Building the Chook Pen - Part I

I had hoped to be hearing the cheep cheeps of little chicks this Easter. Alas, it is not to be and I concede that we will not be making our first deadline from the 2012 Task List. We'd planned to have our long-awaited chook pen finished by the end of March, but OE has run into some health hassles and we've fallen behind schedule. At least we've had some pretty productive working bees with our neighbours over the past couple of months, and here's where we are to date.

This is what we started with at the beginning of the year - a cleared flat piece of earth....

We started by putting in the corner and centre posts...

Next came the purlins, then the bearers and joints for the floor of the chook house. We also dug a 30 cm tunnel around the entire exterior where we'll place some wire to fox-proof the pen.

The bones are there, but still a few more weekends of work to put up the wire mesh and build the hen house.

Creeping Boobialla

Because we've got such a sloppy block of land, I wanted a good native groundcover for steep banks. A few websites suggested Creeping Boobialla (myoporum parvifolium) and since it was available as tubestock at my local Greening Australia nursery, it seemed like a great solution. It did exactly as I had hoped in the first year...grew quickly, surpressed weeds and provided lush green coverage. But after the first year, it started to lose it's lustre and developed dead patches.

I have since found that the common type tends to have a short life span and that there are longer lived varieties. Not really wanting to remove it and start again, in the dead spots I have planted the tougher version "Yareena" as well as the native succulent Carpobrotus glaucescens or Pigface (pictured below) which I hope will eventually create a lovely patchwork effect.