I used to think of chickens as a threat. When I lived in Lesotho, my neighbor’s roaming chickens repeatedly ate the leaves of my chard down to the stems despite my attempts to fence them out. I couldn’t have imagined that I would see them as I do today, as my garden’s little helpers.
Insect control
Even last spring when I bought four chicks to eat the earwigs and pill bugs who were devouring my vegetables, I didn’t foresee that they would be so valuable to my garden in other ways.
I wrote the post, “Chickens eat bugs in the garden,” soon after embarking on the experiment of using the birds for insect control by running them over vegetable beds in a mobile pen. I recognized their good work in that arena quickly, and here today, one year on, I can update to say that I’m still pleased with their effectiveness at snatching up meals of insect pests.
The pen is four feet by eight feet, small enough for almost any yard. It has old lawnmower wheels on the back, and it’s light enough for me to move with one hand.
A chicken’s eye view inside the mobile pen.
This spring I’ve been able to grow many plants from seed that I’d previously given up on because of the bug munching, such as carrots and beets. And I’ve been able to plant seedlings of many crops earlier than in past springs, such as eggplants and peppers.
This Anaheim pepper has fruit ready for harvest today (June 1), which is a month earlier than last year.
I would keep our chickens around if the only thing they did for us was feed on the dreaded European earwigs, but over the past year I’ve discovered a few more ways in which they contribute to the garden, significantly.
Compost
I used to make compost. You probably know how labor intensive that can be, and how sophisticated the process can seem if you are serious about it. Layer the materials just so, get the moisture level right, check the temperature, turn the pile, blah blah blah. Good riddance.
Composting is nothing less than a natural pastime for chickens. All I do now is throw a bunch of stuff into the chicken pen and out the other end a few months later comes a substance that is better than any compost I’ve ever made or purchased.
Almost every plant scrap from the yard goes into the chicken pen: pea shoots, carrot tops, tomato vines, fallen oranges, broccoli stems, thinned peaches. Almost every kitchen and table scrap goes into the chicken pen: onion skins, coffee grounds, avocado peels, bones, egg shells. If the chickens don’t want to eat it, they don’t. Most of it, they do. All of it, they scratch around, peck at, and poop on.
If their pen ever starts to stink, I dump in some tree trimmings (leaves and wood chips), and the smell goes away. And over a handful of months, the chickens’ sporting work turns all of that trash into this most beautiful product.
What is it? It’s not manure. It has absolutely no fecal odor. I think of it as chicken compost because it looks vaguely similar to the composts I’ve made in the past with my own hands, and its constituents are essentially a bunch of decomposed bits of things, including chicken poop.
To make this chicken compost, the only effort I put in is at the end where I sift out any big pieces, like sticks and avocado pits.
Of what help in the garden is this chicken compost, exactly? Pick it up and squeeze it in your hand: it feels spongy, full of air, like it can’t be compacted by even the strongest of grips. Because of this quality, it infiltrates water well. I’ve noticed this after adding it to the surface of the soil in my vegetable beds as well as when I’ve added it to my potting mix for growing seedlings. Yet it also holds onto the water and remains friable once it does eventually dry.
Furthermore, the plants themselves tell me that they are thriving in it. They tell me this by growing fast and putting out uniformly green leaves, as seen in these tomato seedlings grown in a mix that includes the chicken compost.
So I started skeptically with the chickens as a tool to manage the populations of earwigs and pill bugs in the vegetable garden, hoping they could be useful rather than a garden nuisance, and now I’m starting to see them as not only useful but nearly indispensable. I don’t want to go back to laboring over inferior compost piles, nor do I want to buy inferior compost or fertilizers — not when I can have this tidy cycle of resources that the chickens create.
Let me acknowledge the costs involved in getting this cycle of chicken contributions rolling. The chicks cost $5 each, I built a small, mobile pen for them which cost me about $100 in materials, including a waterer and feeder, and the ongoing feed costs are around $1 per month per bird (they mostly eat from the yard). But the benefits of their insect control service and compost production already seem to outweigh those costs.
