How to protect your garden from naughty chickens

Gardening with pets could be difficult, because you have to pet-prove your garden. Building a fence to keep your dog away from the herbs seems relatively easy, but to chicken-prove your vegetables you need some more.

Chickens may decimate a garden quickly be pecking and scratching. But you can make your chickens coexist with your plants, Jessi Bloom says. She is a landscape designer near Seattle, it’s like having a baby: “You wouldn’t have babies and not prepare your house for them.”

Even before beginning to host chickens you have to consider the number of chickens appropriate for the available  space. “If you have 30 chickens on a quarter acre lot they should not be let out,” the designer says, “They’re going to destroy it.”

1. Chicken wire is your friend

By making a collar of chicken wire around small plants, you will discourage most of the chickens, if the have enough to eat elsewhere. To give the wire some structure, use tomato cages or a couple of stakes.

When you have a lot of plants, like Bloom, your garden become a bit steampunk in the spring, but at least the chicken wont destroy your plants. This wont stop a determined chicken but there are more defensive tricks to come

2. When chicken wire is not enough, hardware cloth will do

Because the mesh it a lot sturdier and has smaller holes, wire mesh come in handy when protecting seeds or low growing plants. Cut large squares of mesh and fold down the sides to make a bottomless box to put on your plants. If this is not enough, try to weigh it down with bricks on each corner.

3. Bricks and stones will do well, too

Scratching smaller stones and fresh soil out of flower pots or newly planted containers will destroy your vegetables quite quickly. So use bricks or other similar sized stones to build rings around your precious plants

4. Let weeds to do the work for you

When taking it out weeds, it’ll work as a magnet for chickens. They will strip the earth for worms and bugs and later use the dry dirt to make dust baths. By simply leaving the weeds in the bed it’ll solve this problem and wont harm most of the plants.

5. Planting Strategy

Plant flowers where the chickens can’t go. You can use the gaps between stone bricks or where the chicken wire or mesh touches the ground. Look for spaces the chickens can’t scratch or peck.

6. Plants just for the chickens

When you can’t defeat them, work with them. Even chickens need shelter from time to time, and if it’s just on hot days to escape from the sun. Planting low growing bushes or evergreen will give your chickens the opportunity to hide and they will use it.

Planting berries will not only give shelter, but will also help feeding your pets, cutting down the amount of food you need to buy. But be aware that if you have blueberries in your garden you need to protect at least some of the plants or no blueberries will make it into your kitchen …