Watch your daylilies!

[FlowerFarmer]

Just consider yourselves warned...
Trying to have my backyard flower garden coexist with my foraging chickens.
Certain plants I am willing to let them pick at, scratch in, and bed on... however... my daylilies have been trampled and scratched up at every opportunity they get, (just another sacrifice I guess) along with a lot of fresh growth and seedlings coming up that I will never get to see bloom (probly ever again :tear)
I have made barriers around certain plants and flowers.... but it's a hopeless cause.
I think it's time to come to terms with the fact that my backyard will never be the same again.
I love my chickens (and I only have 4 of them) Im just not too fond of this habit

Watch your flowers... enjoy them before they get carelessly ruined.

 

[ChooksChick]

I make little tunnels along fence out of hardware cloth for all of my border perennials. Once they're up and well established, I can take the hardware cloth down and the larger plants do fine. I have 30+ large fowl in this yard, most a couple years old. I also put broken flower pots over them upside down, so the first several inches are protected and the plants just grow up and out of the pot. My false indigo looks wonderful coming out of one this year.

It's difficult, but not impossible for plants and chooks to co-exist...but I did lose many of my perennials before I learned they need to be protected for the first tender growth.

Edited to correct for pre-coffee finger-foibles.

 

[hennyannie]

So sorry about that. My daylilies here are off limits till the blooms are gone. I just posted yesterday about my first bloom. Also this will make you feel better: About 14 years ago I moved into my house and the first thing i planted was daylilies alog the back fence, they di great and were getting tall and about to bloom. One day I go out expecting blooms and they have been eaten. Just the top of the bloom, plant untouched. I was so disapointed. Come to find out the neighbors donkey waited till they got tall enough he could reach over and eat them. Did you know that in some countries people eat daylilies?

 

[columbiacritter]

Quote:
NOT ALL PLANTS SOLD AS DAYLILLIES ARE SAFE TO EAT!!!! Many "DayLillies" are toxic to people.

That being said my chooks don't seem to have issues eating either type. I have a 2 acre yard that is heavily planted and am always working on new types of protection for my plants. It seems somethign that workds great for one type is useless for others. It makes my chooks crazy when I find a way to deny them access to a bed they've been tearing apart. My oldest hen will use nasty, nasty language.

 

[ChooksChick]

Quote:
NOT ALL PLANTS SOLD AS DAYLILLIES ARE SAFE TO EAT!!!! Many "DayLillies" are toxic to people.

That being said my chooks don't seem to have issues eating either type. I have a 2 acre yard that is heavily planted and am always working on new types of protection for my plants. It seems somethign that workds great for one type is useless for others. It makes my chooks crazy when I find a way to deny them access to a bed they've been tearing apart. My oldest hen will use nasty, nasty language.

Yes, I've been told ALLLLLLL about myself, too!

I actually have a pen in the run rotation in my yard that wasn't keeping in some of my more determined hens. In my backyard flock, I have multiple pop doors off of one coop, each leading to a different run, so I can grow greens and rotate the birds through as needed. In one run, I have combo cattle panel as a perimeter, which gets closer together toward the ground to prevent younger animals from getting through. They would just fly up on top and go over. I extended the height with 4' sections of bamboo and had cross-running pieces of bamboo for a similar, but decorative grid above. Guess what? 8' isn't high enough for some of these girls, and they'd laugh as they flew up, then down. Well...bad words.

So, early last summer, I planted two grapevines in the middle of the two long sides of this 40' x 15' run. By summer's end, I had 15 or 20 grapes, (woohoo!) but more importantly, I had grapevine extending around most of the bamboo, making it more solid and less defined for going over. This spring, the vines have already given me tons of growth, and by the time they're a year old, they'll have arms running over the run, criss-crossing to begin what will be an arbor-style roof for the whole thing which will have edible foliage and fruit!

I can't say enough about how well this is going, nor how quickly!

I'm also going to grow vining spinach, and quinoa, if I can coax it into growing. I deliberately have rocks piled along fences, because I toss handfuls of a mix I have them make up at the feed mill for me: Canadian, Austrian, and Maple peas; alfalfa; wheat; oats; flax; safflower; sunflowers; millet; milo; and field corn. This gets into the cracks between the rocks and I water it for a week, just a bit. They can't scratch the roots out and eat what grows over the top, keeping the plant's root intact. The rocks shade the roots, keeping the plant from drying out. It's a perfect way to have good forage for them.

If you give them a fast-growing edible alternative, it is easier to keep your perennials alive.

 

[KirstenJL]

This is good news for me as my woods have been planted heavily with daylilies. They are invasive here and hard to dig up. I knew daylilies were toxic to cats so I didn't want to let the chickens eat them, but if it's safe, then I'll set my (soon-to-be-completed) mobile run over them and let the chickens have at them!

 

[MareeZoCool]

My chickens don't bother my Daylillies - they are evil to my roses!

 

[welasharon]

Mine leave both the daylillies and the roses alone. Creeping jenny, however, is toast. I got some more and am going to plant it in a cage so they will leave the roots.

 

[hennyannie]

This article about them being edible was in Carolina Country, put out by our electric co-op. It's kind of a joke around here because one year I got so caught up it planting flower beds that I neglected my veggies badly. So now when the DH sees me in the flower beds he says ""Annie why dont you plant something we can eat?" I just have regular daylillies, all named varieties. My SIL is in a daylily club and she has given me most of them.What types are poison? Not that i would eat their lovely blooms anyway.

 

[rebel-rousing-at-night]

Quote:
This post warns us about chickens...are you SURE you aren't talking about my ex-husband?!?

He moved my beautiful daylilies to who knows where?

He was a flower annihilator...and while he was here my flowers were a hopeless cause.