{"id":611,"date":"2016-06-17T13:05:12","date_gmt":"2016-06-17T13:05:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregalder.com\/yardposts\/?p=611"},"modified":"2020-01-14T13:22:41","modified_gmt":"2020-01-14T21:22:41","slug":"chickens-eat-bugs-in-the-garden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregalder.com\/yardposts\/chickens-eat-bugs-in-the-garden\/","title":{"rendered":"Chickens eat bugs in the garden"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joel Salatin advises that you wake up every morning aiming to attack the weak link on your farm. That could be soil fertility, irrigation, labor efficiency, anything. The weak link in our yard has been — for a couple years now — a proliferation of earwigs and pill bugs.<\/p>\n

They grew in numbers as I spread more and more mulch under trees and around vegetable beds. They eat holes in strawberries, eat holey the leaves of peppers, eggplants, basil, and onions, and they eat the cotyledons of every single germinating seed. There is not even one species that they allow to germinate and grow up. This has necessitated that I grow all vegetables from seedlings purchased at a\u00a0nursery, and this is the worst consequence of all: not being able to grow from seed. It’s so limiting and so frustrating.<\/p>\n

Enter chickens. I bought four and\u00a0I can’t describe the pleasure I have found lately in watching them devour bugs. It is inordinate, sadistic, unalloyed, and I don’t apologize for it. It comes from a desire for revenge, true, but it also comes from seeing how happy I am making the chickens, and just as much it comes from closing a\u00a0resource loop.<\/p>\n

Another piece of advice from Joel Salatin is to make a liability into an asset. The bugs have been a liability to me and my garden, but to chickens they are delectable food, an asset. The bugs, which were once only a detraction, a cost, are now a resource, being put to use as feed for hens that will convert them, ultimately, into food for us in the form of eggs.<\/p>\n

I’ve built a mobile pen so I can locate them over a patch of garden, focusing them on finding and eating all of the bugs in a\u00a0particular 32 square feet, and preventing\u00a0them from munching on any of the surrounding plants.<\/p>\n

\"mobile<\/a><\/p>\n

Yesterday, I left them over a bed where there had been strawberries. They didn’t eat every bug, but they ate most of them such that the basil seedlings that I put in today — after I moved the pen down the bed — should survive any damage the few remaining pill bugs might cause.<\/p>\n

Keeping the pen rotating through the garden consistently ought to reduce the bug population overall enough for me to successfully grow from seed again soon. My future looks like this: I’ll have seeds germinating unmolested, chickens well fed, eggs, and even a further asset of manure. It’s only a shame that I waited so long to add the chickens in order to\u00a0make use of the earwigs and pill bugs and fortify the yard’s weak link.<\/p>\n

UPDATE July 4, 2016<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

The basil seedlings have grown perfectly without any bug damage despite the presence of a few remaining pill bugs and earwigs.<\/p>\n

You might also like to read:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Should you get chickens?<\/a><\/h1>\n

Chickens: my garden’s little helpers<\/a><\/h1>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joel Salatin advises that you wake up every morning aiming to attack the weak link on your farm. That could be soil fertility, irrigation, labor efficiency, anything. The weak link in our yard has been — for a couple years now — a proliferation of earwigs and pill bugs. They grew in numbers as I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":614,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[36,34],"tags":[21,44],"class_list":["post-611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-chickens","category-pests-and-diseases","tag-chickens","tag-seed-starting"],"yoast_head":"\nChickens eat bugs in the garden - Greg Alder's Yard Posts: Southern California food gardening<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/gregalder.com\/yardposts\/chickens-eat-bugs-in-the-garden\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Chickens eat bugs in the garden - Greg Alder's Yard Posts: Southern California food gardening\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Joel Salatin advises that you wake up every morning aiming to attack the weak link on your farm. 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