Free range - How to protect your plants?

If I am going to free range my chickens how do I protect my plants from being eaten by my chickens? Will chickens eat my orchids and groundcover plants, or do they just scratch the ground and leave the plants alone?
It depends on what plants you are talking about, and to some extent on your own chickens' individual tastes. There are many types of orchids and more types of groundcover plants. Some your chickens might eat some part of, some they won't. You need to identify exactly what's growing in your garden.

My chickens can go wherever they want in my garden, and despite that, or maybe because of it, it is still a lovely garden. There are, of course, some casualties. For example, at this time of year, my birds eat all the primrose petals and nibble the leaves, so I don't see much of that lovely primrose yellow in the lawn. But the primroses persist and spread nonetheless, and the chickens get some fresh and free nutrition. They don't touch the camellias or the daffodils or the crocuses, and when the bluebells come out, they won't touch them either. They don't eat the mock orange blossoms, but they harvest masses of insects that are attracted to it. Likewise they don't eat the viburnum flowers that have appeared on and off all winter, though they do eat the insects the flowers attract.

If you let your chickens roam free and you have enough vegetation for them to be selective in what they nibble, over a couple of years you will find out what works for all of you.
 
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I guess that I have to restrict and enclose my chickens inside a run. What are your opinions about this chicken run kit from Amazon?

https://a.co/d/5XlKyd6

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I guess that I have to restrict and enclose my chickens inside a run. What are your opinions about this chicken run kit from Amazon?
Strictly to contain chickens (versus predator protection) a kit should be fine as is, as long as you don't have any noticeable snowfall to contend with.

How many birds do you have? The run you linked is only about 60 sq ft.
 
The prevailing theory is that it's more effective to clip just one wing. It puts them off balance. That mostly works for us, but we have this one chicken ... 🙄
 
what can work is an electric fence charger but they have to be trained to it, after it nails them a couple times theyre trained lol ... the setup is, cut 3/4" pvc (the grey is less visibly an eye sore) and drill it near the end, then thread aluminum electric fence wire through it and stake out around anywhere you dont want them, set the wire around 5" high .. if you set up the charger well with a good ground its extremely effective to the point you can wire around things that arnt even hooked to the charger and they wont touch it .. the drawback is during warm months youll have to constantly weedeat around it, and it can be a trip hazzard, depending on where you have to run the wire ...
 

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