Backyard homestead chickens

A fine-feathered flock of garden helpers.

At one point during the past seven years, it hit me: The chain in our garden ecosystem had a missing link.

And that link was animals.

We’re on just 1/4-acre here, tucked in between apartment buildings. We’re smack dab in the middle of a metropolitan area totaling nearly 3 million people and spanning two states. While our little neighborhood certainly isn’t all high rises and Times Square billboards, it’s decidedly not rural, either. So the plan obviously hadn’t included cows, horses, or pigs.

Which is sad, because those animals till the soil with their hooves and leave behind valuable nutrients in the form of manure.

But could it include animals? We already had one: Chaco.

Chaco’s the cat, and he’s indoor-only. But that’s no excuse for failing to contribute to the homestead. He earns his keep by peeing into a litter box full of pine pellets, which break down and get added to the garden. We work the pine sawdust into the soil directly, turning it into our garden beds with a broad fork.

There are trace amounts of nitrogen in Chaco’s urine captured in the pine sawdust. But according to the calculations of a chemist friend of ours, Claire Schosser of Living Low in the Lou, it doesn’t add enough nitrogen to make an appreciable difference to a typical potato crop (spuds are heavy nitrogen feeders). Many people who are serious about gardening without commercial fertilizers use their own urine on their crops, which is easy to collect and distribute. Provided the urinator is healthy and disease-free, urine is sterile and safe to use, ahem, speaking from experience. Actually, this is Anthony C Valterra’s department. I’m too busy with the poop side of things…

Because we’re a permaculture homestead, we believe in “no poops left behind,” so Chaco’s turds go into the long-term compost, a closed drum that doesn’t get distributed into the soil until it’s fully broken down over six to nine month’s time and incorporated with other compost ingredients such as weeds, kitchen scraps, and grass clippings.

But Chaco is just one little guy. And while I did say no poops left behind, we’re not quite to the level of permaculture that would have us making use of our own “humanure¹.” Something else would have to forge that missing link: a flock of chickens.

Lil’ Oreo at five weeks.

Chickens till the soil all the day long doing what comes naturally to these birds: scratching and pecking. And they fertilize it with their prolific poops.

Most people raise chickens for eggs and meat, which is what “dual-purpose” means: A breed that works well both as a meat bird and egg layer. But a better way to regard the magnificent chicken is as a “triple-purpose” bird, with the third one being garden helper.

Now if you’re thinking that chicken manure is too high in nitrogen and needs to be composted first, you’d be right in there with most conventional advice on the matter. Sometimes it seems gardening is one big make-work project the way people build a chicken coop with a floor that needs mucking out and elaborate compost bins where you need to add the chicken poop and then turn the compost… meh. I write full-time; I don’t have the energy for all of that, and furthermore, redundant effort makes me testy.

It works perfectly well to range your flock on a typical garden bed of about fifty square feet. Once they’ve eaten all the spent vegetables and weeds, tilled the surface with their scratching and pecking, and left a nice bit of manure in their wake, you can move them to another spot, turn the soil with a broad fork, and plant again.

I did this last year before our flock was cruelly struck down in mere teenhood, and we enjoyed a bumper crop of tomatoes, basil, and zucchini. I’m in good company, too, as Marissa Ames, editorial director for Mother Earth News, frequently mentions in her monthly columns using this exact same technique. My inspiration actually came from Harvey Ussery’s book, The Small-Scale Poultry Flock². He takes it a step further and grows in-between cover crops that chickens like to eat, so he’s regenerating his soil both with the dead, decaying roots of the cover crops and with the chicken poop-and-tiller rounds. Plus, he’s feeding his chickens for the price of a cover crop instead of bags of feed. Yeah, that’s where I’d like to take our project next.

So what am I talking about here? Your chickens must be mobile. You need to be able to move them about the garden.

What’s the usual small-flock setup? A stationary coop and run. The advantage of these is you can build your chickens a fortress if you want, and try to make it as impenetrable to predators as humanly possible. The disadvantage is huge: Once your chickens eat up everything in the run, they’re just scratching and pecking around in the mud, dependent on your feed bag for sustenance. It also gets poopy in there pretty quick, though not at all pissy: Chickens… actually don’t pee. Their “urine” expresses itself as uric acid crystals in their excrement.

The grave disadvantage of the perma-coop is why I opted for the chickshaw instead. We can move it around the garden, and when the chickens are inside it, their poop falls through the hardware-cloth mesh to the ground. No mucking out required.

I’d basically invented the chickshaw in my head first, when I was researching chicken tractors. A lot of the designs for those don’t look too movable without bending over and hefting awkward shapes around. I typed in, “chicken tractor with handle, mid center of gravity,” and the chickshaw was in the results list.

