Hello all I thought it might be good to start a general conversation about chickens and the many benefits they bring to the garden.
A place for all chicken related information from, composting there waste, farming your own chicken food, to breed specific discussions and general care.
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So Iām currently keeping 20 chickens by the veggie garden and have another 50 I care for near by.
The flock consists of Black australopes ,Easter eggers, Welsummers, Barnevelders, Barred Plymouth Rock, Cuckoo Marans,
Super blue egg layers, Cream leg bars, and ameraucanas.
I use there coop clean out as food for the vermicompost bins.
Iām starting to raise black soldier fly larva as a additional food source along with meal worms and find much joy in feeding them any destructive bugs I find while gardening. I have a 2 foot wide 150 feet long row of sunflowers Iām growing to keep as food additive and am looking at what good grains I can easily grow and store.
These are spoiled birds eating organic feed , roaming the yard and getting tons of scraps from the garden. They deserve it though I get $6.50 a dozen for eggs and sell out as fast as I can collect them 
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@Boozer May I ask whatās been the most cost effective way to feed your chickens? Looking like a nice run there.
Recently moved onto some acres, had to have a go with some birds. I just made a coop a few weeks back and bought 4 birds -/ two of them are too young to lay and weāve since got almost a dozen eggs from the other two newer ladies. Very exciting stuff. I find Iāve already wasted too much time just watching them. Itās a familiar feelingā¦ seems like another hobby which might all too easily become out of hand.
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I love the idea of this thread! Thanks @Heritagefarms
Love & Light ā DJSF
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Your set up is realy nice , I would live in one of those coops myself , seriously though lol. The one I built is 8x7 but those make it look small. Iām only going to have 19 birds though and they are confined to a 12x40 enclosure. I wish I could let them be free during the day but we have lost to many to predators that way and are moving towards large enclosed runs.
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Nice thread. I have 13 hens 3 leghorn 5 australorp 5 golden comets and one game fowl rooster. One australorp just hatched out 13 lavender biddies, lost one. They have free roam of 6 acres.
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When I was a kid, living on a dirt road out in the boonies, I saw someone driving really slow by our house and then a lady stop on the road near our driveway and fiddling with one of those large plastic pet crates in the back of her truck. I thought she was about to dump off a dog or cat (how we got all of our pets coming up) so I yelled out, asking her what she was doing. She ran back into the truck and drove off. I went inside and told my mom and she said sheās probably just going to dump it off further down the road.
I hopped on my dirtbike and headed off down the road, in the direction she was going, to rescue whatever puppy or kitten got dumped. Not a 1/4 mile away, I saw ~20 fat ol Rhode Island Red hens and a couple roosters in the ditches on either side of the road and up in the woods scratching the ground and doing chicken stuff like theyād lived there their whole lives.
We had a small pond with a few geese, horses and cows. It didnāt take long and thereād be chickens down by the pond drinking and bickering with the geese over food. One week, weād have a bunch of chickens, other weeks theyād be off at some other house. With so many farmers in the area, the predators were kept at bay and the chickens thrived. After a couple years, there was a roving band, well over 100 strong, living in a 1/2 mile stretch of heavily wooded dirt road. It was a hawkās paradise, though.
Every family on my road eventually had some chickens descended from that group either taking up with their own chickens, catching their own or re-domesticating themselves and building nests in the corner of a shed or barn. There were chickens living in the woods for ~15 years until some folks built a house near there and caught them up because they considered them a nuisance to their flower beds. Damn city slickers.
For crops though, my dad would have chicken ālitterā from a chicken house spread over the fields every winter. Heād rotate 2 acres for a garden with various beans and corn, cut hay every other year on the rest and bush hog whatever the cows and horses didnāt take care of. I should start a forest chicken colony where I live now, thinking back, it was pretty cool having those āwildā chickens around.
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@Soiltech thanks for the words. I feed my chickens pellets, however in the spring and summer they eat very little. They forage through the woods all day long. Also any blemmished veggies go to them as well.
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@Heritagefarms have you thought about runs?
Iāve used these when running meat birds. Its nice because you can move them with little effort to get to new bugs and grass
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Yep Iām almost done constructing a chicken tractor to use on the dormant veggie beds
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I would enjoy tripping over a flock in the middle of the forest. WTH is going on?!
I once ran into a herd of goats that way.
Backyard chicken rules are pretty hard here but that could change.
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OverCrow the world!
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WTF!..
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Thatās insanely awesome you can get that much. A coop and a small flock is on my to-do list. Kind of worried about hawks, and wondering about stray cats, do they mess with them? I would love to enclose basically my whole back 1/4 acre but didnāt know if I needed to put up anything over the top
I dident want to charge that much but the average market price in my area is actually $7 per dozen so Iām the cheaper option 
I bring 10-20 dozen per market and sell out within 1hr or less.
In regards to hawks they are a serious problem for us and that is why we have moved towards large enclosed runs.
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There are many people in my area that only ask 3-5 a dozen and canāt sell there eggs , I always sell out but am at the largest farmers market in the area and have a established customer base. One couple buys 4-6 dozen every week.
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Here in VA (southern) people bitch at $2.00 a dozen.
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Eggs are realy cheap in some areas where most people are allowed to keep birds. My county has strict chicken rules for small neighborhoods so there are a lack of egg producers. Also most people have no idea how much it actually costs to maintain a healthy flock of chickens vs the overcrowded commercial operations. If most people saw the overcrowding and unsanitary conditions there eggs and meat grew up in they might think different about the money they are saving.
Also organic starter and layer feed is dam expensive in my town.
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Hawks and owls can definitely be a problem, but chickens are pretty good about sounding the alarm when they spot a hawk and run for cover. Theyāll need a good coop/pen to roost in with a cover to keep the owls away. Cats wonāt mess with full grown chickens. Most momma hens would fight off bears protecting their chicks.
Snakes going after eggs have caused me to mess my shorts a few times.
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