platform too. The introduction of its new feed was just one example. Didn’t they know that the whole point of Twitter was to get news directly from individuals rather than through officially sanctioned channels? The cool thing about Twitter was to get unfiltered, non-propaganda type news. In fact, the real-time nature of Twitter meant that the news broke there well before those official channels. Often on Twitter you could get video or information directly from some dramatic event happening on the other side of the world at the time it was happening. An hour or two later, the official news channels would confirm what you had already seen with your own eyes. Twitter’s great power was to harness a global network of individuals and let them provide the content. But Twitter couldn’t help itself. It had to provide the ‘news’ and eventually it started shadow banning, censoring and then de-platforming the very people who provided the content. It’s not possible to govern a global social media network adequately via manual labor. I assume Twitter is doing a lot of the work with algorithms and machine learning. The result is opaque, subjective and unaccountable censorship. It’s a rather Kafkaesque way to run things. One day you wake up and your Twitter account is gone and nobody will tell you why or what you did wrong.

I’ll be surprised if Twitter still exists in ten years’ time. But, in any case, my Twitter journey has come to an end. What started as a technology that opened a lot of doors to new perspectives ended as a technology that explicitly closed down those perspectives.

So, it was goodbye to a global communication tool and hello to a backyard egg production tool. The chicken coop is the latest development in another journey I have been on that is now almost as long as my Twitter journey. I have documented it partly on this blog in the garden update sections and my posts on Living Design Process. I suppose you could call it my Green Wizard journey after the name of the book that inspired me to start it– John Michael Greer’s “The Green Wizard”. The Green Wizard ethic is about appropriate tech at the human scale so it’s appropriate that the chicken coop was a retrofit of the small shed on my property.

A blue Australorp about to step into the coop

From the photos above and below you can see some of the elements that went into the construction of the coop. The bench of the shed has become the upper story of the coop and that is where the chickens roost of a night time. The long plank of wood that forms that walkway to the upper story was repurposed from the shed itself. The step that leads to the outside run was also made from wood that was in the shed. The large plastic pots which are now hopefully going to become nesting boxes when the chickens get around to laying were things I had picked up at a junk store once upon a time. The gate at the entrance to the outdoor run was part of the birdcages that were on the property when I bought it. The chicken wire that can’t be seen in the photo but which is doing time as a fox deterrent on the back fence was also left from the previous owner. So, almost the entire chicken coop is re-purposed from stuff lying around. All that stuff is now part of a piece of technology that will provide me with eggs for the kitchen, chicken manure for the garden and the quirky company of some new feathered friends.

I remember reading once that in terms of energy to transport/energy in the food, eggs were one of the least efficient things you can buy at the supermarket. That is, the amount of energy to transport eggs was very high relative to the energy in the eggs themselves. So, having backyard chickens is a good thing in terms of saving resources. The eggs produced by happy chickens in the backyard are of superior quality to what you can buy at the supermarket and, let’s be honest, the lives of the chickens are just better. Even the free range chooks in the commercial facilities are not exactly living well. So, there’s everything to like about having chickens in the backyard.

A chicken coop is a localised, decentralised and low energy technology. The inputs are the chicken feed and the straw bedding. These require a drive to the pet shop about once every few months. There’s nothing particularly glamorous about maintaining a chicken coop. Pretty sure nobody’s putting photos on Instagram showing them cleaning chicken poop off the roosting bars. But I have a feeling chicken coops are going to be round long after the Instagrams and Twitters of the world have gone the way of the dodo.

If I was a betting man, I would bet that my chicken coop will still be there in ten years and Twitter won’t. If this blog is still going at the time, I’ll be sure to make a post and check my prediction.