Can i keep hens in my garden

No account yet? Create an account. Edit this Article. We use cookies to make wikiHow great. By using our site, you agree to our cookie policy. Cookie Settings. Learn why people trust wikiHow. Download Article Explore this Article parts. Tips and Warnings. Related Articles. Article Summary. Part 1. Buy a premade chicken coop for an easy option. Buying your coop is often the easiest way to set up your chicken habitat. Premade coops can be bought online for a couple hundred dollars and shipped to your home.

Not only does it save you the hassle of trying to build one yourself, buying a premade coop also ensures that your habitat will be safe and structurally sound. These coops usually house anywhere from 2 - 5 chickens. You may also be able to find them at local feed stores.

See if you can make use of an existing structure. To save money and space, see if there is an existing structure in your yard that can be converted into a chicken shelter. It costs a good deal of money to hire people to build a shelter, so converting space can help with this. Select the right materials.

To build a chicken house , you need proper supplies. For the floor, you should opt for knotty cedar. The rest of the house can safely be built from pine. You can find blueprints for chicken structures online and follow them, but they can be complicated if you're unfamiliar with building.

A flimsy or poorly built structure can be dangerous for your chickens. Keep the floor elevated off the ground. The floor of a chicken coop will rot if it's on bare ground.

You should make sure to elevate the floor 2. You will have to provide some kind of foundation, such as cinderblocks, to do so. Line the floors of the coop with bedding. Bedding is an important part of your coop because it provides comfort and stability for your chickens, gives eggs a soft place to land, and soaks up excrement for easy cleanup.

Include the necessary features. Certain features are key to keeping your chickens warm and safe. Feel free to estimate your timing based on the size of you flock and garden plot on the 50 square foot per chicken statistic.

One chicken can provide enough nitrogen fertilizer for a 50 square foot garden in a little more than a month.

Based on the eight pounds one chicken will poop in a month, the average chicken will extract about a quarter pound a day! At this rate, 24 chickens could fertilize square feed of garden in just 6 weeks! Confine your chickens to the area you want fertilized and figure their length of stay based on the size of the area and how many chickens you have. Be careful not to leave your chickens in one place too long without mulching as you can have too much of a good thing! In order for your compost to break down, it must get oxygen.

The more air you give it, the quicker it will break down. Turning is a laborious job, but your chickens can do at least a quarter of the work for you.

Assemble your compost pile and allow it time to heat up. If you need to protect your pile while it heats up, you can put it in protected bin, temporarily fence it off, or keep it covered. I re-assembly and turn the piles once a week and within 4 weeks I have finished compost.

Chickens can level a pile in no time. If I want to spread mulch or compost, I just pile the material where I need it spread and fence in my chickens around it. My flock of 30 can easily spread a large pile of leaves in a half a day, and one cubic yard of compost within two weeks!

Confine your chickens around a pile of mulch or compost where you want it spread. Leave them until the work is done! Time to spread will depend on size of pile, material, and age of material. Older material will have more biota and the chickens will show more interest. Chickens are omnivores , like us, and will eat practically everything we can and more!

Why not give our food scraps to our chickens and save money on trash disposal and lessen the burden of our landfills? Jill: This is also one of my favorite ways to save money on chicken feed! Collect your food scrap in a food grade container or bucket. Chickens will eat practically any type of food your throwing out, including meat. Chickens will thrive on all kinds of insects, beetles and grubs.

A couple of years ago, I moved a flock of 15 around the pasture in square feet of mobile electric netting. Those birds easily eliminated the bug population in that area within a weeks time. There are several options here. Before you plant the garden, you could confine your chickens in a tractor or with electric net over the area, then move them out when you start your garden.

This would work to protect the garden from any crawling insects and the chicken manure might attract harmful slugs out of the garden, to the chickens. You could also move the chickens around the garden or property with a tractor or mobile netting depending the size of your operation. Finally, you can allow them supervised time in the garden or give them in 30 minutes to an hour before dusk. One chicken can de-bug an entire fruit tree within an hour, breaking the life cycle of pests and disease.

Disease and insect problems plague your typical orchard, but it should come by no surprise that the that the chickens can help in this area too. With some strategic timing, chickens can significantly boost orchard production! I suggest running the chickens through during the spring when the adult worms are coming out to lay their eggs.

I would run the flock through again in the Autumn to eat the fallen fruit that that insects might use as housing throughout the winter. Want the printable version of this poster, for free? This is just the kind of information we need more of to empower more people towards homesteading and self-sufficient living. Cover crops are an incredibly underutilized, very affordable way to fertilize your soil, decrease erosion, and increase organic matter. Grab the full-color cover crop PDF here it includes my weekly Homestead Toolbox Newsletter, which gets rave reviews from busy homesteaders!

Hello just read this article we have 4 chickens in our garden. People who are taking care of the chickens want them to stay in their small pen. I am a master composter who would like the chicken to maintain the compost. They fear a hawk will take them, chicks will destroy the garden, afraid they will peck people in the garden and other reasons.

I have assured them this will not happen. Do you have an advice how I can convince this team who have no experience with chickens I have due to working on farms upstate ny to let the chickens do their job?

They only feed them feed which I have explained it is not healthy for then. Any advice you can give would be appreciated. Great post. Thanx for all the great info. We just moved to our farm last May and there is so much we want to do but time and money are limited. We have 12 chickens and I put six per day in the chicken tractor in our garden space. The chicken-keeping trend is equally strong across Europe, where some experts say backyard laying hens now produce 28 percent of the total egg crop.

Our five chickens provide all the eggs we need and few to share, and a continuous supply of high-nitrogen manure for composting. But I think the bird intelligence the chickens bring to garden is what I like the most. Chickens in the garden simply make it a better place to be. By Barbara Pleasant. Low arches of wire fencing are invaluable for keeping chickens off of individual beds, whether you are protecting mulched garlic or beds of tender salad greens.

The arches should be so low that chickens cannot comfortably get under them. Tunnels covered with row cover, tulle netting or bird netting are another easy way to keep chickens from damaging food crops. Old blankets are the best way to keep chickens from renovating cultivated beds that are ready for planting. Fresh eggs taste amazing. I turned my back one day for the briefest of moments, and my hens had completely mown down a bed of newly sprouted cabbages.

Kids love chickens. My daughter loves to run out and collect the eggs at the end of the day and my son is fascinated by them. I missed a week and the smell was pungent. In a small garden this could be a problem. Chickens are fast. The first time I let them out I had no idea how to get them back in the run. I succeeded in herding them into the run using, among other things, a hose, a bean pole, some netting, and a bed sheet.

It took about an hour. At the end of a long day it is really satisfying to watch the hens peck about on the grass. They are curious animals and are quite funny. They can scratch.

They love slugs and are good at cleaning the soil.