I put a Chicken Tractor on my Raised Beds, and it Worked!

Let's see if it works. Chickens! Hey, wait, we should probably do Beefcake first.

I'm working on it.

What's going on? He'll bust through. Nice, nice. Now that we have some extra time because chores are so easy, we're actually walking around the farm kind of seeing how we might tidy up a bit. And then I remembered I saw the chicken tractor in the chicken run, and I remembered I had this idea that I wanted to try to put— see if it fits on the raised bed. You know what, I want to try something with this Chickshaw first though. I mean, not Chickshaw, this chicken tractor. This thing is definitely made to be dragged, not picked up. Okay, so let's try to put this on one of those garden beds and see if it works. I think there's no way it's going to fit. I'm pretty sure it's going to be too long. Uh, I think it might be too wide, but I think it would be worth a try because if it fits, we can use that to— what, what are we going to use it for? We're going to put a few chickens on these beds. See how they have the, the COVID crop in there? I would like the chickens to eat that and till that before before we cover it with silage tarp to get ready for the spring. Even though I think it may be impossible, I'm going to try anyway because otherwise I'm just gonna have to build one from scratch. Arun? Yep. I don't think it's gonna work, but it's worth a try. Arun thought it would work, so we put it over there. We put it next to it. Boom! It's not too long. Too long? No. Yeah, I wanted to have room here. Oh, you still do. You do have a few inches there, don't you? It's, uh, I think it's almost same size. But then I realized Arun was thinking we would put it on top of the wood, and then I thought, well, actually, that's not a bad idea. Wow. Oh, whoa, it's too thin. Okay, so like a middle, he's setting it in the middle. That's interesting. Hey, Lily, I don't want you to get your fingers pinched.

What are you gonna do with it?

The room's gonna move. Well, I'm gonna— I'm gonna work this garden bed area with chickens.

Can I take care of the chickens?

Yes. You want to be in charge of these chickens? Yeah. You want to go get them? How many? Uh, 4. It's kind of neat that it's sitting on top. That way the chickens can actually might be able to scratch and— yeah, they could scratch and peck all the way to the edge. My idea was to build one that would set in there, but then the board would catch. Just— this might work because I was, I was thinking I'd make one so thin that it could fit in here, but that might even be because of this, uh, what do you call this, pergola? That's not it. That's not it. Whatever that is for growing our peas. I think we could put the tractor right next to that. Look, because we have space. Look, do I have some slack down there? Yeah. Oh wow, there we go. My chicken tractor works on this. My 4x8 raised beds. Boy, that just cut me on a fresh new design.

This is This works!

So we'll have the, uh, we'll have the chickens in there till up our cover crop, then we'll, we'll move them on to the next job, have them till and fertilize in there, and we'll put down our silage tarps behind them. Lily's got a chicken. Hey, what's the holdup? We need 3 other chickens. Here, you go that way, I'll go this way. Okay. Just grab one. Okay, we'll get one of these two. Go wide, go wide, Gideon, go wide.

Can I go— uh, where's the feet?

Lily, just put their feet on the ground to encourage them to till. Okay, and then you just need to get a— well, water. Listen, you need to get a waterer with a pan. Put the pan upside down and put the water on it. Whoa! Hey, Lily, there's— uh, we actually ended up with 5 chickens, so give them about a pound and a half of food. They do have some greens in there. We're gonna get feed all over the ground here and attract all kinds of craziness.

Kai's in there.

Oh good, that's a perfect job for him. We call him him, but it's a her. It's named after a fella. Anyway, they're in there doing their duty, scratching, maneuvering right in our front yard. It worked. So guys, I feel like we should get a good before shot. Like, look at that, that's a nice before shot. Well, it kind of— it looks just like that. We're gonna see what the chickens do to it in just a few days, I'm sure. All right, you got the water, that's perfect. But we need like a little feeding tub to put upside down and to put that water on. So that's great.

I'm gonna go get one.

Okay, thank you. So walking away from it, there, there's a hair of a gap on either side. Is that going to maybe be, uh, subject to predators? I don't think so. It's elevated. It's, it's only that big of a gap. It's possible. We have limited— we have limited our risk by only putting a few chickens in there. So I think it'll work just the way it is. It's so exciting. My original chicken tractor design will also now work with my 4x8, uh, design. This is so cool. Nothing makes me more happy than getting my chicken something to do. And you guys love it too, don't you? Hey, Gideon, we're gonna go milk. Uh, I wanted to go milk— try and milk them in the pole barn today, but boys had other plans. So we're gonna milk them up here. Boys, tomorrow let's try to milk them in the pole barn. See, if we— if we milked out at the pole barn and manure dropped, it wouldn't matter if you be right where we needed it. All right, just how you need help doing this. So take the soft side of the brush and brush down around each quarter, okay, until you don't see a lot of that dust falling off. Just had you wash her off too.

