Gardening With Free Range Chickens

Do you have free-range chickens? Do you wish you had a garden? Do you want to rip your hair out as you try every version of a garden with chickens you can find on Facebook, YouTube or Instagram just to watch them tear it apart down to the root? Us, too. So, this is what we did.

The first transition to our Outdoor Garden with free range chickens

I am no fancy, yuppie gardener or chicken tamer and I do not think I ever will be. We use what we got around our place to get done what we need to at the time, in true homestead fashion. We do not have money to run to the store every time we need a new fastener, nor the time. So, we become spontaneous, if you will.

I am attempting to be far more self sufficient and our dreams are just now starting to become realized little by little. One major portion of this must be the garden. I have made huge plans for my garden this year, too! I invested in a hot water bath pot and accessories and will be acquiring a pressure cooker soon. Thus, I see many days of canning, pruning, picking, and steaming my life away in the kitchen!

To do this I must create a voluptuous garden, which seems simple enough, but we have a few major hurdles. Number one, we plan on moving shortly so all of our plants must be transportable in some way. Number two, our yard is kind of shabby. Don't get me wrong, we do the best we can with what we have, as usual. But it is nothing fancy and half of it is overrun by blackberry bushes and other vines. So our space is rather limited. Finally, number three, because of the yard, the chickens have full access to... well, everything. Therefore, there aren't many places we can hide the plants so they cannot get to them.

Our front yard is full of large shade trees, so there is hardly any sun in it ever to grow plants. Therefore, the backyard is our only option. I encourage you to properly survey your yard or land to ensure you do not have an alternative, sunny option which your free range chickens do not have access to. This means that you should watch the sun pattern in your yard areas for a couple days and survey which is the absolute best choice for your garden. Trust me, if you can put your garden in your overly large front yard versus your backyard which you will do battle with chickens over, your easier option is choice number one!

Honey, a Buff Bantam Cochin hen, hiding in the sticker bushes

We, on the other hand, for various reasons can only use our large backyard area for our garden. Yet, our chickens are free ranged so I knew that they would bother them and probably eat all of my garden to death if I left it to them.

I did plant my seeds a few weeks earlier and let them grow indoors where they were safe before bringing them outside to see if they were ready for the lovely Oregon bi-polar weather, and most of them were. So I packed them up, two by two, and brought them out to a few wooden outdoor tables that I had around the yard. They stayed there for a week or so until they grew even larger and I caught the chickens up on the tables, beginning to peck at my starts. Then I transferred them into the above and below pots and random containers that I used in place of pots.

As time went on, the smaller plants finally began growing and I moved all of them into larger pots and containers. After I spent an exorbitant amount of time moving them to higher tables and moving the tables strategically next to my barn, I went inside to wash up and start to cook dinner for the family.

I looked outside and saw our two Silver Sussex hens, Amelia Earhart and Eyon, and their two buddies, Monkey and Summer, inside - yes, inside - my newly planted garden!

They ate all of my cabbage (which had been growing very well!), hot peppers, and most of my carrots. They ate the Swiss Chard and Kale down to the roots (but I am hoping it comes back). I chased my girls off so quickly they did not know what to do! Then I had to stop dinner, grab my husband and refocus on this new problem!

Now, how do you keep your chickens out of the garden? If they are cooped all the time, I could see this not being an issue for you. But not everyone out here is like that and many of us let them wander around the yard to scrounge for bugs and other goodies. During that scrounging, they will undoubtedly scrounge at your plants. Then you can watch them eat all of your hard work away, little by little, or you can find a way to do something about it!

What we did was use our left over chicken wire from cage building, old cages that were broken, and other miscellaneous pieces to create a "cage" around the garden. This is not the best option for everyone, but for us it works. Again, we need to keep our garden mobile for a potential upcoming move! As a result, they are all being planted in moveable pots and we got lucky by putting them all on the tables outside that are not aesthetically the most pleasing, so it was okay to use them for my elevated garden.

