Yates Vegie Growing Challenge

Well I have joined the Yates Vegie Growing Challenge and it also involves blogging about it. Unfortunately you can only seem to put one photo at a time on each post so I am going to do it here as well.

OK when the challenge came into my inbox I thought oh yeah I plant a garden every year…

But this year I want to make it different.

You see we have chooks that get out of their inclosure and while that is nice to have free range chooks and so free range eggs they do destroy an early garden and I find it so disappointing after all my hard work. Not only this but you can spend hours searching for the latest spot they they have chosen to lay their eggs or secretly start their sitting or clucky stage. We aren't allowed roosters in town so there is not point on them sitting on the eggs for then to hatch cos that ain't going to happen ladies.

In previous years I have gone from this

Here it is with veges ready to harvest.











But unfortunately this is what greats me when I go to look at the garden plots today.

It's not been used for a good year as we have four plots we rotate with the chooks and my hubby’s desire to grow his own potatoes.

We have one for the chook run which fertilises the ground. They get all our food scraps so not only are they eating the scraps and depositing their ‘chook poo’, they are also scratching in the left overs they don't eat.

Then a plot (plot number 2) they have just been on, hubby plants his potatoes in, digging very deep so the compost of the chook poo is dug in.

When the potatoes are finished I move in to the plot to plant the rest of the vegetables (It then becomes plot 3) and it is used mainly over the spring/summer with some vegetables that linger into winter.

The last plot (plot 4) is the one I have finished with and when the last of the vegetables are harvested its time for the chooks to be moved onto it.

So each plot is used for the same thing every fourth year which seems to work helping keep the diseases at bay and getting a good lot of fertilizer into the soil.

This plot (above) was last summers attempt and after the chooks had a field day with my seedlings I gave up. You can see the overgrown fenced area for the chooks but they just hop up onto the fence line and out to freedom. I know clip their wings - something else that will keep them out of my garden.

So the Yates Challenge is not only going to get me out there and do something about the garden it is going to help keep me accountable.