combining chickens and vegetable garden

[katerinask]

Hello, I am new to this forum. Thank you for your help and useful comments.
We want to start our own farm project in Guadeloupe, France which is located in the Tropics of Caribbean.
Our idea is to have free range chickens in a fenced block for some weeks until they clean it from the weeds and then start our own vegetable garden in the same block. Since fresh chickens manure is very strong and can kill the plants, do you think we should wait until we plant or do you have any other suggestion how we can facilitate the maturity of the manure?
Thank you!
Katerina

 

[ChickenCanoe]

Which of the islands are you on?
It depends on how many chickens and how much space but I don't think there will be enough manure to be a problem. You can mix the manure with the topsoil which should be enough safeguard.
The nitrogen in the manure will leach out fairly quickly. What makes growing in an area with chickens more of a challenge is the excess phosphorus, not the nitrogen. The nitrogen will leach but the phosphorus won't.
Can you find a place there to get a good soil test performed? If so, I would do one now to know what you are starting with and another after you evict the chickens.
I haven't been to Guadeloupe so I don't know what the soil is like but I know there are a lot of vegetables and fruit grown there. It is down to the soil on your property.
I imagine Guadeloupe is comprised of volcanic soil, which can be quite fertile.
I am fairly familiar with gardening around the Caribbean and on some of the islands I'm familiar with, some have rather thin topsoil, some are fairly rocky and some have a salt problem.
Some of the Bahamas were worst. Jamaica is probably the best soil of the islands I've been on.

 

[katerinask]

Thank you for your kind and helpful message!
We haven't found the right farm yet but we search in Basse Terre. I will search how can I perform a soil test here. There is a big problem here, the presence of chlordecone, a pesticide that is still present in the water and it is quiet rare to not find it... This means no organic chickens since we don't find a farm without it.
Let's see!
Thanks again!

 

[U_Stormcrow]

The best way to combine chickens and a garden is in the soup pot. Nor are they "free range" as you describe. To concentrate the nutrients you want from the chicken droppings, they need to be penned in your garden area (which they will destroy to bare dirt/earth). But as @ChickenCanoe says, chicken droppings are "hot", they tend to burn plants, particularly veggies, until they've had time to mellow.

My wife and I have 30 acres, but only actively make use of about 6 - the rest provide privacy. Our 50-55 birds don't drop enough in the 4.5 acres available to them, or even the 1.5 acre they actively roam, to significantly impact the soil over the last year. OTOH, we use deep bedding in the coop, and deep litter management methods in the run. The combination of their droppings, the leaf litter we use for those practices, some straw from the nesting boxes, and time has made some absolutely phenomenal compost.

So, I think you are on the right track, but should give more thought to your timeframe and your methods of implementation. If you have most of forever, and can afford to wait, free ranging the birds for a long time, then moving in the garden afterwards will, eventually, work. If your timeframe is shorter, contain the birds (or at least, the majority of their droppings), and use a more traditional (and faster) composting method to obtain soil for your garden plots. and if you have time and budget, build a combined garden shed/walk in coop. Fence a whole huge area in which to keep your birds contained. Build raised beds within it, and fence them off from the chickens, so that your chickens can run around them, eating loose seeds, grasses, bugs while you use composted droppings from their shed house to enrich your garden soils.

All that fencing/netting can be expensive though, can become an eyesore, and can be inconvenient when you are actually working the beds. Make sure you design a way to fence the birds out of areas to allow you to work the garden more easily, without "supervisors" while you are weeding or harvesting.

 

[NatJ]

Our idea is to have free range chickens in a fenced block for some weeks until they clean it from the weeds and then start our own vegetable garden in the same block. Since fresh chickens manure is very strong and can kill the plants, do you think we should wait until we plant or do you have any other suggestion how we can facilitate the maturity of the manure?

It would depend on the amount of manure (which is affected by the amount of space, and how many chickens, and how long the chickens were present.) You might be able to just plant right away.

In a warm or hot climate, you could certainly plant within a few weeks of moving the chickens out.

The easiest way to know for sure is to try it. Maybe move the chickens out, and plant a small amount of each crop right away. Then plant a little more of each crop once a week. Make notes on how well each crop does. You might find that some things can be planted immediately and others need to wait a few weeks, or you might find that everything can be planted right away, or everything after two weeks, or something like that. But you should only have to do the experiment once, because after that you'll know the answers.

 

[U_Stormcrow]

Look to open air coop designs - great for high temp/high humidity environments, and not resource intensive to construct

 

[U_Stormcrow]

If you divide the garden into fenced areas, rotate the chickens thru, following behind with your weeding/mulching/planting/harvesting in a rotational gardening process, you can make that work, yes. Most don't want to dig in soils recently filled with chicken droppings - your post gardening sanitation needs to be top notch - but it is absolutely something that can be done.

i.e. (and similar variations)

 

[ChickenCanoe]

Thank you for your kind and helpful message!
We haven't found the right farm yet but we search in Basse Terre. I will search how can I perform a soil test here. There is a big problem here, the presence of chlordecone, a pesticide that is still present in the water and it is quiet rare to not find it... This means no organic chickens since we don't find a farm without it.
Let's see!
Thanks again!

Keeping chickens can be less of a challenge on islands than on the mainland due to fewer predators. I can imagine that they will mostly birds of prey and dogs. Many Caribbean islands have mongoose as well. Do you know of any others in Guadeloupe?

 

[katerinask]

Yes I read that mongoose eat their eggs and maybe chicks but we plan to keep their eggs protected and in general their house will be fenced. However, I am worried about heavy rains (in organic agriculture we should leave an area protected for them to be outside when the weather is bad) and also if it is very hot outside (we thought to plant fast growing trees around its block).

 

[katerinask]

The best way to combine chickens and a garden is in the soup pot. Nor are they "free range" as you describe. To concentrate the nutrients you want from the chicken droppings, they need to be penned in your garden area (which they will destroy to bare dirt/earth). But as @ChickenCanoe says, chicken droppings are "hot", they tend to burn plants, particularly veggies, until they've had time to mellow.

My wife and I have 30 acres, but only actively make use of about 6 - the rest provide privacy. Our 50-55 birds don't drop enough in the 4.5 acres available to them, or even the 1.5 acre they actively roam, to significantly impact the soil over the last year. OTOH, we use deep bedding in the coop, and deep litter management methods in the run. The combination of their droppings, the leaf litter we use for those practices, some straw from the nesting boxes, and time has made some absolutely phenomenal compost.

So, I think you are on the right track, but should give more thought to your timeframe and your methods of implementation. If you have most of forever, and can afford to wait, free ranging the birds for a long time, then moving in the garden afterwards will, eventually, work. If your timeframe is shorter, contain the birds (or at least, the majority of their droppings), and use a more traditional (and faster) composting method to obtain soil for your garden plots. and if you have time and budget, build a combined garden shed/walk in coop. Fence a whole huge area in which to keep your birds contained. Build raised beds within it, and fence them off from the chickens, so that your chickens can run around them, eating loose seeds, grasses, bugs while you use composted droppings from their shed house to enrich your garden soils.

All that fencing/netting can be expensive though, can become an eyesore, and can be inconvenient when you are actually working the beds. Make sure you design a way to fence the birds out of areas to allow you to work the garden more easily, without "supervisors" while you are weeding or harvesting.

The other idea is to let the chicken enter in the block vegetable garden for some weeks and then when they will weed everything we will put cardboard or plastic to cover the whole area. After some weeks we add compost and we are free to start! What do you think?
We search a farm of 1-2 hectares since we are only two and we don't want to use tractor but chickens legs to work the land. So the technique will be no dig.