Some of y'all know my story with my precious chickens.

Friday night, as I was out of town for a farming conference, the last two got killed by a predator.

As I'm over here racking my brain over how to use my money to beef up my coop and run, it donned on me that the problem is the solution. I need to slow down and stop being so reactive.

My original solution was to bury cinder blocks around the walls of the run, overlap chain link over the cinder blocks and the pallets that make up my run walls, and possibly add electric fence. The electric fence would be an expensive last resort to add onto all the labor intensive first plan.

Another solution I came to was getting a dog. After thinking long and hard about that, I am not getting a dog. I can't give a dog a good enough life right now, so I'm not getting one. I don't want to feed one, house it, or compost it's manure right now.

I've been thinking on all this since the first chicken got killed. I've created a high concentration of tasty, unprotected prey animals. They need protection from part of the system.

So for a while, I've been brooding on the permaculture principle that "the problem is the solution." I've been looking for ways to apply it to other peoples' problems, and it is becoming more and more obvious to me in every case. Listening to Jack Spirko's Survival Podcast episode on permaculture design for the fourth time and he reminded me that people are part of natural systems.

Duh, Nate! You're part of the system, you dummy!

With that, wheels got turning, and I decided that when I get the new chickens, I'm gonna sleep outside with them.

Wait, no, that's not gonna work... I work when they sleep. So I need to be able to protect these things while they sleep. That's when bad things have been happening. In analyzing the problem, I had to step back and observe my system here. Here's what I observed:

1. I have a chicken coop and a chicken run.
2. My chickens range, fertilize, and eat from my small food forest.

Which begs the question: Nate, why the hell do you have a chicken run if they safely range the forest? The forest is the run!

So there I was, thinking of a way to make my chicken run more secure, but the chicken run is part of the problem. Realizing this helped me come to the solution that I don't need to dig another thirty five feet of trench to bury expensive concrete blocks to secure my run. I need to scrap the run and make the coop secure.

So what I think I'm gonna do is get a small fence energizer, jack my coop up off the ground, and put polywire around the coop where these critters can't get in. Since the coop is the place they're dying, the run isn't what needs secured. DUH!

Getting things figured out, and chickens will be inbound, cause I miss em bad. My system is broken, and I need it fixed. Big progress coming up. I'm gonna have me some big time integrated permaculture eggs.

Hold my beer.

All action for the good of all.

Nate.

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