Uh, yeah.

Okay, thanks. You stripping her? Yeah. Okay, and then you go to town. What's this?

Any Huggins?

Oh, you're audiobooking? You brought your speaker? Make sure you take it back. Okay, I have it on tape. You said all right, you're gonna bring it back. All right, that was easy. We're done. We'll come back this afternoon and cover up their— Josiah, is the milk still over there?

Right there.

Oh, okay. Thank you for watching Out the Stanchion. I just got word from my assistant. We got the last of the Polyface design books in this week. She's shipping them out. The rest, the last 800-ish, are going out today. So if you ordered Polyface designs from us and you haven't gotten it, they went out last week and this week you should get them. Everybody who ordered in January Joel had us hold on shipping all those until February to let him catch up with those other orders. So get in in January, and we're going to place our— I think Heather said she was going to place her order soon. Like, January is almost over, and we can start shipping all the January 1st-on orders. So if you order like today, you're getting your book very soon. That's polyfacedesigns.com, or I'll leave a link down in the description. That's good news on that. I talked to you yesterday about all the content I want to crank out. Let's get going on the very first vlog. I'm gonna go to the original footage I shot and re-edit it. I've done like 2,000 videos since then. Been working for 5 years making videos. So it's gonna be interesting to see. The shooting won't change. The cinematography won't change. But the editing, let's see how much of a difference it makes. That's fun. I pulled up the folder, it was called Pilot. I don't know if you can see that. Yeah, Pilot Vlog Chickens Escaping. We didn't have an order for our files yet, you know. We, we pretty soon started to call them vlog dash underscore and then number. Now we do vlog dash underscore number date and then name. All, all my vlogging right there, guys. All on these G drives. What is that, 7? Goodness. I can pull them up if I'm referring to them in a future edit. Look, they all connect right there, and I can turn these off and on right here. I can turn the G drives off so I don't always have them all running. But that's 5 years of footage right there. That can pull up pretty quick. Timeout. Randolph's here. Get his— I got his coffee going. Randolph says it passed inspection.

Well, it looks pretty slick.

Okay, good. The drywall and the paint job? Yeah. You see anything offhand right away?

Oh, that looks pretty good.

I see something. I kind of wish we would remove— I would remove those, those toilet paper holders. Oh, you got a plan?

Yeah.

Okay, good. Okay, good, good.

I know, I saw that.

I've been panicked about it.

It's fine, put tile over it, it'll just make a little hump.

Stop it. No, stop it.

He hadn't had his coffee yet.

I guess we got to get this window in so we can see how high the tile goes.

Okay, so I had thought about that. All right, so the tile I had to get was 4x12 because they didn't have the 3x— oh no, it was 4x16. Yeah, so I figure what we could do is, because if you— if we do like window height all the way around, that might leave you having to cut a million tiles. So what I thought we could do is we'll just come to the bottom of the window and then whatever it is up to here.

Yeah.

So you don't have to cut all of the tiles around the whole place.

All right, I just dropped my footage in. Interesting. An hour and 25 minutes of raw footage. That's about what I still do today. About, about that, uh, sometimes a little under 45 minutes to an hour and a half typically. Sometimes as much as 2 hours, but that's about average. Look, this, this did not make the— I'm in my old kitchen. That didn't make the cut. Look, we spilled some butter or something. Mr. Brown, maybe that'll have to make the second edit. We're chasing chickens, the boys are building a cage. I can tell you this. Oh, we went somewhere. Yeah, we went somewhere, and that never made it. Maybe that'll make it. I'll edit the original, put it in. I'll leave the unaltered one in. You guys can see how it's changed. Randolph's coffee's ready. Boom! Duck confit, eggs, guacamole. Taking a break from the edit. Didn't get started too far into it. I look forward to just nailing it after lunch. How is it, guys? Good. Leftover Taco Tuesday. Before we go finish that edit, let's try out some yogurt from that we made yesterday. I'm looking for mild, smooth. It's smooth. That's pretty mild. 8-hour, 8-hour ferment. A hair tarter than I would like. I might try with a different starter because the starter yogurt we used is already pretty tart. Got my yogurt over here. Let's knock this out. This has been fun so far. A lot of fun. Bucket on that. I'm getting to put the music on this. I bet we're so much faster editing now because it's only like— I'm like almost done. It's 1:20. I'm gonna do it like in less than 2 hours. It probably took us, what, 4 or 5 hours? I feel like it took— So people might not know this, but you used to edit.

