Hens love to roam free – they are natural scavengers so will ruin flowerbeds and eat your grass! The bigger the area they have to roam in the better and the less damage that will be noticeable. If you have a small garden they will eat your precious plants, flowers and herbs rather than the weeds!

There are some things you can do to have hens and a nice garden!

1. Restrict where they can free range with a run or fencing
2. Plant the right plants
3. Give them things to do and eat

Limiting the area chickens can forage in

I live in a semi-detached with a small graden, so when I left my first trio to roam freely my lawn disappeared in a fortnight! Since then I have always built a good sized run for hens to enjoy.

The one pictured was built with trellis and lined with chicken wire and I am now growing climbing roses up the outside of it. My current 4 hens took about a week to eat all the grass! Every now and again I chuck in a straw bale to keep the mud getting too bad! And every couple of months I buy a couple of turfs from my local DIY shed to give some grass to graze!

Another option is electric fencing – you can restrict the chickens to a certain area and move it around the garden to allow it to recover -after a while the ground can get sour from the manure!

Electric fence kit

Buy Electric fence kit now!*

Plant the right plants

Have lots of shrubs that are big enough to withstand scratching round the base and protect them with mulch.
The key is to protects small seedlings – chicken wire round veggie beds works well – they can’t perch on the wire! You can also put prickly mulch like 20mm gravel around plants too.
Every chook is different but most won’t touch…

Winter

• Snowdrops
• Crocuses

Spring

• Camellias
• Primroses
• Violas
• Daffodils
• Tulips

Summer

• Lavender
• Roses
• Asters
• Hydrangeas
• Chrysanthemums
• Iris.
• Strong-smelling herbs like rosemary, mint, lemon balm and feverfew

Autumn

• Dahlias
• Azaleas

Most evergreen shrubs, especially prickly ones, are usually also safe from foraging hens!

A helpful book on keeping chickens and having a garden is Chicken Runs and Vegetable Plots by Charlotte Popescu


Buy Chicken Runs and Vegetable Plots now!*

Give them things to do and eat

Chooks love sweetcorn, so it is great fun to hang a cob of corn so they can peck it.