Helen Lehndorf

Category: chickens

  • the L-family’s beautiful permaculture garden

    One of my favourite things to do is to visit other people’s vegetable gardens and have a good nose around…I always learn so much and get inspired to go home and get into my own.

    Here are some photographs from a beautiful, well-established permaculture garden on the Kapiti coast I visited in late spring last year.

    Here is their garden photographed from just beyond their porch, you can see this from the house:

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    I loved the way they had their main crops (potatoes, corn) in large clear beds, their salad crops growing more ‘wildly’ in the shadey edges, and they had planted an orchard at the foot of the garden which doubles as the chicken run…the chickens keep the grass from around the base of the trees (most fruiting trees don’t like grass growing around their bases), and the chickens fertilize the trees with their poo…meanwhile, the trees offer shade to the chooks, and food, too. (Unfortunately for my chickens, the two huge trees in their run are feijoa trees, and it seems chooks don’t like feijoas, so no happy harvest for my lot!)

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    Everywhere I turned there were different crops – here you can see salad vegetables, calendula, dark leafy greens and garlic…

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    Near the house was an absolutely beautiful peach tree sorrounded by fennel, with flawless fruit dripping off it. I sat under it for a while – it sure was a special tree – and took a bazillion photographs…but I’ll just share a couple with you here as you may not find photographs of peaches so mesmerising as I do.

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    Beautiful hand-woven baskets and seedling pots made from newspaper…

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    I noticed they had a ground cover of red clover, too.

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    I have another vegetable garden visit to share with you, soon. I hope you enjoyed this one!

  • This is not a gratuitous cute kitten photograph…

    …it’s a cute chicken photo, instead.

    This is Cockatrice – one of our hens. She is the leader of the pack, top of the pecking order and frankly, the brains of the bunch. She was also a quick developer – the first to grow her full comb and to start laying eggs.

    Cockatrice is intelligent, adventurous, nosey and demanding. She seems to be much more aware of us and interested in interacting with us than the other three chickens. She’s one of those animals who verges on being creepy, because you feel like she is way more sentient than she should be.

    (A Cockatrice is a mythological creature which is half-chicken, half-dragon. Willoughby, our resident dragon-lover, named her. She is his chicken.)

    My hen, Harriet, and Fraser’s hen, Hildegaard are bog-standard chickens. They are cute and charming, but don’t have the personality and boundary-pushing behaviour of Cockatrice.

    Magnus’s hen, Syndrome (named after the baddie in the movie The Incredibles) is a silly chook. She’s not very bright. She gets stuck, gets lost and gets easily confused.

    I swear Cockatrice knew what I was doing when I did this photoshoot with her – she stood patiently, stock-still in various poses, like a chicken supermodel.