Chickens are one of the best garden tools money can buy and one of the few garden purchases you can make which pays dividends in the form of fertilizer, eggs and meat too. Hens left to their own in a garden will scratch up and loosen the soil, eat down weeds and consume plant destructive bugs–whether you want them to or not.  All the while the Hens will be fertilizing the garden and feeding themselves–is this as close to perpetual motion as it gets?

At the end of the growing season I love to move a crack team of hens into the polytunnel or garden to “sanitize” the area for the coming year.  Not only do the hens keep from having to clear up all the green waste, but they also eat up all the dropped and rotten vegetation and, more importantly, the seeds they’ve left behind and any diseases which may have formed throughout the growing season.

With each hen having four toes on a foot, even a small group of hens working a patch is like having a large rake, or aerator at work in the garden. Scratching, digging, loosening the soil and cleansing it. . . .In terms of keeping diseases and pests down in the garden, chickens are number one. Number one, that is, when you want them in the garden. . .if they get in during the growing season and you don’t take proper precautions, then they become just another, large, garden pest. But that is easily solved with using a portable, floor-less Chicken Tractor to move the hens around the garden. Just move it to a new patch each day ahead of where you need the soil worked and wait. Magic.

Chickens, thus allowed to exercise, harvest their own food, and breath the clean air of the garden–I am assuming if you have chickens in your garden, and you eat the vegetables from it,  and you value your health, you aren’t using herbicides, fungicides or pesticides–are far healthier than their cooped up Factory Farmed counterparts. They will be less susceptible to diseases themselves and won’t create a smelly, festering mess of one area. And until those in the know can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Avian Influenza–aka Bird Flu–is truly transmitted by wild birds on a level which is harmful to free-range domestic fowl¹ then I am willing to take the risk with my flock and keep them free-range, and recommend everyone who gardens to get some of these magnificent garden tools.

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1. Why don’t the wild birds die? Why don’t the wild ducks, geese, swans and other fowl which we have domesticated from the wild, die? If they are somehow immune, or are just carriers, why aren’t we breeding their genetics back into our domestic birds? Or is it just that the natural immune systems of most domestically raised poultry and fowl is so compromised by the lack of fresh air, and space, and the low-quality manufactured food they are raised on, that they cannot fight off AI? [↩]