As JanetMarie said, anything that reaches outside of those cages will be chicken food. Trust me! They won't eat the fruit right away. They'll let you gain a false sense of security about it. Then one day, you'll go out there and find hollowed out squash, just-barely-not-ripe tomatoes with beak-sized chunks missing, skinned zucchini, etc. Ask me how I know!
My girls will also nibble at leaves, especially on young plants. If I were you, I'd go get just a small, cheap roll of chicken wire to protect them until you can put your garden fence up!
Which reminds me that we don't yet have our garden up here, either.
: But this heat lately is just suffocating! Too much to work in!
My current flock has 5 males in it. Three are young, immature cockerels, but the remaining two are adult roosters, father and son. Not even raised together, and beside the occasional squabble to reiterate who's boss, they get along great. They *can* kill each other, so I'm not saying that's untrue, but it's not as common as people like to think, especially with roosters who are raised together from a very young age. Really, it depends on a lot of factors, primarily the individual temperament of the roosters and how many hens there are to go around. Let me just say right off the bat that 6 hens is NOT enough for 3 roosters. You will have torn up hens, who may even sustain injuries from overmating. Those boys may or may not fight over them, but odds are pretty high that they will, and that's even more potential for your girls to be hurt in a squabble. On top of that, those boys will mature a lot faster than the girls, and they will try to force themselves on the girls because those young pullets will refuse their advances for breeding.
If I were in your shoes, just getting started with chickens, I would rehome those boys ASAP.
All of them. Reason being the complications of adolescent roosters coming into maturity with young pullets as I mentioned above. Next year, once your pullets are all grown up, you can try again with baby roosters. By then, those hens will be mature enough to give a young rooster what-for for stepping out of line and teach him proper chicken manners.
Alternatively, if you really wanted to keep a rooster this year, I would invest in building a pen for him to live in away from the pullets, but so that he can see and interact with them through a fence, until the pullets start laying. Once they're laying (and even a week or two beforehand), they'll be more receptive to a rooster's advances. It won't be pretty, because those birds are still inexperienced and it takes practice before things go smoothly, but it will be better than listening to your pullets squawk and scream as the boys chase and harass them all day long.
Just my two cents on that topic.
(my luck). I heard its not good to have more than one rooster in the same flock because they can kill each other. Do you know if that is truth? if so I may have to re-home a couple roosters.
