I have wanted to have chickens for ages. One of the thing I was most excited about when moving from an urban no-chickens-allowed area to my rural place three years ago was that I could start a small egg laying flock. Now that I actually have some chickens, I love them even more. The eggs are wonderful but perhaps even more valuable is their contribution to the garden.
My chickens and two ducks stay in a large chicken run, measuring about 40 feet long and 60 feet wide. Right now, though, they are in a small fenced off area of about 10 feet by 40 feet to allow the newly reseeded chicken yard to grow for a while.
Off the main chicken yard, there is a small bump-out in front of the rabbit hutches that I consider to be one of the most important parts of my garden: It is the chickens’ compost area. It is connected to the main chicken yard, but off to one side. In this area goes everything a gardener would normally put into a compost heap: kitchen scraps, garden and yard waste, spent straw, leaves, and so on. This is where the chickens spend most of their days. They kick through this small area over and over, eating bugs and seeds and scraps. They leave behind poop and mellowed organic matter.
Now that it is early spring here in Northern Ohio, I am harvesting the compost the chickens have processed for me. All last summer the garden leavings got tossed in. Last fall I put a huge pile of raked leaves in this area, and then in midwinter I opened an old but dry bale of straw for the chickens to play in. And every week the rabbit cages get cleaned out and some of it falls here too (though most of the bunny poop goes directly into the garden, no matter what time of year it is).
First, I wait for a dry spell, so this area is easy to rake up. It will still be damp, but not nearly as heavy and hard to get if it is actually wet. Today I raked up all the loose stuff. When I started there was about 3 inches of springy organic matter.
About 15 wagons-full later, a new garden bed was full to overflowing, and most of the loose stuff was raked up.
The next layer will get shoveled up in a day or two. It has a little straw and leaves but is mostly well-composted matter that looks like fluffy dirt. I consider this my potting mix, and it works really well. It absorbs water without getting dense, which with my clay soil is pretty wonderful. I should be able to fill a large feed sack or two with this fluffy layer, plenty for all my potting needs.
Once I get the fluffy layer off, that area will still be about 3 inches higher inside the fence than outside. So I’ll dig this layer up and use it as fertilizer. It is mostly composted chicken poop, dirt, and organic matter. This layer is teeming with composting worms, and you can smell them when you dig. I’ll dig this layer up to make the compost yard even with the rest of the yard again, and leave the piles for a day or two so the composting worms can mostly escape. With each layer I expose in the compost area, the hens keep me company and participate. They stand by and watch, waiting for their turn to work on each patch as I finish up. With their composting yard clean and bare, they will be happy when the cycle starts again with new scraps, leaves, straw and yard waste, and they like the composting worms too.
Then this soil along with the litter I clean out of the chicken coop and the bunny cages will get put generously in each garden bed, around the berry and nut bushes and fruit trees, and in the flower beds.
Because of my chickens, I know that my garden has good quality, clean, pesticide and herbicide free fertilizer, and with the organic matter they scratch apart for me, my soil is getting better each year.
I’m so grateful to have the hens and ducks. They are amusing to watch, they eat my scraps and turn it into both eggs and valuable gardening material. I just love them!