Gardening with Backyard Chickens

With summer behind us, this is a good time to think about your coop and the types of plants you planted and if it worked for you and your chickens. Whether you plant for shade, food or color, or a combination of all three, the chances are that you are thinking of changing things up next year. Some of the benefits of choosing certain plant materials are that they can repel non-beneficial bugs while still providing an interesting landscape for you and your backyard chickens.

There are a number of gardening books available that can give you valuable insights into the what, why and how, that will pique your interest, such as “Gardening with Chickens” by Lisa Steele of Fresh Eggs Daily and “Free-range Chickens, How to create a beautiful chicken friendly yard” by Jessi Bloom, just to mention a couple.

For Wendy, our resident Master Gardener and me, we tend to favor food over color and pollinators over chemical disease control, so planting for shade and food, whether it’s for the chickens or the multitude of beneficial pollinators are two of our main goals.

Develop a planting plan before planting your garden. Doing so allows for year-round harvest and helps with protecting new growth until plants are fully established. Wherever you are in the country, you will find that your successes are only limited by Mother Nature; too much rain, unseasonable temperatures or bugs.

For this blog series, we are going to walk you through our planting plan for 2017-2018 giving you our reasons for plants selected and their placement in and around our coop. So pull your boots off and kick back with a glass of wine while we walk you through our Chicken Garden!

A Word from Wendy
It is always an adventure trying to figure out what your chickens will eat. Their preferences do change, just as yours and mine do. This morning, despite there being an abundance of leafy greens, they annihilated a Black Beauty eggplant! The most important thing to consider is what plants would be toxic to them. I have found, however, that they will usually avoid what they aren’t supposed to have for the most part. It’s better to err on the side of caution when planting around the coop.

For the winter, I plant leafy greens such as Swiss chard, lettuces and hearty winter vegetables; red and green cabbage, broccoli raab, cauliflower (they only like the greens) and kale. I planted 3 kinds of kale last year and they only liked one. They eventually ate the others, but not until they had exhausted their search for other goodies. I enjoy watching the girls’ anticipation as they see Roger pull something out of the garden, shake the dirt off the roots and hang it on the Slider.
This season I added beets and carrots– we get the roots and they get the greens, so everybody wins. Most of the vegetables are in our main gardens. I start seeds every month and crowd the seedlings into the garden boxes because I know the girls will enjoy the thinning. I planted pea and mustard seed a few inches away from the edge of the coop and pen, with a hoop of wire over them. The wire keeps them from pulling the plants all the way out of the ground and allows for new growth. In the winter I don’t plant for shade as I want them to have as much sunshine as possible.
Don’t forget your herbs! You can use them sprinkled in their food or in the nesting boxes under the straw or hung in the coop. Rosemary, thyme, mint and lavender work well to hang. We also planted a large rosemary (see the top picture) bush in their pen and will be adding more herbs in the spring around the edges of the run. We still have nasturtiums growing but not for much longer, so Roger will hang them from the Slider in the main pen soon.