Australian Permaculture. More than just organic gardening

Outback Permaculture Garden -3-

Overview

Outback Garden 1

Outback Garden 2

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The Animals
Ducks
Like all the other animals the ducks had a large fenced-in area for themselves. They had the run of the lawn and surrounding shrubs and trees for shelter. They produced excellent fertilizer right were we wanted it and were quite good for pest control. We had a changing number of ducks, as some hatched and some died or were sold. We found six was a good number for the area.

	A fence separated the duck area from the rest of the garden. A gate could be opened to give them access to the pond. We monitored their time in the pond closely to maintain the balance in the pond.

Chickens

The chickens lived in a large area that was easily accessible at the entrance, where the chook-house was.

This chook doubled up as a pet

The chook house was very close to the lawn beds and banana circle, the manure had to be carted only a few steps.

We had planted that area years before with shrubs, tropical trees and some fruit trees. It had been impossible to keep the weeds and long grasses down and the fruit trees were loosing their fight against the grass. After the chickens were introduced and had the free run of the whole area, the fruit trees started bearing fruit. Through their scratching the chickens kept the area nearly weed free and cleaned up the fallen fruit as well. They never had any diseases, they always were in excellent condition, supplied a good amount of eggs and occasionally one would sit on eggs.

Geese

The geese lived in the "native garden". The native garden was established when we first build the house. We had selected trees and shrubs that grew naturally around Mount Isa and they were doing well. However the weeds and grasses that grew in that area made it hard just to walk through it and it was quite time consuming to control them by cutting. It probably would have worked well to introduce chickens here, too. But only the fence would have separated them from the part of the garden where the dogs lived, which would have been much too frightening for the chickens.

So we introduced geese. They were two years old and had lived on a couch grass lawn. At our place they ate only the green tips of some of the grasses. We had to feed them regularly; the area was just as overgrown as before and finally we gave them away.
An option might have been to hatch geese eggs in that area, so the goslings would eat only this grass from early on.

Outback Garden -4-