who has chickens AND a veggie garden?

AEJEfarm · May 10, 2016

We have 5 chickies who will be moving into our backyard and free-range throughout the day unsupervised in a few weeks. I also have 4 10x10 plots in the same yard. 2 are for flowers (rose bushes, lillies, sunflowers, etc) the other two will have lettuce, broccoli, assorted herbs and tomato plants. I have read that they need to be completely encased, others say a 3-4 foot wire fence on the perimeter will keep them away. Id love to see some people's setups to keep their chickens out of the garden, and id love to hear any advice.

oldhenlikesdogs · May 10, 2016

We use a 2 foot tall green wire fence, mine don't hop over, i have about 40 free ranging chickens. Mine also won't fly over the 3 foot tall pasture fence.

Rock Home Isle · May 10, 2016

The fence around my garden is 3 feet tall and is made of 2 x 4 welded wire.

pdirt · May 10, 2016

It depends on how bad they want to get in there. We put up a 5 foot high fence for their secondary run and they can fly over it, so we need to put netting over it.

But for a garden, if they have enough good stuff to forage on, they probably won't bother it with a short fence. I'd put as tall of a fence as you can get afford. Our current garden is not at our house. But when we did have a fenced garden, they easily flew over the 3 foot fence. They didn't do it all the time, but regularly enough that they destroyed parts of our veggie garden. Our chickens also had 11+ acres to forage on, but they preferred the yard with overhead coverage from trees and the deck. They won't bother flowers specifically, but they can and do dig around them, potentially uprooting the whole plant. It depends how much time they have available to do this and also how dense the growth is around the plants. A well-manicured flower/veggie garden won't have much for weeds or grass around the plants and that is chicken heaven to destroy the plants.

eviemethugh · May 12, 2016

pdirt said:
It depends on how bad they want to get in there. We put up a 5 foot high fence for their secondary run and they can fly over it, so we need to put netting over it.

But for a garden, if they have enough good stuff to forage on, they probably won't bother it with a short fence. I'd put as tall of a fence as you can get afford. Our current garden is not at our house. But when we did have a fenced garden, they easily flew over the 3 foot fence. They didn't do it all the time, but regularly enough that they destroyed parts of our veggie garden. Our chickens also had 11+ acres to forage on, but they preferred the yard with overhead coverage from trees and the deck. They won't bother flowers specifically, but they can and do dig around them, potentially uprooting the whole plant. It depends how much time they have available to do this and also how dense the growth is around the plants. A well-manicured flower/veggie garden won't have much for weeds or grass around the plants and that is chicken heaven to destroy the plants.

I agree!
If you give your chickens some "jobs" to do, they won't mess with your garden toooooo much. We have a compost pile, manure pile, and pile of hay near the chickens, they love turning up all of those. We recently put a pile of fresh cut branches near them that they love to play in. They can CLEAN OUT over grown areas very very quickly, and prefer areas with shade. So a full sun garden doesn't hold as much allure necessarily if you have other things going on. It's also fun to lay boards on the ground and turn them over after awhile to let the chickens have all the bugs.

who has chickens AND a veggie garden?

More options

AEJEfarm

Chirping

oldhenlikesdogs

Hope Springs Eternal

Rock Home Isle

Songster

pdirt

Songster

eviemethugh

Chirping

Similar threads

New posts New threads Active threads

Latest posts

Latest threads

Threads with more replies in the last 15 days