Gardening with Free-Range Chickens For Dummies
Overview
Maintain a beautiful garden with chickens? Easy. Chickens are great gardening assistants, with lots of benefits for a home garden and landscape—from soil-building to managing pests and weeds. Home gardens can be great chicken habitats if designed well, and Gardening with Free-Range Chickens For Dummies provides a plain-English guide with step-by-step guidance for creating a gorgeous chicken-friendly landscape that helps the chickens and the garden thrive. Gardening with Free-Range Chicken For Dummies offers guidance and step-by-step instructions for designing and implementing a host of different chicken garden plans. Plus, you'll get detailed information on the best plants and landscaping materials for your chicken garden (and the ones to avoid), seasonal considerations, attractive fencing options, predator and pest control, and much more.
- An excellent supplement to Raising Chickens For Dummies and Building Chicken Coops For Dummies
- A plain-English guide with step-by-step guidance for creating a chicken garden
- Advice on how to manage chickens while maintaining a beautiful garden
If you're looking for step-by-step advice on building a chicken garden, Gardening with Free-Range Chickens For Dummies has you covered.
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About The Author
Bonnie Jo Manion has been featured in national garden magazines with her gardens, organic practices, chickens, and designs. Follow Bonnie at VintageGardenGal.com. Rob Ludlow is the owner of BackYardChickens.com, a top source on chicken raising, and the coauthor of Raising Chickens For Dummies.
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gardening with free-range chickens for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
Chickens are gaining popularity quickly. Not only are chickens fun and educational, but they're also beneficial to you and your garden. When you free-range your flock, you gain helpful gardeners who aerate the soil, rid plants of insects, provide composting, and, best of all, supply food — their eggs!Here's how to gain insight on good and bad plants for a chicken garden, layer your garden for free-ranging chickens, and guard against chicken predators.
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Chickens
For raising chickens certain everyday tools are really helpful. They’re tools that assist you in composting, tools that are helpful in feeding your chickens, tools that are great for cleaning a chicken coop, and tools for raising chicks.Use two types of thermometers.Two types of thermometers that are good to have when owning chickens are the long-stemmed compost thermometer and a regular outdoor thermometer for measuring the internal coop temperature.
If you’re new to chickens, you may encounter some common problems that come with raising chickens. Here are some suggestions for solving those problems. Chickens can be a great addition to your garden and your life. They provide natural fertilizer, weed and pest control, aeration, and tasty eggs.Discourage rodents.
Your compost is a custom mixture, an interesting byproduct of your life. All the ingredients thoroughly combined become organic, rich humus with incredible benefits to your soil, garden, plants, trees, and yard. The following list gives you ten ways composting is beneficial:
Compost improves the soil structure by causing mineral particles in your soil to naturally clump together.
So you have a basic chicken coop set-up and an adorable chicken flock. What more could you want? How about making things a little fancier? Here are some creative ways to get a little fancier when raising chickens.Customize egg cartons.Store your eggs in pulp egg cartons that come in different colors. Try lime green, pink, blue, and brown.
Chickens
Whether you’re an experienced gardener, or an enthusiastic newcomer to gardening, it helps to know some basic garden terms to help you further understand garden structure in a garden for you and your chickens.
Plant your garden structure that is compatible with your geographical location and your plant hardiness zone.
Medicinal plants aren’t limited to human use. Medicinal plants can benefit your chickens too. The following three plants are natural de-wormers for your free-ranging chickens:Garlic can be a preventive for worms and is considered an organic de-wormer for chickens.Garlic, allium sativum, is a perennial that grows from bulbs.
Chickens
When you are free-ranging chickens, you need to choose functional plants that offer benefits to your chickens and your garden's soil. Specific types of plants return valuable nutrients back into the soil. In addition to having a layered plant ecosystem and creating a garden foundation anchored with strong structure by using trees, shrubs, and perennial plants, choose plants that are functional according to your needs and specifically helpful.
Chickens
If you are raising chickens, you need to have a manure management program. Composting is ideal. You should have at least two compost bins — one you’re working on filling, and one that’s nearly ready as humus for your garden.A handmade pallet compost bin.Compost bins can be homemade with simple materials, such as stacked pallets as shown.
Chickens
Besides having health and healing properties, many medicinal plants have properties that deter external chicken parasites like lice and mites. These insect repelling herbs can also be cut fresh and placed around your chickens, or they can be dried, and added to their feed. Consider these plants when you’re looking for natural insect repellents:Catnip is known for attracting bees and cats.
