Home

A smart chicken garden

F&F decorates the hen garden so that it looks as pretty as possible.

Over the past year and a half of keeping chickens, I’ve learned a few things. One of them is that the chicken garden won’t look pretty in the way I thought it would look because even with a reasonably large patch of land to themselves, the girls will destroy all vegetation apart from nettles. The second is that the chicken garden can still look really smart, just so long as I’m organised and work hard at it.

This is the chicken garden at the moment. It has a new coop because the old wooden one fell apart. We bought this new wooden one rather reluctantly as I prefer Eglus, but Eglus are quite pricey. To try to make this wooden one last longer, I’ve used a green-c0loured wood treatment (it’s pet friendly because of the low VOC content) on it and its adjoining run, and to make the run a bit more hospitable I’ve covered it with some of the fake turf left over from the balcony days, which means that the hens have somewhere dry and shady to shelter when it is rainy or unpleasantly hot. Plus fake grass makes the whole set up look a bit more fun.

I’ve also built a leaf mould pit in the garden, not least because the hens love playing with leaves and they’ll enjoy eating the various beasties that crawl in and out of that pit. And to keep the garden looking smart, I painted the wood for the pit that same dark green, too, so that everything matches.

I’ve also decided to start collecting vintage tin signs on the side of the shed that faces into the garden, as this adds some colour. It just so happens that the first one, a very smart one from the Imperial War Museum’s allotment range, matches the green coops and leaf mould pits. It’s almost as if I’d planned it that way.

I really like the look of this sign, and will add a number more (not all of them will be green, or else the chicken garden will start to look like an army barracks).

If I still had my allotment, I’d be growing cabbages galore for the girls. Instead, I buy a cabbage each week from the market, bore a hole in the top with an apple corer, and hang it in the coop so that they can play swingball with it. It’s good for them to eat greens, especially given they only get let out on the grass once a week and there is no grass left in their own run, and it’s a good form of entertainment for them too.

The man at the market also gives me a bag of cauliflower leaves, which the girls love too. I toss a handful of these into the garden each day and they run towards them with great glee.

And then there are the windfall apples, which friends bring me. I use the best ones for jelly, but the rest go in, maggots and all, to the hen garden, where they disappear rather quickly indeed.

The hen garden will never look pristine. But with some thought, at least it looks smart and stylish.

Related Posts

2 Responses

  1. Nick

    Like the cabbage swing ball, will treat our mini-flock to one. Re. apples - I’ve read that apples can slow down laying. Our mini-flock are on a go slow with only one egg a day, but it was like that before apples started to fall in their enclosure.

    Reply

Leave a Reply