It’s got a terrible design flaw, however: The open egg door in back. In another post, I talk about how this cost us our flock last year.

But we’ve since sealed the opening. With that done, the chickshaw is apparently impervious to opossums and raccoons, as both have been by to check out the situation while we were brooding chicks inside. They couldn’t get in.

Some chicken keepers brood chicks in the house, but as our tragic smooshing incident drove home, cats + baby chicks = mortality. We brooded ours atop a bed of cedar shavings poured into a galvanized steel tub inside the chickshaw, with a heat lamp over the chicks and a wire top so they couldn’t hop out. It worked beautifully.

That kept them happy and healthy from arrival to three weeks. But they were clearly ready to leave the tub at that point, and outside temperatures warmed up such that they could handle it. I let them out of the tub and into the chickshaw proper, where they’ve been for the past two weeks. With a stick for roosting and plenty of weeds dropped in to give them a taste of things to come, they were content… until they realized there was another frontier awaiting. This past Saturday marked chicken liberation day, and I must say it made my heart soar to see them take to the earth.

Once you witness a young chicken scratch dirt for the first time, you’ll vow never to eat eggs from a factory hen again.

It seems they’ve puffed out and are starting to look more chicken-y already after just a few full days of free-range eating.

The other thing we’ve done for our backyard flock also comes as a recommendation from the aforementioned Harvey Ussery: Set up an electric fence.

Now that the flock is free to range at sunup, they’re much more vulnerable to daytime predators. You might remember Fudge Pie (my favorite) was taken out by a hawk. This happened because she’d slipped out from under her pen and wandered alone into the open garlic bed. The girls can’t do that with an electric fence.

I resisted this idea as long as I could, as I spent 13 years as a vegetarian and have a big, warm, fuzzy (not-so) secret heart for animals. It took the loss of last year’s flock entirely, and then this spring setting up a non-electrified “hen pen” and quickly observing that it would simply not do before I bit down hard and ordered the real deal.

What it comes down to is I rather see them roam around in fresh foliage, eating bugs and worms and juicy green shoots, than stick them behind permanent fencing in a run that will only be green for a few weeks. Plus there’s the benefit of their tilling and fertilizing. The chickshaw’s on big wheels; it’s meant to move.

But I also realize I have a deep responsibility to protect them from predators. The chicken evolved in tandem with us; it cannot survive on its own in the wild. Everything wants to eat it. Everything. That’s why chickens lay so many eggs, to ensure their own survival by sheer numbers. That’s also why rabbits reproduce… like rabbits. These species have high mortality rates. But they also depend on their friend the farmer for defense.

One of my mistakes last year was to let Fudge Pie imprint on me in the first 24 hours. Some species do this: When lacking the presence of their biological mothers, they will reassign the role to the nice person with the treats who coos at them. This is flattering to the human ego but really bad for the chicken. It gave Fudge Pie a feeling of separation from the rest of the flock, a resistance to minding Queenie—the big sister and ersatz mother hen—and a wanderlust that brought her out in the open, to her demise.

This time I kept my distance those first couple of days, and even after that I’ve tried to regard them as backyard homestead creatures rather than pets. They are beloved, and I still chat with, sing to, and pet them, but they are not Chaco.

Big Sister and the Holding Company, Double Stuff, and Lil’ Oreo are worthy of protection. I can’t help my chick crush. I think they’re just the prettiest birds.

Can you tell which one is Double Stuff?

The fence is mobile, too, and easy to set up and take down. It’s solar powered and delivers a short shock without harming the chicken in any way, like when you get a static-electricity charge from a blanket fresh from the dryer. As the maker states, these fences are more psychological barriers than physical. Our ladies quickly figured out the hard limits on their ranging. They tend to stay near the open chickshaw anyway, as it’s been a comfy, safe home for them and still is. They can forage underneath it, safe from aerial predators and shaded from the sun. They can retreat inside it, and that’s where their grit, bag feed, and water bowls are located, such that spills fall right through the mesh to the ground.

In case you didn’t know, chickens are extremely vulnerable when sleeping, as they roost and fall into a fugue state. Each night, the flock returns to the chickshaw, and their crazy chicken lady raises the drawbridge, shutting them in snug and tight. There they sing their birdie sleep songs as they shuffle off to dreamland. Cheepie-cheepie-cheep, cheepie-cheepie cheep…

1. No shit: If you buy The Humanure Handbook via that link to Bookshop.org, we’ll get a small commission, at no extra cost to you. Commissions help keep content like this post free for all, without the need for flashy ads and popups. More about our policies here.

2. Ditto the above for Ussery’s book.