On Oct 17, 2:52*pm, wrote:
Just coming to the end of my first 6 months with a bunch (that is
now a total of 5!) of chickens pecking and scratching at everything
in the garden.

Now my garden has never been the neatest of places - it's productive
and good for the kids to play with (or was until it was coated in
chicken poo!), but it's always been relatively nice to look at, in
a slightly haphazard way. *Now it's kind of ... a few straggley plants
looking sadly out of the ground where the chickens have scratched up
the soil and pecked at all the new green shoots.

Other than "cook the chickens" or "keep them in their run", does
anyone have any advice along the lines of plants the chickens won't
like so will keep away from?

OK, this might seem a bit, err, out there, ( and TBH, I'm not really
being serious) but I was thinking along the lines of how farmers use
electric fences to control cattle grazing and came up with the idea of
two large plastic sheets.
You lay them out, so that they can't blow away (but one still
relatively folded up) and each day fold back, say, a metre or two of
the spread out sheet, whilst unfolding the other to close off the
space from the previous day.

This way, every morning, as you fold back one sheet all the critters
that that being hiding on the surface, just under the plastic, would
be come fast-food, sort to speak.