Improving Soil Using Chickens

Improving Soil Using Chickens?  How does that work?  Let me explain…

Our Gardens and Our Soil

Our chicken friend Jo is helping us show off our cottage garden as well as some items from the wood shop.

We have many gardens around our home.  There is a cottage garden in our front yard, a Japanese inspired shade garden, a rose garden, herb gardens off our back deck, and Grandma’s perennial flower beds around her apartment.  Our biggest garden has always been our vegetable and perennial fruit garden.

Our soil is clay.  In fact, the local art center used to do summer classes where the whole class would go dig up their own clay and take it back to the studio where each student would throw and fire pots.  Hysterically funny that we are trying to get potatoes and carrots to grown in that same clay, isn’t it?

The water for our lawn and gardens comes from a well.  It is slightly alkali (high in a form of sodium) and leaves a white powder on leaves.  Our solution to our water problems can be found here.

Building an apartment connected to our garage moved a lot of dirt around in our backyard.  It gave us an opportunity to try out some ideas we had for improving our soil.

Improving clay soil takes some effort but is well worth the work!  Here is an article about the traditional ways of improving clay soil without using chickens.

Improving Soil Using Chickens

Look at the abundant garden we got from last year’s chicken yard.

Bring on the chickens!  We hit on the idea of building a new chicken coop next to the garden spot.  The old chicken house had become a shed out of necessity.  In the discussion of where to build the new coop, we decided to put it next to the new garden and then the ideas began to flow.

We split our garden spot in half and give half to the chickens for their fenced-in yard.  There are so many predators that allowing our hens to roam has always ended badly.  That’s where the modified free-range phrase comes in.  Their yard is large, allowing them to scratch and hunt to their hearts’ content, but fenced.  In fact, 2 electric wires run around the top and the bottom on the outside to prevent anything climbing over or tunneling under.

Throughout the growing and harvesting season, we dump lots of organic matter into the chicken run for the chickens to eat.  Things like pulled weeds, extra-large zucchini and cucumbers. The ends off the beans, shells of peas, even the skins from the tomatoes during processing and corn husks end up dumped in various places in their yard.  All the good stuff that the hens eat give us eggs with golden tasty yolks, too.

Chicken Yard This Year, Garden the Next

Here is a view of the east side of our chicken house. It is the permanent part of our chicken yard. The crabapple tree provides shade, treats and perches.

The chicken door to the great outside is actually on the opposite side of the coop from their yard.  They go out the door, down the ramp and around the back side where there is a strategically placed crab apple tree that gives great shade in the summer.  That part of their chicken yard stays the same every year.  There are 2 structures inside the fence.  They provide shelter from heat and great places for dust baths for the chickens.  Our chicken shelters are always inside the chicken yard and we move them periodically throughout the summer. The wooden gate that allows us into the chicken run is permanent as well. The rest of the yard changes yearly.

We don’t allow the chickens to roam the garden while we are using it.  Chickens love vegetables as much or maybe more than they do the weeds.  They will eat us out of vegies in no time.  Tomato plants (leaves and stems) are harmful to garden soil and possibly to chickens as well.  We don’t want to take any chances.

Our plan has worked really great for almost 10 years now.  It is the plan we use for our ANNUAL garden.  Our perennial gardens have other soil improvement plans in place.

Moving the Fence

One year the garden is on one side of the fence. The next year it is on the other. The blue shelters go with the chickens every time they are moved.

Most of the time, we move the fence that surrounds the chicken yard in the fall right after the frost that makes us pick the last of the tomatoes and pull the plants and gather up the pumpkins, squash and gourds and pull the carrots.  Then the chickens get to scratch and eat and enjoy the plants that are left.  Sometimes, we simply run out of time before the ground freezes too hard to move the posts.  In that case, we just wait until spring and then they clean up the garden.  It is amazing how fast all that dead stuff goes away once the chickens get into it!

So we use steel posts, sheep wire on the bottom and chicken wire on the top to make our fence.  To move the chicken yard, we just lock the chickens in the coop at night and don’t let them out in the morning until they have a new yard.  Then we roll back the fence to the point where it stays the same every year and pull out the posts that are left.  Cameron has a great system worked out so we don’t even have to pull all the posts.  Some of them make the new fence.

We restretch the sheep wire and the chicken wire around the posts.  Next, we fasten it with zip ties to the posts and at the point where the sheep wire meets the chicken wire.  We are very careful to stretch the wires up and down as well as around.  One year, we had a dumb little Polish pullet that thought the sag between the 2 kinds of wire made a great place to roost.  We had a terrible time getting her out of there.  So now we are careful.  The electric fencing goes around last as a security measure.

Now we have traded places with the chickens.  Our garden will be where they were last year.  Usually in about February there is a thaw that allows us to clean out the coop and  leave it on the garden spot side.  By the time it is time to plant, it is old enough manure to till into the ground and it won’t burn new plants.

We also use grass clippings to mulch around the plants and between the rows in our gardens.  It helps to hold the moisture in and kind of helps keep the weeds from growing so fast.  I mean they are weeds though so…

We love the Americanas, Welsummers, and Polish.

How Many Hens Does it Take to Till a Garden?

Our half of the garden space every year is about 1000 square feet.  That might seem like a lot but our garden feeds a lot of people (about 10 consistently and more if we have extra).  Over the years, the number of chickens changes but we have found that 25-35 hens are ideal to work that area without overcrowding. We have had as few as 8 after a run of fox thefts and that was way too sparse to do any good.

This little black and white Polish in the picture is 7 years old now.  She doesn’t lay eggs anymore but she is still an important part of the team.  That was totally off topic but she is so cute.

Using what we have learned here at Montana Bowl of Cherries, we think 3 or 4 hens for every 100 square feet of last years garden would be enough.  A gardener still has to think about using only half their existing garden space but we have seen more than twice the harvest we used to get using other soil improvement methods.

HOW DOES ALL OF THIS IMPROVE OUR SOIL AND HELP OUR CHICKENS?

1. The chickens do a lot of tilling that doesn’t leave the soil open to erosion.  They dig holes for dust baths, scratch at the grains we throw out to them everyday and gently till the ground but not deep enough that the soil blows away in the wind.
2. The soil is fertilized throughout the season.  No more hauling in bags of chemical fertilizer or hauling pickup loads of manure from neighboring corrals.  What a savings of time and money!
3. All the organic matter that is scratched into the soil really loosens it up.  To our amazement, we have found that it doesn’t get harder as the rain stops and the heat moves in  We have been able to successfully grow LOTS of potatoes and carrots again.
4. We have seen a huge increase in our garden’s production.  Same amount of space, better yields.
5. Along with the savings in time, there is a cost savings in our little experiment.  Because of the eggs we enjoy and share and the way the chickens fit into our garden plan, it takes the cost of keeping the chickens down too.
6. Because of their close proximity to the garden, the hens also help keep up with the bugs.  We have noticed less grasshoppers and potato bugs invading our produce.

With all that our ladies contribute to our garden project, the eggs are kind of a delicious bonus.  We have toyed with the idea of getting them little straw hats and overalls but that would just be too much work.  We definitely appreciate how they make us look like such great gardeners though!