Without telling us, the workers decided to custom build the gate lock out of welded rebar and scrap steel. I actually like it a lot. It will probably end up rusting once the paint and anti-rust primer scrape off. But for now, it is a custom one-of-a-kind lock that you won’t see anywhere else:

We filled up the raised garden beds with coconut husks about halfway:

Then we filled them all the way up with some of our clay topsoil mixed with shredded coconut husks to give the clay some air pockets and water permeability:

Now it is pretty much done and ready for the chickens:

Now, Praew has signed up for a class on organic chicken farming at Organic Way nearby. At the class, they give each participant 5 organic chickens to take home, and we now have a home waiting for them. It will be good to have someone to ask about cleaner ways of raising chickens without falling for all of the sales pitches out there for whatever supplements or vaccines the large companies are trying to sell everyone. 🙂

One last comment that I will be posting more about later is that you will notice above that the gardens are all rounded on the ends. This was done for a very specific reason. Praew is working with some of her students on designing a mobile robot for gardening. The guys at farmbot.io have done some pretty cool things with a CNC based gardening robot. Praew’s thought is that while their design is pretty cool. it doesn’t scale well because it would require bigger and bigger gantries and longer and longer rails for the gantry to move on if you want to enlarge your garden. So Praew’s design is to build a mobile robot that lives on the top of the bricks at the edge of the garden, and runs along it like a monorail. It can have a charging station at one point on the edge, and can run around the entire garden on its own doing what needs to be done. Watering, weeding, planting, and maybe someday even harvesting. No wires, no rails, no moving gantry. Just a mobile robot that crawls around the wall of the garden with an arm long enough to reach halfway across the width of the garden.

So the only limitation with her first version is: no corners. It is much easier to design a robot that crawls around a gradual curve than one that tries to turn on a sharp corner. And thus the curved ends of the gardens.

And with this design, if you want a larger garden, just build one. No need to change a thing on the robot. It can drive 100m around the garden as easily as it can drive 10m. And if you need it to work faster, just add multiple robots to the wall and let them collaborate. We are building the garden of the future.