This week we had really great weather here in Southeastern Oklahoma. The sun was shining all day and the weather was comfortable enough to wear a light jacket or a t-shirt with jeans. A lot of this was attributed to the fact that the wind was low and it took the chill off with the solar radiation coming down.
It was a great day for a work day.
We decided to begin the construction of our container garden with recycled 8 foot railroad ties we have on our property. We have enough railroad ties around the place that we can make quite a few container garden plots. We also used recycled cardboard (we saved our moving boxes) and we recycled the bedding from our chicken coop.
When we moved onto our property of 5 acres there was what we think was originally a roundabout gravel driveway. What they had done was put down a bunch of rock in the center surrounding these trees and then fenced it in with some railroad ties. Jason and I have never been real big fans of this, or at least the size of it. This area produces a ton of bugs in the summer underneath the rocks and it gets overgrown with weeds.
Jason first chose the best looking 4 railroad ties and dragged them over to their new home with our Cub Cadet Tractor.
He placed them in a square and leveled out what he needed to in order for the railroad ties to lay as flat as they could.
He then took some scrap cardboard and laid them out flat to cover the entire inner surface area. This cardboard will break down as seen in permaculture gardening.
This was a great opportunity to clean out the bedding in our chicken coop. He took about 4 sled fulls of bedding and then dumped and spread this layer over the entire inner surface area to provide the next layer.
Finally, he sprayed the area with a large amount of water to encourage the next process of decomposition.
Last week my husband had asked our neighbor, who has about 70 cattle this year, if he had any old hay he was interested in getting rid of. Our neighbor was kind enough to drop this off on our property by our coop free of charge. We are so thankful.
We are going to use this hay as the new bedding in our chicken coop and continue this process of recycled material for our container gardens.