A mother Earth article lied

[lazy gardener]

Let me know if you find a cure. I go to great lengths to keep my birds OUT of the garden.

Perhaps put muzzles and hobbles on them!

 

[Slike]

Lmao. Sounds like the devil was the details (or rather lack-therof!) in that article. Sorry to hear your beloved garden got mauled! Thankfully mine can't produce anti-tank traps at my place because the lava is only a few inches down, but having formerly lived in California as a kid and keeping chickens there I totally know what you mean. It doesn't matter how well (diversely) or how much you feed them. They are one of Nature's best rototillers, along with pigs. Even when they're not seeking out food, they're dirt bathing and wallowing in all that soft, fluffy compost-ammended soil you've painstakingly mixed for your plants, badly exposing the roots and killing the more sensitive things. They can work beautifully in an orchard, but within a garden full of soft-leaved tasty things, you're screwed. They really enjoy much of the same food things we do.

I have a sprawling garden in an irregular shape that mainly creeps along paths I've created through the thick Strawberry Guava thickets on my place. There's tons of leaf litter, and since I started rehabilitating the super poor state of the ecosystem there some years ago, many species of insect which were once not found have moved in. There's LOTS of worms, too, for the chickens in the low spots where all the soil and detritus collects.

I had a feisty Cuckoo, Class A Serama rooster that I love the hell out of, named Pickman. He and his all-Silkie harem would be let out while I was there gardening or clearing jungle, to literally go where ever they pleased, with one real exception: my Marshmallow plants. I am stubborn, so I refuse to spend money on fencing for the sole purpose of keeping them out. Instead I set about training him. It worked half-way. You see, his favorite thing were those Marshmallow plants which I was growing for the medicinal roots, primarily. They were important for me to have, and they were planted only in one spot. Every time he'd go there I'd tell him firmly to get out and shoo him, and he'd take off with his bumbling ladies in tow and not return to them that day. Very soon he understood that that was the only place off limits to him, but in his mind it was only off limits so long as I was around to enforce this. Long story short, while I was clearing in another area to widen the space I had for planting smaller things, he decimated them, ate all the leaves and the crowns from which new leaves can sprout, ruining my prized medicinal plants. I had to harvest them way early and was pretty irritated about it. They had been doing gloriously well, the roots swelling in mass.

The only real way to exclude them is with fencing, but this becomes pricey, inhibitive for you to be able to work in the space without having to screw around with gates, doors, or climbing over wiring, and I personally just dislike it immensely after trying it briefly in the past. It makes the garden ugly in my perspective.

In conclusion, chickens are great for the garden - so long as its their byproducts, and not themselves, finding their way into the place! Their rototilling nature can also be utilized by confining them for a time in a pen over an area you want to prep for gardening. Any smaller, non-woody weedy things edible to them will be devoured and disappear, seeds will be eaten if found, and anything inedible to them will be trampled, ripped at, scratched at, and if its still alive, its usually in such poor, beaten and denuded shape by that point that removal is cake. And all those weeds eaten are converted into poop to fertilize this newly worked soil.

 

[Barry42001]

Lol mine dug up potatoes eat hot peppers( habanero ) that had a humorous moments. Nothing was truly safe in the garden with these little Velociraptors running through it but I do intend to fence off sections of the garden that which is not directly being used for vegetables and other such things will be not available to the chickens

 

[Barry42001]

Lol mine dug up potatoes eat hot peppers( habanero ) that had a humorous moments. Nothing was truly safe in the garden with these little Velociraptors running through it but I do intend to fence off sections of the garden that which is not directly being used for vegetables and other such things will be not available to the chickens

Also I have 24 birds 5 of which are roos all of the same father. Rules are already being very clearly established
Lol.

 

[Dinosaur Feed]

These chickens also know when a fruit is at its peak ripeness. I went out one morning to grab a cantaloupe from the garden and to my amazement, I found a bowel made out of the cantaloupe rind. I should have taken a picture...

 

[Beer can]

Lowe's or maybe it was Home Depot I got a couple 14'x50' rolls of poultry netting for around $15 ea and some cheap metal stakes. Split it lengthwise, now 7'x100' x2 and fenced the garden in. Yeah those chickens will destroy a garden.
I've noticed lately Mother Earth news will let anyone write for them now, see a lot of silly not very well informed information articles on there. Didn't used to be that way back yrs ago .

 

[HoopyFrood]

Our solution was two gardens: one for them to ransack and one for us. Anything we do in their garden is known to be at risk of destruction. We've got big plans this year, ask me next year how it goes Also we're only dealing with five chickens.

Fencing is key, but thankfully it doesn't take much of a fence to keep chickens in/out if they are generally engaged (i.e. not bored). We do let them in our garden but only if we're escorting them. They like to scratch in our wood chip-mulched pathways and we have one little hillock we made in the middle of the garden area and planted with wildflowers; they love foraging around/in that! There is a "no chickens allowed in the garden beds under any circumstances" rule that they are actually pretty good at following. Most of the time. They seem to derive as much joy from surreptitiously yanking garden labels out of beds and running away from us with the labels still in their beaks as much sneaking nibbles off of whatever crops are nearby. Life with chickens!

 

[eatwhatyougrow]

I did see a good article where they had like little runs builts all around the garden. If I ever had the money I would build those. But untill then they get the garden from Oct through March. And I use deep layer method in my coop so all that gets put into the beds. I dig them like two shovel depth. Setting aside the top soil from the first bed. Then add some of the used dlm bedding and add on the top soil from the next bed...until I have done all eight beds...4x9 beds. I do this every other year. It's amazing how good those beds produce. I have been doing it for about ten years. The opposite year it gets dumped into the bigger area where I grow it's about 50' x 70' and gets disked in like early April. Sits for a week or so then gets planted. Also mixed in are last year's grass clippings from the neighbor and their leaves...all mixed in. But yeah Chickens and Gardens, I have never found they mix well. They always eat the veggies and leave the weeds!!!