The Busy Gardener's Guide to Keeping Chickens
All my best ideas about how to enjoy keeping chickens with less work.
Though we have 14 acres and technically live in the country, I have no desire ever to own rabbits, cows, donkeys, pigs, goats, sheep, alpacas, horses, or any other sort of livestock. While I think sheep are particularly lovely (did you know they can recognize and remember faces?), and I’m charmed by alpacas and the idea of free high-quality fertilizer from their droppings, these animals all seem like a lot of time, energy, and effort. The reality is that I don’t have any of those three things to expend in abundance. Plus, as a gardener, I’d generally rather putter around with plants than tend to a herd of anything.
However, we do keep both bees and chickens.
In my opinion, bees and chickens are the two perfect partners for a garden: bees ensure strong pollination of flowers on your fruit and vegetables, and chickens help with insect control, happily take care of vegetable scraps, and produce a never-ending supply of goodness to enrich compost.
The husband and I debated for a while before getting the chickens; neither of us wanted to sign up for a ton of additional work (but we did like the idea of fresh eggs). We both work full-time jobs and enjoy traveling, so if we were going to keep chickens, we had to find ways to make their care as low-maintenance as possible.
In the end, we got four chickens. We’ve had them for over six years now (the oldest two are just beginning to slow down laying this year) and spend just a few minutes a day collecting eggs and giving them treats or scraps from the kitchen. Once a month or so, we top off their food and give the coop/run a good clean. That’s about it. Although they are so entertaining, we often find ourselves just watching them do their funny chicken things.
I wrote a series of articles about keeping chickens for one of Mother Earth’s publications a few years ago. The articles focused on minimizing the time required to care for the chickens and included instructions on how we made our low-maintenance feeding and watering system and other tips and tricks we discovered over time.
This week, after some light re-editing, I’ve started the process of bringing these articles into Substack. So, if you’re on the fence about keeping chickens, you can read through them and get some tips and tricks that might make it all feel a little more manageable.
Here’s the first one:
I’ll slowly add the rest under the Bees + Chickens section over the next few weeks, and if you have any burning chicken related questions, I’d be happy to answer them over in comments, or in a future story.
“Field Notes from Woodside Gardens” is a collection of stories about creating a garden. Most Fridays, I share what’s going on in our garden, along with tips and ideas that you can use in yours, wherever you are. Please consider becoming a free subscriber if you haven’t already done so.
Thanks for sharing this! I love my flock and couldn’t agree more that they’re the perfect garden companions.