I know this is seriously off topic, but I want to discuss it anyway.
I currently have 22 chickens that free range 3 acres. 10 of those will be going away in a few weeks, so I should end up with around 10.
From what I have seen their destruction is more from digging than eating. Although they nibble, I keep finding intact plants that they just dug up and left (or covered with woodchips), theoretically chasing after something yummy in the soil around the plant.
So protection as I can. But other than that, they seem to be ignoring most of my crop plants, possibly because they’re planted in among the grass and weeds. They will devour anything that is set off by itself, or protected/covered.
My thought is that by planting thickly, without an organized pattern and without clearing the area, the chickens might not damage my crop plants any more than anything else in their free range area.
Fences will eventually go in, but in the meantime what do the chicken wranglers think of my plan?
I’ll watch your progress on this with interest as I have been thinking of getting back into having some chickens. My experience however is that they are horribly destructive to any planted areas, so much so that I got rid of them a few years back. I don’t have room or need to maintain a big flock and a half dozen or so is barely enough to keep a flock going, let alone apply any kind of landrace ideas.
I’ve been studying on ducks and or quail as alternative.
We’ve never let our chickens into the vegetable garden, but they have roamed around the orchard without doing significant damage to the understory plants, so your idea seems like it could work. One thing I’ve noticed, though, is that they like to dig shallow pits to sit in or roll around in on hot days, and this could end up being more damaging than scratching for worms or whatever.
Most of the effective help I have had has come from edibleacres on YouTube. I do have my chickens netted which mostly contains them, but they can fly out depending on how I orient the tractor.
That being said they love shrubs and grapes and low trees. So having those areas between them and the garden is the first deterrent. Next large rocks discourage scratching up newly planted trees. And finally wire mesh covers can help protect crops from poultry and other wild birds.This channel has helped me to further my ability to work through my chickens.
I dont currently have chickens but my mom does and has for a long time. She tills her garden and plants in rows and the chickens often go in and take dust baths. To my memory, that is the biggest impact. Also new young plants will get shredded pretty good. In general my mom doesnt let them free range for a month during planting time. However, i have a theory that if you dont till, have cover crops, no free dirt, and plant in a polyculture, you might minimize or completely remove any damage by the chickens
Oh, that seems clever. I’ve heard that gardeners sometimes plant stuff that birds love just for the birds to eat, which keeps birds away from the other stuff they’re growing for their own food. I wonder if that’s a good solution for chickens, as well as for wild birds?
What about of trap crops, which are used to attract insects away from the food crops? Would chickens want to spend more time scratching around the trap crops for bugs, since there would be more bugs on them?
I seem to recall hearing somewhere (maybe in a Parkrose Permaculture video?) that currants often get a lot of bugs eating them, and chickens love currants, so you can always give currants with larvae inside them to the chickens, who consider the larvae a bonus.
Maybe a “fence” of fruit shrubs that chickens love, like currants, would work?
My farming partner runs chickens. They are let out most days for a short time but the veg growing areas are strictly out of bounds being either fenced or too far away for them to bother with in their hour of freedom. They do have access to a developing food forest but it’s so dense with grasses etc that they don’t venture there much at all.
I think a lot depends on how much space they have to roam. When I was a kid, we always had chickens, lots of chickens, probably a hundred, sometimes more and turkeys too. We also had big gardens, all surrounded by lots of open pastures, weedy areas and woods. The chickens were completely free range, and I don’t ever recall an issue with them messing up the gardens.
Maybe it’s a breeding thing but the chickens I’ve had in recent years were big wussies. Afraid to venture into the woods or tall weeds. They just wanted to hang out in the mowed yard waiting to be fed and destroy any planted area they had access to. Although back then DDT was still popular, so raptors of any type were few and far between, plus any that did show up and anything resembling a coyote or fox was shot on sight.
Interesting. So it may be possible to breed chickens that are happy to stay in wild areas (where presumably there are a lot more bugs to scratch for) and leave garden beds more or less alone?
Currants only produce fruit for a few weeks each year. You would need to plant a diversity of berries to keep the chickens occupied throughout the season. And if you had all these berries, you would probably start thinking about how to keep the chickens away from them so you could save some for yourself!
Maybe if you grew a variety of grains and berries and such? My currants (both red currants and black/cassis) never had any serious bug problem, so not sure if this is a regional thing, but they also only ripen within maybe a 2 to at most 3 week window, so you’d likely want to also plan on having other chicken snackies planted.
That makes sense. So you’d probably want to have a row of alternating fruit bushes that is producing something chickens love through the whole season.
Maybe if you used those bushes as a fence to keep chickens out of the garden, they could eat all the berries on one side, and you could harvest all the berries on the other side for yourself?
I don’t know how prone chickens are to dig their way through bushes. Or fly to the other side.