So your chickens dig up your garden and eat all your plants? Welcome to life with the bird. Chickens can be very destructive when roaming freely. Although it sometimes seems like a tough fight, you can learn to keep the chickens away from the garden!
Take this from someone who has a bunch of chickens who like to help ‘s and ‘s in the garden and keep them away the hard way. Many chicken farmers will tell you that you can’t have both chickens and a garden, but that there are ways to keep chickens out of the garden and not think about it! You can make use of free herd planting, but you can also have fresh vegetables in your garden!
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The fight is real.
Throughout the summer we fought the chickens that were eating and destroying our garden. Every time they stopped running around the henhouse, they destroyed my plants.
It was infinitely disappointing.
Our freshly sprouted garlic is pulled out of the ground in search of worms with sharp claws. The strawberries were picked until all that was left of the soil was small roots. The tomatoes were left alone until they turned a perfect red colour, after which they were picked from the bunch with small beaks and eaten within seconds.
It was chaos.
Fortunately, trial and error has shown us several methods that really work to keep chickens away from the garden.
How to keep chickens away from the garden
Block size cut
Many people who fight to have their chickens eat all the vegetation in their garden are in trouble because they simply have too many chickens for their place. The more chickens you have, the more they eat and the more they destroy.
If your farm has turned into a mud pit and all your plants have been eaten like stumps, you should consider reducing your herd size before making other changes. The urban bird population should be limited to five birds or less, with larger areas capable of supporting larger flocks.
Protection of individual plants
Our chickens completely destroyed our pot plants the first year we had them. They liked to jump into our large pots of fruit and herbs and dump all the topsoil on the ground.
We noticed that placing stones on the ground around the plants did not allow the chickens to destroy them. You can even put them in a smart place to embellish the functionality a bit.
Tall plants such as pot trees can only carry stones to protect the soil. Smaller plants, such as grasses, may need extra protection. If you wrap the gauze or cloth around the pot and secure it with the stake down, the chicks will be kept away. Along the perimeter of the pot you can plant thin stamps or sticks as a fence in the ground and wrap a ribbon or rope around the fence to prevent birds from jumping into the pot and eating the plants. The use of coloured threads can add a touch of beauty to this chicken block.
Leisure control
If you have time, the free flight monitor will prevent the chickens from leaving the garden. If the birds are released for only one or two hours, it may be possible to observe them during their migration. The extra bonus here is endless fun for you!
If our garden was fenced in, we would sit on the back porch every day to watch the birds walking in the yard. When they enter the garden, we will either physically remove them or water them with a hose next to them (not on top) to remove them. It worked well in the short term. But as life became more intense, it was unwise to sit with them all the time.
Strategic landscaping of gardens
Place your garden out of their direct path and the view will help kill the bird in the garden. Creating an orchard in the front part of the site and raising the chicks in the back part will greatly reduce the problems. A fence between the front garden and the backyard also keeps the chickens away.
Another tactic we used to keep the birds away from our herb garden was to bring them up and down. My husband built a three-foot high bed on poles for our herbs. The bed is so high that the chickens don’t even know it exists! They go directly underneath to reach their dust bath, and the plants grow happily on top of it.
Garden fence
To keep the chickens away from the garden, the fence is the ideal tool.
Our welded wire fence acts as a large barrier when they are on foot and are not trying to jump or fly over the fence. They can see the vegetation on the other side, but don’t know how to get there. We tried the wooden fences around our garden and although it’s beautiful, it doesn’t stop the little fools. Chickens only use it as a starting point. They jump from the ground to the top of a wooden fence and then throw themselves directly into the garden.
Wire fences work best because they are too flexible to jump over. If you use a wire fence, do not place a wooden board over it. (Even the fence. It will probably be the entrance to the garden).
Growth of the chicken garden
If you have space, you can add an extra garden area to distract them from your garden. You can provide them with their own chicken garden. If they have easy access to all the fresh delicacies you have grown for them, they will be less likely to drive vegetables out of your garden. (It’s also a great source of free chicken food!).
We hope this article will help you understand how to keep chickens away from the garden! If you, dear reader, have any other useful tips, don’t hesitate to leave them in your comments, we look forward to hearing them!
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