Eggs
And let me not leave out mention of these. If the purpose of a garden is to provide food, then . . .
(I’d be happy to share specifics on how I’ve learned to best run the chickens’ mobile pen through the vegetable beds for insect control, how I built the mobile pen, or anything else related to letting chickens contribute to a home garden and not be a nuisance; for example, if you want to let them roam freely for a bit, do it at sunset because they’ll be out for a limited time and they’ll return to roost in their pen at dusk without your needing to herd them back. All of these topics probably deserve their own post in the future. But let me know in the comments section if you’re curious about something now.)
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I'm Greg. My goal is to help others grow some food at home, with a focus on vegetables and fruits -- especially avocados -- in Southern California. I write a new "Yard Post" every Friday. 
I would love to see a picture of you mobile pen. Sounds interesting!
Thanks for the reminder, Chris. I added photos of the mobile pen to the post.
I am interested in learning your rotation of your chickens in the gardening beds.
I have been contemplating adding chickens as garden pest control. It is impossible
to grow root crops for all the root worms. I have been researching if chickens can be a helpful control for that. I have an urban garden so a mobile pen and coop is necessary.
I am not dependent on the chickens as egg layers, thinking of them as more organic insecticide. I am thinking of two to four birds as sufficient for my yard size.
Hi Darren,
I’ve noticed that my chickens like any type of worm more than any other insect. So I’d think that chickens would do well for you if worms are a problem in your garden (I’m thinking of wireworms, specifically).
I have four birds, but only two birds could easily get all of the insect control work done on even a large garden.
My rotation routine is that I always run the chickens in the mobile pen over a bed after it is harvested or finished. So, for example, in April I had a bed of peas that were finished producing; I put the mobile pen over it for a couple days; then I planted tomatoes in that bed.
Sometimes I also put the mobile pen over a bed that has producing plants in it, but only for a brief time — like ten minutes in one spot. For instance, recently I noticed earwigs in a bed of lettuce, so I put the chicken pen over that bed; they ate all the bugs right away, and once they started pecking at the lettuce I moved their pen.
That’s the heart of it. When the chickens aren’t in their pen over a vegetable bed, they’re in another part of the yard. There I bring them stuff from the garden and table scraps that they eat and make into compost.
As an aside, my vegetable beds are three feet wide, and the chicken pen is four feet wide (so it covers some pathway on either side too).
Greg, our chickens love worms and bugs, but they go completely nuts over grubs! We have a few open compost piles (they love scratching through them) and we find grubs in these piles when we dig down to turn them. When one chicken gets a grub, they all abandon helping me dig and instantly start chasing the chicken with the grub around! So fun to watch! It’s amazing how fast they get the big ones down!
Oh! And in the doing they really go crazy for Japanese beetles! I have a good friend with a nectarine tree who lets me come over to strip her tree of beetles that we then toss to the chickens. They love chasing, catching & gobbling then down! And then their poop is full of iridescent green specs.
Agreed! I’ve noticed some of the same. In fact, just yesterday while planting a tree I dug up a grub and gave it to my son to give to the chickens because I knew he’d love to see them go crazy for it.
Also, reminds me that some smart orchardists are known to run chickens through their orchards at certain times of year in order to unearth and consume insects that cause the trees problems (like the big green fruit beetles).
Loed reading about your chickens, and we have been thinking of getting a few. We live on 1 1 1/4 acres and the back part of our land we have left barren, An unbelievable number of any hills and ants have taken up residence there. There are so many of them that we have not found any way of controling them. And they keep creeping up to our planted and grassy areas. Do you know if chickens like ants? It would be wonderful if we could find an organic way of controlling them and getting our backyard back.
Hi Louise,
Oh how I wish chickens controlled ants! Mine don’t. They ignore every kind of ant we have in our yard. They just let them crawl over their feet sometimes.
Where do your chickens lay their eggs? When I looked at the picture of your mobile coop I don’t see anything. Also, how do you get the chickens in and out of the mobile coop? I’ve only had traditional chicken pens. We’ve just moved to San Diego from NorCal and I have never had so many insect problems!