Chickens
Most gardens contain a problem area or two. A slope is a problem area in a chicken garden because chickens love a slope and gravitate toward it, continually scratching and creating dirt baths in that area. A barren slope is open to soil erosion and loss of soil nutrients.
If you need a fix for a slope, consider these plants:California wild lilacCeanothus.
Chickens
A damp or wet area is problematic in a chicken garden because chickens don’t do well with continual dampness, and it can create a large unwanted muddy area where nothing will grow. The following plants are good choices for damp areas:Alder treesAlnus. Deciduous trees. Zones vary by species. These nitrogen-fixing trees like ample water and can tolerate flooding.
Chickens
Seeds are another type of food chickens enjoy and forage for. Their beaks are perfectly designed for picking up seeds. Seeds are part of a chicken’s natural diet. Seed-producing plants are a good choice to grow in rotating chicken runs or zones. Here are some good choices:FlaxLinum usitatissimum. Cool-season, full-sun annual.
Chicken breeds, like dog breeds, can be categorized by their different purposes serving humans. Dogs are bred for many purposes, such as physical abilities, appearance, temperament, and show. Chickens have been bred for many purposes, too. Sometimes these purposes overlap, as chicken dual-purpose breeds do. Here are some of the categories:Dual-purpose breedsDual-purpose breeds have formidable egg-laying capabilities and heavy-breed configurations for meat consumption.
Chickens
Predators prey upon chickens for many reasons, including for food, for survival, and to feed their young. Some predators, such as dogs, may consider chickens a game or sport, something innate in their breed, preferring the act of chasing or catching a chicken to actually eating it.
Take a closer look at some of the more common predators of chickens.
Chickens
Your chicken garden should change with each season. Even if you live in a mild climate you still experience subtle season changes and have seasonal chores. You'll want to know how your garden will change with each season, how the seasons may affect your chicken flock, and how chickens imprint your garden each season.
Okay, you’ve picked out the spot. You know where in your garden you want to situate your coop and outside pen. You’ve carefully assessed the size of a chicken flock that is best for you.Chicken coops have many variations. They can be permanent, mobile, new, repurposed, custom, and innovative. Chicken coops can be cheap — as in free — using wood pallets or recycled materials.
Toxicity is a natural defense for a plant, and some common garden plants are potentially poisonous to chickens. Unlike other types of livestock, free-ranging chickens have a keen sense of what is good for them, and what is not, and will most likely not touch or eat anything potentially poisonous to them. However, there are always exceptions, so it is important for you to know what plants do have potential poisonous qualities in your garden.
Chickens are active, and curious, and always on the go. They prefer being able to move about, which makes free-ranging ideal. Normal behavior for chickens free-ranging in the garden includes a lot of wonderful sustainability attributes. Your chickens are part of your weed and pest control, aerating your soil, contributing to your compost pile, and fertilizing your landscape randomly.
Chickens
Eggs are a big part of owning chickens. They come in different colors and sizes and may have some imperfections. It's important to collect them each day and to know proper handling and storing techniques.
Collect fertile or nonfertile eggs for eating at least twice a day or more if possible, and store them immediately in the coolest part of your refrigerator, not in a refrigerator door.
Chickens
If you have chickens, you will have manure. Fortunately, chicken manure is among the most prized of manures. Fresh chicken manure is considered a "hot" manure, which is unsuitable for immediate use. Chicken manure needs to be composted and aged at least two to three months before you add it to your garden. If you don't wait that long, it will burn your plants.
Chickens free-ranging generally will not eat potentially toxic plants in your yard, they seem to have an innate ability to understand what is healthy for them, and what is not. When introducing new plants into your garden, research and check if they could be potentially toxic to your chickens and family pets.
Plants use toxicity as a natural defense to avoid being eaten and to ensure survival to propagate.
Chickens
Typically, hardscape comes in many common materials, such as concrete, concrete pavers, stone, decomposed granite, bricks, and wood decking. Choosing exactly what type of hardscape to use in your garden with your free-range chickens depends on your landscape setting, your budget, and how handy you are.
Many of these hardscape materials have permeable qualities that advantageously allow rain and water drainage to seep into the ground rather than run off.
Chickens
Common softscape elements for your free-range chickens to enjoy are soil amendments, compost, and mulches The type of soil composition and the type of plant materials on your property and landscape will determine what softscape materials are needed to enhance your soil.
