Free Range Chicken Gardens: How to Create a Beautiful Chicken-Friendly Yard

Yesterday I heard a discussion about the environmental and economic situation on the radio. One speaker laughed and said we’ll all be stocking up on gold and backyard chickens. I don’t have any gold, but I do have backyard chickens. As do many of my rural neighbors. However, I know that gardeners who live in town on small lots are also setting up backyard flocks. The town ordinances allow up to ten chickens. No roosters!

If you don’t already lust after your own flock of pretty egg layers, a browse through the beautiful pages of Free Range Chicken Gardens by Jessi Bloom with seductive photos by Kate Baldwin and published by Timber Press will send you off to find the Murray McMurray Hatchery catalog.

To further seduce potential chicken farmers, Timber Press will giveaway the Free Range Chicken Gardens to one lucky person who will also win a complete chicken garden start-up kit, including:

• $50 gift card for chicken feed or supplies from McMurray Hatchery
• One chicken coop plan from The Garden Coop (a $20 value)
• 1 lb. of organic chicken forage blend and seeds for chicken-friendly plants from Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply (a $20 value)
• A copy of Free-Range Chicken Gardens, of course.

All you have to do is go to the Timber Press website and sign up for this great prize.

I haven’t had a chance to read the whole book, which is dense with information about chicken house design, predators, keeping your garden safe from the chickens and beautiful photographs of charming gardens and all kinds of elegant chickens, but I wanted to give you plenty of time to enter your name before the February 17.

Just think what it means to have your own small chicken flock. Delicious eggs with marigold yellow yolks. And wonderful manure for the garden. Feed yourself and feed your soil.

Heath - A Right to Farm Community Roadside Sign

For more Wordlessness click here.

The Rooster crows, but the Hen delivers

One year my boss at Greenfield Community College gave me this ornament. I thought he was giving me a compliment, but no. He was merely acknowledging my flock of chickens and the eggs I brought to give out at work.

Have you even been given ornaments at work? Were they compliments?

We have lots of other chicken ornaments on our tree. I think chickens are cheerful, domestic and productive. I emulate the chicken.

When I finally visited Cosima I had to agree. Her henhouse is a work of art. She said they built this cordwood  masonry henhouse using Robert L. Roy’s books and that this is actually his sauna building plan. The building has an interior diameter of 9 feet with circular walls that are about 8 inches thick. These walls are comprised of cordwood/firewood, sometimes split, and sometimes as plain logs, plus a special masonry mix. They also created a green roof . They put hay bales on the roof and planted gourds and nasturtiums in a pocket of soil in the bales.  Other plants were carried there by the wind. In this rear view of the building you can see trailing nasturtiums, and if you look very closely you will see trailing gourds on the right.

In addition to the cordwood, Cosima used glass bottles to provide handsome graphic elements.

Hens lay their eggs in these egg boxes inside the henhouse.

But eggs can be collected from the outside.  This type of construction keeps out the wind and is quite warm in the winter. Practical and beautiful. One cannot ask for more.

Althuogh I did not realize it. when I arrived as Cosima’s house I got a preview of the henhouse. The cordwood masonry  mudroom is an addition to the old house, and is also beautiful as well as practical.

This interior detail of the mudroom gives some hint of its charm.

So there it is a week’s worth of henhouses, providing food for thought about designing for practicality and beauty. For more unique henhouses click here, here, and here.

There was nothing photogenic about our chores this glorious autumn weekend – mowing, weeding, cutting back – so I’ll concentrate on an exploration of another Heath henhouse.  Joey built, overbuilt he said, this 10×12 foot henhouse for his ten hens. You can see he has a lot of help! He read a lot and looked at a lot of henhouses, and talked to a lot of people before he built his. The forethought shows. His luck shows too. He found the little stairway at the town dump. He said it is attached to the henhouse with only three or  four screws.  The building itself is built on skids, much like Bob’s, which I wrote about here. Joey said he built it on skids because he wasn’t sure where he wanted to put it permanently.

Joey wanted the children to be able to collect the eggs without going into the chicken space so he set aside this part of the chicken house for storage and copied Sheila’s system which I wrote about here.

The front of the egg boxes looks like a cabinet with a slanted top that keeps the chickens from roosting on it. The chickens enter this space from the opening on the left.

