As most of us who free range their flocks know, gardens and chickens don't always coexist happily! Chickens eat plants, dig holes for dust bathing, etc. But they can be beneficial for the garden as well, by means of fertilising the soil with their droppings and taking care of bugs and slugs. This week I would like to hear you all's thoughts on everything garden and chickens. Specifically:
- How do you chicken proof your garden (I.e. minimise damage done to plants etc by free rangers)?
- What plants do chickens not eat?
- Composting with chickens?
I've got a rather ambitious garden plan for the coming year, and chickens play a big part. First, the original questions.
I keep the chickens in the run until the plants can fend them off. I built tunnels to protect the lettuce. Mostly, things were fine, I didn't lose much to the birds, but I have a couple acres they can roam. That helped.
They don't seem to bother beets...but then again, neither do I...
Working on that now. I deep litter my coop, and accumulate until late fall. I partition off part of my garden and use one hog panel bent into a U, with another hog panel across the front as a gate. I cleaned out the coop and dumped it my little enclosure. It's to protect from the poop-seeking dogs as much as anything. When the leaves came off the trees I blew them into the U as well, when it was full, the rest went into the run. It will compost over winter, and be distributed to the garden in the spring.
Now, to the larger plan.
I'm going to start a duck, hog, poultry rotation on the garden. I'll be adding ducks in the spring. The garden will have temporary fencing, likely green snow fence (dogs patrol the ground so predators aren't an issue, and with two acres, they don't try to scale much of anything, they just keep walking). The fence will keep the ducks in and chickens out. Since the ducks aren't as hard on plants, and their manure isn't hot, they will benefit the garden during the "grow" phase.
As the garden is harvested, I will remove the duck fencing and expand the fencing of the feeder pigs. They will come in behind the garden, clean up the plants, root up the ground, and continue the fertilization process. Once the garden is more hog than duck, the ducks will range with the chickens, while the hogs have full run of the garden to keep weeks from establishing and keeping the soil turned. I plan to butcher in mid October.
Once the hogs are gone, the fencing goes back up, and the poultry are turned loose on the garden again to clean up what the hogs missed, and fine till the ground.
I'm also toying with a two-leveled duck swim pond that uses overflow duck swim water to water the garden.
Ambitious, maybe. But I'm curious to see how it works....