Keeping chickens in your garden can be beneficial or it can be detrimental, depending on how you manage your flock. Here are 6 tips for managing chickens in your vegetable garden so you can enjoy both your chickens and your garden.
Make sure the flock remains in the garden
A fence around the entire garden will ensure that the chickens don’t wander away from the vegetable garden. Another option is to confine the chickens to a chicken tractor while they are in the garden.
A chicken tractor is essentially a portable bottomless coop or cage that confines the chickens to a small area where they can scratch with abandon. Periodically moving the chicken tractor provides the flock with fresh garden ground to scratch in.
Protect newly sprouting seedlings
If you are not using a chicken tractor, protect newly sprouting seedlings with cages made of chicken wire, small mesh woven wire, hardware cloth, or a moveable fence. The same goes for newly disturbed soil, as chickens love to scratch in soft earth. Move the protective wire around as plants in the garden change throughout the season.
Limit chicken time in the garden
Rather than caging soil or seedlings, wait until the vegetable plants mature. Let your chickens into the garden late in the afternoon, shortly before they normally go to roost. The less time they spend in the garden, the less damage they can do.
Another option is to bring your chickens into the garden one at a time while you work there. Without flock mates, a single chicken is more likely to remain nearby where you can monitor its activities.
Entice the chickens to limited forage areas
To encourage chickens to scratch in an area where they can’t do much harm, sprinkle a little scratch grain in that area. Or lay down some boards and turn them over so the chickens can glean the bugs and worms that hide underneath.
Protect maturing fruit
Yes, chickens will eat your ripening tomatoes. Or at least they will peck a hole into each tomato they can reach. They will also peck your red strawberries. And they will poop in inconvenient places, where their droppings can contaminate root crops and leafy greens.
To avoid those eventualities, set up a small fenced area in or next to the garden. Toss weeds, clippings, thinnings, and other garden debris into that area, and let the chickens scratch and poop there. At the end of the season rake the pile together and let it compost for future garden fertilizer.
Keep chickens away from growing plants
If managing chickens in your vegetable garden becomes a bigger chore than you bargained for, you could wait to let your chickens into the garden after all the vegetables have been harvested for the season. Then let them in to clean up bugs, weeds, weed seeds, and other garden pests. Just like gardening itself, keeping chickens in your garden requires careful management and a watchful eye.
Helpful Links
- Safe Kitchen Scraps for Chicken
- Four Kitchen Scraps Not to Feed Your Chickens
- 18 Weeds that Are Toxic to Chickens
And that’s today’s news from the Cackle Coop.
Gail Damerow has written numerous books about keeping poultry, many of them available from the Cackle Bookstore. Image by Lennart Bruchhaus.