The flat part of the cabinet can be lifted and hooked up to make it easy to clean the egg boxes. The row of boxes is not nailed down. The row can be removed entirely making it very easy to shake out and clean. This is a great idea.

Joey thought a lot about the cleaning out process. This clean out door with a latch near the floor on the inside opens  to a door on the outside.

The reason for the second door is too keep out critters who have been known to open latches.  When this door opens all any critter will see is a blank wall.  On clean out day, Joey is outside with the cart and the kids sweep out all the bedding. They do a terrific job, Joey said. He then vacuums out all the cobwebs and they all put down more shavings.

One of the most unique elements of Joey’s henhouse, and one I am  going to add to mine, is this oystershell dispenser. It is made of two lengths of PVC pipe with a cut back PVC elbow on the end and fastened to the wall with ordinary brackets. He just pours crushed oyster shell into the pipe and the chickens take it as they wish. And Joey says they really like it and it goes very fast. He uses these in the winter when the chickens do not get the necessary grit from pecking around in the  soil. The oystershell provides grit all winter long, in addition to providing calcium for strong eggshells.

Fortunately Joey has a good crew of chicken wranglers. Only one more henhouse in my series. Keep watching.

You may wonder what is with all the stones and stone -like things in  the Shed Bed, but you have to remember that the Shed Bed is right next to the hen house and for the past couple of months the chickens have considered this their personal Lido for taking dust baths.  First I kept the chickens in the hen house today. Then I finished weeding and edging, dug in some nice rotted manure and lime, and planted the little annual salvias that edge this bed every year. This is the way I fudge not being able to grow a lavender hedge.

You can’t really tell, but I also put tiny annual dianthus along the west edge of the Lawn Grove, as well as nine cosmos seedlings.  The big task was planting the weeping cherry that I bought at Home Depot.  I hope that was a wise decision.  It’s been watered and mulched with wood chips. You can see a small hardy azalea blooming on the far side of the grove.  Lots of weeding.

Guan Yin Mian

The garden is progressing faster and faster.  Everytime I turn around something new has come into bloom.  This tree peony is so lovely. The translation of the name is Guan Yin’s Face.  Guan Yin is the Goddess of Compassion and surely hers is the most beautiful of faces.

Boule de Neige and Rangoon have been slowly opening, but with temperatures in the 80s for two days they came into full bloom in the shady bed next to the Cottage Ornee.

Last year I found this rhodie forgotten and languishing in the weeds at the edge of the ‘orchard.’  I dug it up and this time I transplanted it properly, “Keep it simple, just a dimple,” as my rhododendron expert says. I think it is Calsap. What a lovely surprise to have it survive and put out new growth and bloom!

The lilacs are blooming and perfuming the air.  We even spent some time enjoying the beauty and fragrance of the garden: we opened the Cottage officially and entertained two friends who we see all too infrequently.  A perfect weekend.

Don’t forget tomorrow is the last day you can enter the Give Away drawing for Starter Vegetable Gardens by Barbara Pleasant. Just click here and leave a comment. The winner will be announced on Saturday.

Avian Aqua Miser

It is very hard to get a good photo of the chickens drinking at their new  Avian Aqua Miser waterer, but the first chicken on the right had been drinking and the second chicken on the right is still taking  good long sip.  What you cannot see in the photo are the little ‘nipples’ that work on a similar principle to a hamster waterer.  The 5 gallon bucket has water and the chickens  poke at the nipples that release a drop at a time into their little beaks.

We got our kit from the Avian Aqua Miser people and my husband installed the nipples in about 15 minutes.  It took a little longer than that to teach the chickens to drink from this new waterer but that was our fault for not hanging the bucket high enough.  Now everyone is happy. The chickens have clean water to drink and I don’t have to worry about them knocking the waterer over and then being thirsty all day long.

I bought the kit that contains three nipples and a drill bit, just the right size. I have not been paid for my comments. The company does not even know I am writing about this product, which I do recommend.

February 25 8 am

The snow was falling when I woke.  I hope this is the first of the four final snowstorms predicted for this winter.

While the snow is beautiful, the view inside the hen house was not as lovely.  For the third morning in a row I went out to find a dead chicken, killed by a weasel. I don’t know if it is possible to keep a determined and hungry weasel out of a hen house. I will spare you the image.  Only a dozen chickens left, including a rooster.

I wish I had a portable chicken house! No joke.