wimp can be surprisingly helpful when it ’s time to winterise your garden .
Though not generally a full addition to a growing garden because they eat just about anything green , they can be valuable assets in fall .
Garden cleanup is healthy for them , too . They get to tidy fatigued vegetable plant and use up badbugsand grubs . It ’s also good exercise and genial arousal for them to disperse compost , aerate the filth and spread mulch to protect the ground overwinter .
Clean Up the Garden
Chickens eat up growing green plant voraciously , and they ’re no different when turned escaped in a garden .
This is near for human as well as chicken if you let the birds in after harvest to winterise your garden for you . A small flock will make clean up all the spent botany and any unpicked vegetable .
If you design to continue harvest certain plant through winter — such ascarrotsorkale — fencing off those areas to protect them from the chicken . Or you may control your chicken ’ garden cleaning by using achicken tractorand locating the chickens where you want them in your garden .
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As far as chicken health welfare , studies show thateggs from pasture biddy are good than those from most commercially raised hens .
Eggs from loose - ranging hens across the country were try out and compared with the USDA data for commercial-grade eggs . Free - ranged ball contained half the cholesterin , doubly as many omega-3 fatty loony toons and greater levels of vitamin A and E.
So countenance your chicken run gratuitous in the garden is unspoiled for them and their eggs . Just take care to protect them from predators such as hawk and certain plants .
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Plants to Watch out For
Chickens can safely consume most garden botany in fall . However , they should not be provide to eat rhubarb or plants from the nightshade family unit .
mutual garden plants in the nightshade family admit tomatoes , peppers , eggplant and potato . ( Sweet potatoes , however , are not from the nightshade family . ) These plants contain solanine , which can have serious wellness moment if exhaust by chickens , and should be pulled and get rid of from the garden before you let chicken in .
Also , the leave of pieplant are toxic and should not be consumed by chickens or human beings . However , rhubarb plant is a recurrent , so rather than removing the plants , fence them off from chickens . Shutterstock
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Insect Appetizers
Chickens areomnivores , mean they eat plants as well as animals .
They are particularly lovesome of louse and eat bugs , chow and larvae as they are scratching and pick up through the garden . By eating the larva and grubs of “ bad ” insects that be after to overwinter in your garden ( such as Colorado potato beetle larvae ) , chickens can importantly slenderize the louse load in next yr ’s crops .
This boil down the number of insects that come forth in spring to eat up your harvest . Chickens are great at constitutive pest decrease .
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Add Chicken Litter & Mulch
Once you ’ve clear up the garden of fatigued vegetation , add compost to avail replenish nutrients in preparation for next year ’s garden .
If you save and compost the unclean bedding material from the chicken coop , it makes terrific compost for the garden . Chicken muck contain a caboodle of nitrogen , one of the principal food that postulate to be replenished yearly in the garden .
But adding chicken droppings directly to a mature garden can burn plants because atomic number 7 levels are so not bad . By compost the one-time chicken bedding from the chicken coop and add it when you winterize your garden in fall , you enrich the soil during the winter and lease it melt sufficiently by spring to be secure for planting . Caligula1995 / Flickr
In addition to furnish nitrogen - racy chicken litter for the garden , your chickens can help you overspread the compost .
Just place piles of bedding material at veritable intervals in your garden row or layer and turn the chicken loose . They enthusiastically work through the compost and unfold it out for you .
After the old botany is gone and compost has been spread , it ’s beneficial to add a thick protective layer of mulch to the garden .
Again , chickens are well-chosen to distribute the mulch . This can be grass press cutting , chopped leaves or whatever mulch material you have . Just ensure the mulch stuff is free of pesticides or herbicides that you would n’t want foul your homegrown garden produce .
This mulch layer is not intended to summate nutrients back into the garden but only to bear the grunge in stead and prevent weed seeds from germinating . In bound you could murder the mulch bed and immediately begin planting .
Garden rows will have already been replenish with nutrients from the compost and should be well-nigh costless of gage because of the heavy mulch layer . Shutterstock
Aerate, Eliminate Bugs & Weed Seeds
While your chickens eat your previous garden flora and spread compost or mulch , they render additional good services , such as :
As volaille bet for grubs and eat the honest-to-goodness garden flora , they naturally aerate the garden soil and add nutrients with their droppings . Although their sweet droppings hold back a mountain of N and can burn plants , by impart them in fall the droppings diminish in potency over wintertime and provide increase plant fertility in springiness .
Chickens also gently work on the top few inches of soil as they fret and improve the soil texture while introducing O . This promotes optimal planting condition when spring arrive .
at last , as your chickens nag and scrape through your fall garden , they wipe out the weed seed that they expose .
This can significantly reduce the number of sens that germinate in spring after the mulch level has been remove . Of course , fewer Mary Jane mean less body of work in the busy spring garden .
Just by turning your chickens at large in the fall garden , you’re able to put the vegetable garden to bed , protect it for winter and get a outset on spring preparation with minimal work on your part .
It ’s a sound , alimentary activity . And the birds fully enjoy helping you winterize your garden at the final stage of each rise season .
This account originally appear in the November / December 2018 issue ofChickensmagazine .
