garden with chickens can be a pot of fun . They ’re often underfoot ( and under shovelful ) doing some of the oink work , like hit boney sprouts and wriggling ground pestis . The trouble is that chickens do n’t sleep together when to stop helping .
grow solid food in small spaces is challenging enough on its own , but tot up a loose - ranging flock of hens and gardening suffer unmanageable . My chicken - impediment have been 4 - by-8 - foot enkindle bed with obliterable fencing made of rabbit conducting wire . fence in beds , along with some admittance to establish flora in the yard that the chickenscanget into , has kept my muckle out of the bottom most of the time .
This grow season , I have only one raised garden seam because we ’re changing our M layout . All I planned to farm this year was a variety show of constitutional lettuce and some onions , so I cook the seam a few weeks ago , adding some garden soil , compost and peat moss . I blend it up well with the service of the chickens and then planted the sugar seeds and onion starts . The onions are thriving , but the unfit batch of lettuce come never sprouted . What did sprout throughout the wise garden layer was 32 square metrical unit of poison ivy .
The onions are now booby - trapped .
Until I manage to overthrow the toxicant ivy , I ’ve decide to garden around the chickens ’ dust bathing tub — the flock ’s exclusive repair . My thought is they ’re less probable to bathe around my plants because they love their bath , but the area is only appropriate for sure kinds of plants . row of beans , for illustration , ca n’t mold here — they need to be in a raised bed and protected with fencing . But this country can manage some hardy perennials .
My blackberry and Mentha piperita are thriving there , unfenced and always undisturbed by the hens , so I embed deep brown wad plant life and rhubarb industrial plant — what I ’m looking for is ground coverage that ’s also edible . For fun , I put in a couple jalapeño works , too . If they all do well , I ’ll put in a few more things , but for now I postulate to protect the source of the plant I have .
The risk of chickens to the garden is less about what they can peck with their snout than the legal injury they can cause by digging at young root . If I protect those tender ascendent until the plants establish themselves — and until the poulet get drill with the newness in the garden — the plants will be in less danger later on . When I end planting , I staked a tomato plant coop around each new plant . Of naturally the poulet were curious , and they examine to get to the base of each plant before I could get the cages over them . But , once the cages were in place , the poulet could only toil several inches by , leave the new plants unaffected .
Surrounding my odd group of tomato - caged pot , rhubarb plant and jalapeños is one of the rabbit - wire fence I still had lying around . The chickens can leap onto and inside the fence , but they most often do n’t . They ’re already uninterested in the new plant . Once I get to the all-inclusive weeding and mulching that require to be done in this unrehearsed garden and its surrounding area , the plants will offend the wad ’s interest again . It ’s only irregular ; I have no dubiety they ’ll calculate for easy trouble elsewhere .
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