The Reality of Gardening with Chickens

Here thar be gold!

Many who work their gardens dream of sustainably living or supplementing their table with the riches grown within their gardens. Those dreams sometimes include those golden butt nuggets, breakfast pooped out by our feathered companions. Eggs.

Ugh, Dinosaurs

What many glossy books and pretty pictures don't tell you is that those breakfast pooping gremlins can be mischievous to the point of destruction, reducing that prized zucchini to an empty shell in a matter of minutes or pecking your kale plants till they are just leafless green spears jutting up from the ground like strange green saplings. Or that their poop is everywhere...

A gardener with chickens has to be smart, strong-willed, and ready to move when those breakfast pooping mini dinosaurs are eyeing your garden.

Let Them Run!

The first thing you should plan is a healthy sized run for your flock. This run will be their time out space when their antics are not appreciated, so the bigger the better. Additionally, there will be issues with predators and not just the four-legged variety. Death can come from above. So, plan accordingly and include cover for them to run under including a human built or what nature provides (bushes and trees).

In terms of size the common recommendation is ten square feet per chicken. This is essentially a 5ft by 2ft space per bird. Below is a pretty healthy size run for three chickens (though we all know chicken math...) and letting them forage is a critical part of being a modern feathered dinosaur caretaker.

Fowled Up

Additionally, if you plan on giving the time in your garden know that chicken poop or any animal feces is a contaminant that can make you or anyone who eats befowled (it's actually spelled befouled :-) food very sick! This means 120 days of no harvesting on root crops or low-lying harvested plants like lettuces or creeping plants like strawberries that raw manure may have contacted. So, yeah plan on letting the foraging grounds lay unplanted for a season. This would be a good time to implement cover crops in sections and let the dinosaurs roam free, taking care of pests and scratching away at the ground.

The Best Laid Plans...

The most important thing to do is make a plan, recognizing that those will have to change. It's good to have a basic idea of what your layout is and how you are going to implement this. Draw it out. Talk it over with your family and/or friends.

The point is to have a plan.

In Conclusion:

Those dreams of chickens frolicking in your garden are real they just need to have proper boundaries and you need to have realistic expectations.

There will be poop.

There will be hungry chickens who will eat all your plants, if given the chance.

There will be those eager to eat your chickens.

So, dream big and harvest those glorious golden butt nuggets!