"Sacha" wrote in message
...

Before we had hens I fed the wild birds all year round. The hens do a
much
better job of eating the nasties we don't want.


Unhappily, in the past I have found that the hens I kept also ate quite a
lot of the plants and not always the nasties! I think the suggestion of
free range hens here would be the proverbial lead balloon!

Ah, I quickly learned which plants they preferred and which they didn't.

I'm not a big flower man so only grow those which the hens don't like -
mostly perennials and herbs. That suits me, they can't scratch up well
rooted stuff. I start new ones in the greenhouse until they can fend for
themselves. The vegetables, which are far more important in our average
sized garden, are mostly kept in runs. Spouse made steel framed chicken wire
hurdles, in two module sizes, so that any space can be enclosed at my whim.

When the crops have been harvested I remove the hurdles (they're very slim
and stack next to a shed) and the hens have the freedom to scratch as they
please - and eat the nasties AND fertilise the ground for the next crop. It
works extremely well. The greenhouse houses the hens in the worst winter
weather, there they pick over and fertilise the borders.

In fact the reason I started growing vegetables was because I noticed how
well everything grew the year following our first hens.

This year I've learned that the asparagus must be enclosed too, to stop them
scratching up the crowns, and that it's a bit dodgy leaving potatoes open to
their scratching. The potato plants survived well but the hens kept exposing
potatoes which of course turned green in the light.

The poultry poke their heads through the hurdles to eat chard and spinach
leaves but there's so much of them that there's still plenty for us.

And it's such a joy to see them, the hens (and this year two boys until
Christmas at the latest), and then there are the eggs ... Bliss!

Mary