For best results, add softscape materials to the landscape in a layering effect.
Chickens
Chickens are living creatures and therefore need shelter, food, water, and protection every day. Hens also require a quiet place to lay their eggs. Following is a list of everyday chores, followed by weekly, monthly, and biannual suggestions.
If you’re going to be gone on vacation for a few days or for an extended period of time, these chores still have to be done.
Chickens
If you love your chickens and have enjoyed free-ranging them on your property, it’s only natural to think of having other farm animals. What joy to have fresh milk, fresh goat cheese, or farm-raised lamb!Chickens are low-maintenance, leave a small livestock footprint, and are adaptable to many different environments.
Chickens
Fencing is extremely important, especially with free-range chickens, because it provides a perimeter for your property and garden landscape. It sets a boundary that keeps things in — and things out. Fencing is a deterrent to predators, but it isn’t always foolproof. You should not only have a solid perimeter fence, but also be vigilant about maintaining it.
Chickens
Chickens are gaining popularity quickly. Not only are chickens fun and educational, but they're also beneficial to you and your garden. When you free-range your flock, you gain helpful gardeners who aerate the soil, rid plants of insects, provide composting, and, best of all, supply food — their eggs!Here's how to gain insight on good and bad plants for a chicken garden, layer your garden for free-ranging chickens, and guard against chicken predators.
You may want to grow grains for your chickens and yourself as a food source. Grains need space, a pasture, or an available fallow chicken zone. Grains need time to reach maturity before harvesting, threshing, and storing them. Another option is to let chickens free-range after the grain has reached maturity.
Grains vary with growing requirements and harvest needs.
Slowing down your chickens from eating your plants in the garden is hard to do. Chickens love tender succulent greens. You can choose to grow these in your vegetable garden for yourself, and hand-feed them to your chickens, or plant them amongst your various chicken runs or zones for your chickens only to graze on.
Chickens
Each layer of your chicken garden offers a chance to grow beautiful edibles. Take advantage of the different heights of plants to provide a stunning layered landscape and a multitude of good eats for your chickens.
Tallest layer
The tallest layer, also referred to as overstory, is the uppermost layer of foliage or canopy in a chicken garden.
Looking for some plants to grow in your chicken garden that have beneficial qualities for your chickens? Look no further. Check out the following herbs that pull double-duty: They are lovely to look at, and they offer health benefits to your chickens:
Catmint: Nepeta cataria. Perennials. Hardy to Zone 3. Full sun.
Chickens
Raising chickens in your garden has huge potential for further creating your preferred garden style, creating the kind of chicken coop you prefer, and how you actually mange your free-range chickens.
People new to chickens can easily get emotionally attached to them. They soon get acquainted with the chickens’ charming personalities and find out how much fun they are in the garden.
You may have pets already as part of your household. When introducing chickens to cats or dogs you already own, you should remember that your pets can become best buddies or deadly foes with your chickens.
Pets can be friends to your chickens
Just like when Mom and Dad bring home a brand-new baby sister or brother, everyone goes through a period of acclimation and adjustment to the new family member.
Chickens
If you purchase a prefab chicken coop, hire someone to construct it from scratch, or start with buying a garden shed, it will cost you a pretty penny. In the spirit of sustainability, you may want to look for something existing on your property that could be modified for a chicken coop. Consider modifying other existing structures for chickens.
Chickens
If you asked 20 poultry enthusiasts which breed was their favorite, you might get 20 different answers. It really is an individual preference. Research some of the breeds you aren’t familiar with, and don’t let limited availability deter you. Many hatcheries have great selections of popular and rare breeds for sale as day-old chicks.
Chickens
Sustainability is the ability to maintain a desired level of ecological balance without depleting natural resources. The more time you can devote to growing your own food, raising your own chickens, composting, recycling, collecting rainwater, and conserving resources, the richer and more self-sustainable your life will be.
What if you could create a working, harmonious, and easy plan to balance raising chickens, composting, and gardening, while allowing your chickens to be free-ranging? It has been done, and the result is a self-contained chicken hamlet — or a chicken utopia.
What would this chicken utopia look like? A chicken coop is centered in the middle, flanked on each side (east and west) with large, fenced, permanent chicken garden runs that also alternate as garden growing areas.
Chickens
Chickens fit in well with a layered plant landscape. Chickens thrive because this type of ecosystem provides shelter, food, and protection. Softscape elements are most beneficial added in layers. Think of your style of gardening as an integrated plant landscape with each layer working together. Imagine each tree or plant as building a plant community with symbiotic relationships, rather than isolated by itself.