Hi Jan,
They just lay their eggs on the ground. I used to have a box in there but found it to be unnecessary.
There’s a little door on the front of the pen, and also the roof is not attached so I can slide it and the birds can hop in and out.
Maybe I should make a post with notes and lots of photos of my pen in case anyone would like to build something similar. I’m pleased with almost every part of its design and construction.
If you have a problem with a specific insect that you’re not finding good ways to manage, let me know and I may have some experience that could help.
I just found your site and am loving it. We’ve lived in SD for about 8 hrs but just bought a house in late summer with a yard that has established fruit trees and enough room for a bit of homesteading (a very little bit!). I can’t wait to dig in. One of the things I’m leaning heavily towards is getting 2-3 chickens for the reasons you’ve mentioned here- bug control & compost. I would LOVE to read a more detailed post on your mobile coop and your chickens. Thanks for running your web page- it’s so hard to find gardening information specifically geared to our area.
Hi Brook,
Thanks for writing. Glad you found my site. And congratulations on your new budding homestead! You must be intoxicated with the potential of your yard.
I haven’t written a chicken post for a while. You’re right: it’s time. I’ll get to work on one about my mobile coop or my bug-control routine or the chickens’ compost making. Feel free to guide me as to what you’d most like to hear more about first.
In the meantime, I’ll share this link to a slideshow that I made a year or two ago to accompany a talk I gave called, “Chickens Enhance your Garden.” At least there you’ll be able to see a few more photos.
Hi! Thanks for taking the time to respond! At first I was confused by this quote: “Composting is nothing less than a natural pastime for chickens. All I do now is throw a bunch of stuff into the chicken pen and out the other end a few months later comes a substance that is better than any compost I’ve ever made or purchased.”
and how a moving pen can create compost. However, after reading through again, I see that the chickens actually live somewhere else and get to visit the garden from time to time, depending on where you are in the gardening cycle. Do the chickens have a coop & run for when they aren’t in the garden or do you use the same mobile pen? I’m trying to figure out how to set up my chicken system so they can multi-task and be as productive members of the family as possible. I want eggs, of course, but I want compost to use in building my new vegetable beds (and maintaining them), and then pest control. My initial thought was a coop big enough to hold 5 but starting with 2-3 & then let them free-range in the yard (I will start with buff orpingtons & we have a 6+foot fence all the way around our yard). However, I really don’t want them to destroy my (yet to be built) garden. I’ve read a lot of Paul Wheaton’s writing on chickens and like the idea of paddocks but am not sure how I would set that up in my particular yard (and would it even be worth it in the amount of space I have?). And, as I mentioned above, I want compost like you describe which I don’t think would happen in the paddock method. Anyhoo, those are the thoughts I ponder when trying to decide how to proceed with my tiny urban farm. Thanks again for taking the time to not only share your adventures via your website but being willing to coach the rest of us.
Hi Brook,
I promise I’ll write a full post on this soon. In the meantime, my chickens have just one full-time home. It is the 4-foot by 8-foot mobile pen/coop. I keep four hens in there.
Almost every day, I also let them run around the yard for a bit. Often this happens in the late afternoon because that way they’ve already laid their eggs in the pen.
Whenever a bed in the vegetable garden needs some de-bugging, I roll the mobile pen over to it and the chickens do their work. But otherwise, the pen stays mostly in one spot.
In that spot is where the chickens are making compost. I put kitchen and garden scraps in their pen and I add a lot of wood chips, the chickens poop all day and all night, and the chickens scratch through it all to mix it all up. After a few months, I move their pen off the spot momentarily so I can harvest that compost. Then I put the pen back on the same spot for another few months of compost making, or sometimes I start them in another spot. Since my yard is an acre, I can do this, but you might want to just always keep them in one spot.
The paddock idea only works if you have a lot of land. That is, the chickens will quickly devegetate a small paddock if they spend too much time on it at once or spend time on it too often. I can’t imagine that it would work in your situation.