After a lot of work from my hubby, some nails, a few old kennels and cages, chicken wire, and random odds and ends, we finally created our current masterpiece, complete with a lid on the lower half. The upper portion so far has not needed a lid because they've not yet figured out how to get up there.

Let me take that back... They did figure it out, actually, very quickly. They used the carrots, which has a complete cage and top around it, as a stair onto the lower part of the garden. With a bit more pushing, lifting, pulling and tugging, we moved the carrots and old cabbage box away from the other garden so they no longer had a staircase. So far, it has worked. *Knock on wood!*

Check out my first video of our garden below one week after creating our elevated garden!

Now, there are many benefits to the chickens and ducks being amongst the garden. Namely, they eat a lot of the bad bugs away for you. Actually, each type of poultry has its own pests that it eats up - Ducks eat slugs, snails and flies, caterpillars, butterflies, moths, mosquitoes, mosquito larvae, grubs, mealworms, and anything they can find in the water including mollusks, fish, larvae, amphibians and reptiles. Chickens eat beetles, worms, mice, shrews (yup and yup!), snails, small snakes, grasshoppers, crickets, locusts, termites, grubs, maggots (ew, but helpful!), and more. Guinea Fowl eat ticks, fleas, mice, beatles, grass hoppers, crickets, medium snakes, and small rodents! Turkeys eat about anything they can gobble up, literally - grubs, slugs, snails, worms, spiders, snakes, termites, frogs, beatles, grasshoppers, mice, and other small rodents. Pheasants are kept by many poultry lovers but they are difficult to keep because they easily fly away and do not easily tame. If given the right environment, wild pheasants are known to eat beatles, caterpillars, other insects and even ants! They also eat mice and other small animals like the turkeys and guinea fowl which are all wilder birds.

Another benefit of raising poultry and gardening at the same time is using their fertilizer on your crops. With fruit trees, it is easy to allow the chickens and ducks in the orchard with the trees so that they can both fertilize the soil, trim the cover crops and eat the pests. This is definitely a win-win situation! But with a garden, it is a bit more difficult.

Our answer is two ways - First, I literally fill my watering can up out of the duck pond that they all swim in and drink out of. This gives them instant fertilizer and water! Second, we created our own super soil. What I mean is, we have been emptying all of our animal bins, beds and barns out as well as our compost for the last year and a half in one, specific part of the very back of the yard. It is basically closed in and we just continue piling bedding, hay, and table scraps into there every day. The chickens love going through it and eating the leftovers as well as the bugs! Then they help by tilling and turning the compost for us. It rains pretty often here, but we still wet it down from time to time in the summer.

Within the last year, the very bottom of this pile has turned itself into real, fresh, nutrient rich soil. I used this bottom layer to fill my planters and pots up. Messy? Yes. Gross? Definitely. Smelly? Absolutely! But it is also very, very rich soil.

The plants that have been in this mixture from the beginning are absolutely loving it! My pumpkins, winter squash and zucchini definitely have given it a big thumbs up as they tower higher and higher each day. I can't wait to see the monsters that grow!

A final note, and just a slight Toot! on my own horn - these were all grown from seeds. Every single plant. I did not get any as starts or preexisting plants and all were little seed packets, mainly from Dollar Tree, just a few weeks ago. Incredible, isn't it?

Check out the second video of our garden and what we had to do in another week!

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References

Zahra, M. (September 21, 2022), What Do Wild Pheasants Eat?, Feeding Nature, https://feedingnature.com/what-do-wild-pheasants-eat/#more-6376

Hossain, M. (June 15, 2022), What Do Wild Ducks Eat?, Feeding Nature, https://feedingnature.com/what-do-wild-ducks-eat/

Hossain, M. (June 20, 2022), What Do Pekin Ducks Eat?, Feeding Nature, https://feedingnature.com/what-do-pekin-ducks-eat/#more-3947

Feeding Nature (February 2, 2020), What Do Turkeys Eat?, Feeding Nature, https://feedingnature.com/what-do-turkeys-eat/#more-886