I did.

You learned how to edit. You taught me, but then you edited until we were starting to get ready for the Great American Farm Tour.

Yeah, I edited all the way up until— I edited for almost a full— for a little over a full year. Hey, we'll give you some.

You can't handle it that I'm just sitting down here.

I know he wants to.

He wants to. Oh, come on, get it over with.

He's chewing on your ear.

Just don't open my mouth, I might get a smooch. So what was your vision when you edited that first vlog?

I have no idea. I remember it was like 20 minutes the first time I was done with it.

Yes, this is a fun fact we should tell them about. Yes, so when you were done, it was 20 minutes. We sent out a Google Form to people on our email list before we published it, and we let them see it, like 100 people.

It was like 100 people had asked and requested, would be interested.

What do you think? Yeah, we had said that. Yes, so these were people that wanted to see it. They were interested, feedback. And one thing we asked, because this has been our goal the whole time: did you laugh? Did you learn something? It was a big yes on both those. We also asked what could we do to make this vlog better, and they said— what do you remember them saying? Yeah, they thought it was too long.

Yeah.

Now interesting enough, now that I go in there, a lot of them weren't interested in like the end scene with the green hands, the tickling the kids. Yeah, they weren't interested in the family, but now that I'm looking at it now and doing it, I shortened that down but kept it in there because it's a perfect happy ending. And though that— you know why I think though?

Why?

Because now people know us. Yeah, so that's funny. Before, that's just a stranger like tickling his kids. Right, right. Like, that's not as cool as if you know that person and you know those kids. The cinematography was horrible.

It's horrible.

And it's funny though, I still have Jonah filming for me and stuff, but even my cinematography is rough, you know. You think I move the camera around a lot now, guys? No. So I did what I can. I cut it down from 13 minutes to about 10. Okay, and we'll air that this weekend.

Okay, I can't wait.

So you guys will get a bonus video this weekend. That— and it's really neat. I think you guys will enjoy that, our vlog from 5 years ago, re-edited. It's been a lot of fun. Getting a little headache. You want to go on a walk? A beautiful day. You know, I want to keep crunching on that. I'm to the music. That's like the funnest part. But really, my body's saying— and the sun is calling me— my body's saying too much screen time.

Such a nice day too.

Take a break. All right, we'll be more productive at the end. Back from the walk. It's good to get out and get in the fresh air. Yes, there's a hole in our wall right outside our bathroom. Randolph has cut it for our bigger window. That looks good. And I finished the edit. 3 minutes shorter. Added what I thought to be cooler music. Put in some things that were not in the first vlog that didn't make the cut for whatever reason. Added coloring. Just cut the clips shorter. Put some, what you call, B-roll, like steady shots of something over talking or in my case, a really moving camera. So guys, that's this weekend. Bonus video this weekend on the channel. I think it'll be called something like 5-year vlogger edits his first vlog or something like that. It is Indian Wednesday. What you making us tonight, Arun? It's the Indo-Chinese redness. Okay, again, that's great. Look at that. Look how delicious that looks.

It looks so good. I told him he's making you very happy.

Oh my. I feel like I should clarify this. I brought these guys in because it was raining yesterday, not because they can't handle the rain. They can handle cold rain, they can handle snow. This is why— well, this is— well, you see that mud? Well, that's partly because we've been having to dump our water here, so we're gonna have to figure out a water situation, but I don't want to pug up this sacrifice area. A little bit of manure, a little bit of urine. These wood chips, if they're wet, they're not going to absorb the manure or urine. So on super rainy days, we're just going to leave them in. We put them up in the afternoon. We put the caps away, just keep it in there in the deep bedding. That's our compost-making machine right there. The more we can keep in there the more we're gonna— the more compost we're gonna get out of this barn. Hey, hello, hello! How'd your donuts turn out?

Well, I'm waiting for the oven to preheat.

It's almost there, 344. Okay, Indian Wednesday! You guys liking it?

Oh yeah, we haven't taken a bite yet.

Hey, do you eat like this every night, Amy, over there?

Uh, yeah, pretty much.

My man, good job! Cooking with Arun Kumar. Good job. Yum. Let's try it. All right, he knocks it out of the park every time.