Keeping Chickens out of the Garden

Once plants are established it can even be a good think for chickens to scratch around in your gardens; they eat pests and leave fertilizer behind. But when seeds are put in or if plants are still small enough that the chickens can pull them up by the roots it is definitely not a good thing for them to have free reign. For instance, the peas that Josh planted became chicken snacks almost as soon as he got them in the ground. Since we don’t want to fence in each garden bed and are not willing to keep the ladies penned up in their coop (nice as said coop might be) we had to figure something out.

Instead of buying more ‘stuff’, Josh realized we could use the frame of the hoophouse to protect the seedlings that are coming up right now. We simply took off the plastic cover and covered the hoophouse structure with black deer netting. Because the plastic is attached to the frame with pvc fittings that pop on and off it is easy to interchange materials. The plastic is folded up for fall use; once the lettuce, spinach, etc is big enough we will dissemble the whole frame. But for now we’ve got a chicken-free garden bed. Only problem: as we start putting more plants in we will either need more hoophouses or different solutions.