Chickens
If you’re planning to keep chickens, it's best to start with a small flock — start with at least three. Chickens like to be active, and they require space for foraging in your garden or yard. They prefer space to roam, rather than confinement, although sometimes they need to be confined.If you have more space, perhaps you want a larger flock.
Chickens are very hardy and adaptable to many types of environments. How do chickens fit in with your lifestyle? Maybe you’re a city slicker in a very urban environment with little spare time. Perhaps you’re part of a trendy family in the’burbs growing your own food. Maybe you’re a true country homesteader and love working your land.
Chickens
No matter how your land lays out, you have many different options for free-ranging chickens. The best method for you depends on your lifestyle, your garden landscape, your property setting, and how you want to raise and manage your chickens. Free-range can be divided into two basic categories, free-range and confined-range.
Chickens
The best way to have an abundant bountiful vegetable garden is to keep your free-ranging chickens entirely out of it. Keep it enclosed, fenced off, and out of bounds. Don’t grow vegetables amongst free-ranging chicken, because of the remote possibility of sickness and disease such as salmonella.
Low-height vegetables should be off limits to free-ranging chickens because 1) they will eat them all, and 2) if fresh chicken manure comes in contact with these vegetables, anyone who eats them could become violently ill.
There are many medicinal herbs that play a role in benefiting chickens’ general health and laying, repelling pests, and even de-worming. The herbs described here also are used as edibles for culinary use and provide benefits in a chicken garden for chickens.
Planning your herb garden
Herbs can be planted intermingled throughout your chicken garden, and close to the chicken coop.
Edibles come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and flavors! These edible layers can be a major part of a layered landscape and a key component in your chicken garden.
Edible landscaping, with co-mingling herbs and vegetables within ornamental gardens, is exploding in popularity today. Be very careful. If you’re practicing this trend, always remember to use food-safe products and practices.
Chickens
Planting fragrant plants in your garden and landscape is pleasing. The ability to smell is an important sense, and it contributes to a desirable garden ambience. The smell sense is very powerful and can evoke strong childhood memories or a favorite place.
When raising chickens in a chicken garden, make sure your chickens are managed well to keep odors away.
Chickens
One form of plant protection for free-ranging chickens is plants that have spikes, thorns, or other objectionable physicality. Chickens seem to be able to maneuver around and under these intimidating plants, and they give predators pause in pursuit. An example is a thorny floribunda rose, Rosa. Of course, you, your family, and friends have to be careful of the same thorns when pruning and walking by them.
Chickens
It’s important to use landscape for screening where it’s necessary in your chicken-friendly garden. Assess how small or big a space you need to screen. Landscape for screening comes in many different sizes, shapes, and characteristics. A tall vertical space requires a different plant for screening than a wide, somewhat low space.
Chickens
Mature trees, by their very height and presence in a landscape setting, provide shade for your chickens, and also offer visibility shelter from sky predators, such as hawks, owls, and other birds of prey. Additional planting of lower protective shrubs among your trees adds to the layering effect and plant density that shelters chickens.
Chickens
A permanent rotating chicken run or zone has permanent fencing, and it essentially creates a zone for your chickens to forage in. Rotating runs are directly connected to the chicken coop with its own door. Here is a chicken garden with three rotating runs and a separate centralized area for the chicken coop and a secure outside pen.
Chickens
Temporary runs are best when you want to focus your chicken flock to a particular area but don’t want it to be a permanent situation. An area can be created with a flexible light wire such as chicken wire, rabbit wire, shade cloth, and even construction barrier cloth.
Temporary runs can be made out of cheaper fencing materials, such as chicken wire.
Chickens
A landscape has two basic elements: the hardscape and the softscape. Adding free-range chickens to this equation is easy. Hardscape describes all the non-living or man-made materials in a landscape, such as concrete, stone, and gravel. Softscape describes all the living materials in a landscape, such as plant materials, flowerbeds, mulch, and soil amendments.
Chickens can be trained. They have keen eyesight and are extremely motivated by their desire to eat. Training your chickens is key to effectively managing your chicken flock. By training your flock, you can have them come to you whenever you like, herd them along if necessary, and generally have them respond and behave for you as you wish.
