I don’t know about you, but during this pandemic we have a real feeling of comfort from growing our own food. When this pandemic began, we dug into the basement freezer and have been enjoying preserved foods from the garden in our daily meals. We also have backyard chickens – which means that with four chickens we have enough eggs for our home use and to share with our neighbors, some who are recently unemployed and really appreciate our gifts of fresh eggs to help stretch the food budget.
I would suggest that chickens and gardening are complementary partners. Chickens will clean up your garden spaces, produce valuable compost, and eat your kitchen scraps. It can be a valuable relationship with great upsides and some downsides. We’ve had chickens at our house for more than 5 years and have some reflections that may help you think about adding chickens to your yard. First check your local city policy on keeping chickens.
The eggs! We only have egg laying chickens in our yard. We have four chickens who lay about an egg each every day. The egg-laying only adds to the options we have to grow and eat our own food and lets me share with my neighbors.
The compost. Properly composted chicken manure can be a valuable commodity. We positioned our chicken coop close to the garden and compost bin. In my own backyard, we have found that the chicken manure breaks down in about a season. We use the deep litter method to manage chicken manure which means that we are regularly mixing in straw and pine shavings into the manure and it begins to break down in the coop before it is placed in the compost bin. You need to be careful to make sure chicken manure is fully composted before it is used on the garden, but once it is, it’s a great way to amend your soil.
Chicks. We have raised two flocks of chicks and they are cute but they do require a fair amount of work when they are young. We’ve moved to buying our chickens as pullets (juveniles) who we can immediately move into the outdoor coop and who are ready to start laying eggs. We’ve found some nice farms through Craig’s list where we were able to purchase healthy chickens right from the farmer.
Predators! We live in Northeast Minneapolis and we’ve had fox and raccoon attacks on our chicken coop. Over the years, we have fortified the coop’s run (the outdoor space) with hardware cloth that we also buried in the ground to ward off attacks. Chickens are delicious and our city predators are happy to break into a coop if they can.
Garden raids! We let our chickens roam our fenced yard when we are home and when our dogs are not also in the yard. Chickens are great at cleaning up the gardens. We grow fruit and berries in our yard and the chickens are very happy to help clean up dropped fruit. I also let them into the vegetable gardens in the spring and fall for garden cleanup. The chickens will turn your beds for free (to a point) but I have learned that they will also happily eat all of your recently spread carrot seeds or help themselves to your tomatoes. I would recommend thinking about ways you can limit your chickens’ access to parts of your yard or garden that would not benefit from scratching and pecking. In my vegetable garden I have added cheap wire fencing to the raised beds which has proven to be a good deterrent to chicken “gardening” activity.
By Darielle Dannen, Hennepin County Master Gardener volunteer
