It is 6:24 am and 33 of my chicks have been running through my garden for an hour now (since I opened up the coop). Did I mention that my tomatoes are now about five feet tall, my corn is about 6' tall with tassles and corn, I can't keep up with my green beans, and my sugar snow peas are super sweet? That is by the beginning of June.
My chicks eat the weeds, but rarely touch a garden plant. I am just trying to quickly grow more chickens because these 33 cannot come close to keeping my weeds at bay. I need about a hundred more...
The biggest problem I have with the chickens in my garden is that they are sort of trampling down a bunch of my onions that I have planted in a bed. I should probably have put a short fence around them because whenever a plane goes overhead or somethin else scares them, they make a beeline dash across the onions and knock them all down.
They are exterminating the bugs in my garden, though, something that was my original purpose for the birds. Also, they are fertilizing everything great with all of that poop. Since it is spread out and I water or get rained on frequently, I am having no problem with the nitrogen burning anything. Rather, the opposite is true. The garden is exploding with the addition of the chickens!
P.S. - Remember, on the tomatoes, the chickens will eat a few of the leaves, but they can only reach a little ways up. A healthy tomato plant needs to have the bottom branches and leaves trimmed off anyways, so if the chickens eat a few of those here and there, it will actually be good for them. I wish that my chickens would eat more of my tomato leaves, because then it would save me the time of having to go out there and trim them myself. Instead, they want to eat more leaves and grass and scratch the ground for bugs in the leaves that I am using for mulch.
