Put Your Chickens to Work! How Your Chickens can Help your Homestead

Thanks for joining me for another week on the Backyard Farming Connection. This week I’m diving into how to maximize the benefits of chickens on your homestead. We’ve been experimenting with rotating our chickens through our garden for many years with a variety of success and will share our top 5 tips today.

Other things you might like this week:

• How to Soil Block

• Understanding the Permaculture Principles

• The Best Chicken Coop Bedding

You can also find more about using chicken tunnels on the Backyard Farming Connection Blog.

4 Ways Chickens can Help in the Garden

Natural Pest Control: Chickens happily devour pests like slugs, snails, beetles, and even small rodents, reducing the need for chemical pesticides and promoting a healthier garden ecosystem.

Weed Management: Chickens enjoy scratching and pecking at the ground. They'll help to loosen soil, break up clumps, and devour young weeds, keeping your garden beds tidy and weed-free. At the same time, chickens also love to eat what you’re growing so giving them free access to your garden means they will also eat your plants!

Fertilizer Production: Chicken manure is a valuable source of nutrients for your plants. As chickens roam and forage, they naturally deposit manure across your garden. When properly composted, chicken manure becomes a rich, organic fertilizer that can improve soil structure and nourish your plants, promoting healthy growth and abundant yields.

Compost Turners: Chickens are excellent compost helpers. They eagerly scratch through compost piles, turning and aerating the organic matter as they search for tasty treats. Their activity speeds up the decomposition process, resulting in nutrient-rich compost that you can use to fertilize your garden beds.

How to Get Chickens in Your Garden

Despite the benefits, you can’t give chickens free access to your garden or they will tear it all up. We’ve used a few methods over the years to manage and rotate chickens through the garden.

Here are a few methods to consider:

• Make rotating chicken runs - this is a semi-permanent solution. Simply build a few chicken runs and rotate the chickens. One of these runs can include part of your garden and you can strategically let your chickens into this section during parts of the year.

• Chicken Tunnels - I’ve used many different chicken tunnels over the years. Made from fencing, wood, tubing, or whatever is available, you simply create small tunnels your chickens can walk through. Place these around your garden and your chickens can help remove weeds and reduce weed pressure.

• Chicken Tractors - create a moveable chicken tractor that can be used to move chickens around the yard. The chicken tractor above is great for 5 birds or young chicks and since it’s on wheels we can move it around, attach a moveable run and put the chickens strategically over garden beds.

There are also a few other options (like supervising your chickens) but we’ve found the methods above work best and once you’ve got the system in place you can easily move or adjust things.

Have you used chickens in your garden? Leave a comment with what’s worked well for you!

Happy Homesteading,

Gretchen