Chickens
To convert a dog house with kennel into a chicken coop and outside pen, all you need is time, muscle power, a few additional construction materials, and your creativity. Many unique chicken coops have been built with a lot of imagination and a little of re-purposing and recycling materials. Of all the structures that may already exist in a garden, the most common is a dog kennel.
Chickens
Nothing tastes like fresh blackberries, blueberries, raspberries, and strawberries out of the garden. Hopefully, you have a spot in your chicken garden to grow some of these delectable berries. Berries can come in many forms and can be integrated throughout your chicken garden.
Your chickens love these berries as much as your family and friends do.
Chickens
Creating a free-ranging chicken run or zone works well in orchards. Chickens easily forage around the trees, and on fallen fruit in an orchard. Trees are considerably higher in height than chickens, so the fruit doesn’t come into contact with the chickens, making it safe for humans to eat.
An orchard is defined as a piece of land intentionally planted with trees for food production.
Mobile chicken tractors, also called arks, are a viable option for confined ranging your chickens. You can find these tractors for sale online in various sizes, or you can build them fairly easily. If you are custom building your own, consider making them the same size as your garden beds or raised vegetable beds to help with the spent vegetable gardens.
Some plants deter chickens from entering certain areas. Chicken-resilient plants come in many forms, as in specific trees, shrubs, perennials, herbs, and ground covers. It helps if they are woody, with deep roots. Many plants that are dense such as mass plantings and groundcovers can also be effective in deterring chickens.
Where there are chickens, there are predators. Be aware of potential predators where you live and be proactive so your chickens aren't attacked. The following table offers ways to keep your chickens safe from each common predator.
Common Chicken Predators and Solutions for Avoiding Attacks
Chicken Predator
Solution
Domestic dogs
Build a fence around the perimeter of your chicken coop and
pen.
Chickens and lawns are a good mix, only if your lawn is organically maintained and your chickens are well-managed with it. Organically maintained means your lawn is not chemically fertilized and chemical weed killers or pesticides are not used. There are no leaky spots of oil or gasoline around either.
Traditional lawns need regular water, and your chickens should not be allowed to free-range on a lawn still wet from irrigation.
If you allow your chickens to have free range to forage, be sure to acquaint yourself with the more common ornamentals and edibles that are mildly toxic or poisonous to chickens. You’ll find a variety of plants that fall into these categories.Always err on the side of caution; if you suspect a plant is poisonous to your chickens, rid it from your garden.
Chickens
This basic, hypothetical, confined-range chicken concept consists of multiple separate foraging runs or zones for a chicken flock. This concept can be used in an urban, suburban, or a rural setting. The figure shows six separate runs or zones.
The number of zones can vary depending on your property, landscape design, and overall layout.
Chickens
Gardening has evolved quite a bit over the years. The addition of backyard and free-range chickens has come into the mainstream along with modern gardening.
From Victory Gardens to the desire for modern, seasonal fresh food
Nearly four decades ago, a quiet "fresh local food" movement began in the United States, and this food movement is still going strong today.
Chickens in natural conditions forage for tender young succulent plant growth. Along the way they delight in finding bugs, insects, worms, and larvae. Chickens eat a wide range of foods such as plants, edibles, weeds, grass, berries, seeds, and more. Chickens can be a natural cog in the ecosystem wheel of your garden and landscape setting.
Chickens
Fresh water and a well-balanced variety of food are a foundation for good management in raising and free-ranging chickens. Providing your chickens with fresh water and a properly balanced laying feed formula ensures their health and happiness. Allowing them to forage for themselves in your garden is an added benefit to their well-being and their egg quality as a food source.
Chickens
Good soil health is the first key component of a landscape, especially if free-range chickens are about. Watering is the second most critical key component of your landscape. You can have everything right, and still get it wrong with too much or too little watering.
Here are some factors that determine your frequency and intervals of watering:
Your climate and weather
Your soil texture
Your soil structure: How much space is between your soil particles and how well your soil drains.
You have some important aspects to consider when choosing how to free-range your chickens. Take a look at the following handy list of how free-range chickens behave so you can pick a free-ranging option that works for you:Chickens can be messy in their search for food.They can displace walking bark paths and make indentations for dust baths at the base of your favorite shrubs.
Chickens
Not everyone raises chickens in a chicken garden or a garden landscape environment. You may have small farms, acreage, and pasture to free-range your chickens. In fact, pasturing poultry at the turn of the 20thcentury was the prevalent method of raising poultry.
Pastures are the exact opposite of a well-layered landscape, which has an abundance of garden structure.
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