Proximity to vegetable garden?

harpchick

Hatching
10 Years
Mar 17, 2009
6
0
7
Utah
Is there a rule of thumb about how close I can place a coop to my vegetable garden? It's going to be a small coop -- 4'x8' housing maybe 6 chickens who will free range during the day.

I'm a total novice at this. Space-wise, there is a good spot that is about 10-15 ft. away. It's slightly uphill on a gradual slope, so rain would wash down towards the garden. It just occurred to me that this might be a problem for food contanimation. Will the chickens eat all my produce?
 
We tried a garden last year with the chickens to only end up with some happy hens. I would say that if YOU want to reap any of the benefits of the garden then you need to fence it in or keep the chickens up. Once they find it (and they will) they will visit it every day and as soon as something begins to ripen, if it even makes it that far, it will be eaten.
 
chickens can definitely devastate a whole veggie garden. That said, the manure and runoff would be great fertilizer, so don't worry about contamination. Just worry about the chickens' eating all your seedlings, fruits, and veggies! You'll need to cover it with bird netting or fence it in - probably with a roof too. But, that's cool because it'll keep out the other buggers too - squirrels, rabbits, other birds, etc.
 
Oh dear. It's starting to sound easier to keep the chickens contained. The garden is 16'x40'.
 
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The farm up the road has free ranging chickens and a huge garden. I asked how to keep my birds out. She uses a 4' fence around her garden. The birds have yet to fly over, they don't know what is in the garden and have never been allowed to know.

I am going to put a fence around mine this year and leave an unplanted area between the fence and the actual planted area
 
yah... chickens are favorite foods of lots of predators too, so it's good to keep them contained when they can't be watched. I would love to have mine free-range all day everyday, but it's just not safe for them. My coop is about 15 feet from my newly-built veggie garden. My run has a 1-foot-deep concrete trench around it and is covered on the top and all sides with 1/2 inch hardware cloth to keep the predators out. My garden is also going to be totally enclosed to keep all the potential problems out - chickens and other critters. I let the chickies out to free-range when I'm out with them.
 
one year the chickens ate the garden AS it was being planted.
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My mom didn't notice that the chickens where following her eating the seeds as she was dropping them into the rows.
we didn't have any green beans that year.
They will also eat the Styrofoam off the coldframe too.
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