planning my garden

[tom e]

My girls favs: cherry tomatoes (we do the little yellow pears), large leaves of Brussels that you cut off anyway, cucumber- I press it through the hardware cloth so it's bite sized for everyone, I always get volunteers of sunflower from scratch they missed, cantaloupe- heck any melon or squash for that matter!!

 

[ChickenCanoe]

I cover crop my garden beds with oats, wheat, field peas, buckwheat (only if it will stay above freezing), winter vetch (for when buckwheat doesn't work), and sometimes red or white clover. Then I put hoop pens over the raised beds and run them in there. I don't worry about weeds because the chickens eat them too.
I have 4 beds over 40' by 4'. Two were planted in fall crops, chickens not allowed because I want the lettuce and cole crops.
The other two in cover crops/green manure/chicken food. Those wiped out/pooped over beds become my spring lettuce/cole beds for spring. When the fall/winter crops are gone, they get planted in the above cover blend. Chickens wipe them out in the spring and they become my summer beds and on and on infinitum. Summer beds become spring beds, spring become fall beds.
On top of chicken crap and whatever greenery they leave behind I add the compost made up from cleaned out bedding, feathers, heads and blood and any other greenery I can scrape together.
The garden gets better each year.
Turnips are also a great green for chickens.

 

[BarredBuff]

You can grow field corn then let beans run up it. You could sprout grains. You could plant sunflowers.

 

[catterbug]

My chickens love pretty much anything. They even ate the tops off of my broccoli. The one thing they did not touch was my celery.

 

[noodleroo]

Mine really like chickweed and kale. They like all the squash, too. If you've never planted chickweed, it grows easily and makes a great addition to a salad. You can make pesto with it, too. Just make sure you plant enough; the chickens will devour tons of it...

 

[jomoncon]

Quote:
My chickies just love the broccoli, cauliflower, & cabbage leaves. I trim off the lower ones & they think it's the best treat ever - second only to mealy worms.

 

[Carols Clucks]

Kale

Kale

and more Kale

That is what all of our chickens LOVE out of the garden

And once it grows tall enough they can't reach the top, the few hens that break in to the garden dont seem to kill them

 

[felidaet]

I wrote up a long reply to this but it looks like it disappeared when I pushed send. I don't want to retype the entire reply.

A few comments:


> Mine like almost everything grown in the garden.

> BOSS should be on the top of you list. I grow 6 rows that are 20' long for my 34 birds. No need to buy fancy seed. Just plant some from the BOSS you buy at the store. It grows great.

> You can feed them your extra corn after it is too mature for you to eat. Some people will argue this saying that it is too fattening. I don't give them too much.

> Spaghetti squash is also one of their favorites. I plant an extra hill each year to make sure there is plenty for them. (I have to make sure to have some for my family to eat. It is one of our favorite garden crops.)

> Chickweed is truly a weed in this area. It tries to take over my garden every fall. The chickens eat lots of it but they barely make a dent in the amount I ususally have. (My garden is more than 1/3 of an acre).

 

[jomoncon]

Quote:
I was planning on growing a couple of rows of sunflowers for my girls next summer and I was wondering which variety to plant. Now I know - just some BOSS!!

And I don't even have to buy any seeds. They are already in the birdseed & the scratch.

 

[Egghead_Jr]

My girls really enjoyed the raised bed of greens. From chard to green leaf lettuce. The good news on the tomatoes is they did'nt wrek havock on them, we still had plenty for the house. Grape tomatos are prolific! Far better yeld than cherry. Once they started to drill holes in a few pumkins it was time to harvest. Fed em the halloween carvings and broke one up twice a week there after for em. This year were putting in a border of sunflower for estetics, shade for young asparagus (that is fenced in!) and feed for chickens and wild birds a like.