No Free Ride

Chickens are a useful addition to a home. In addition to providing the usual eggs and sometimes meat, they can also be put to work to make your life a little easier. We are a breeder of several chicken breeds and have a number of pens and over 100 birds. I expect that many birds to earn their keep with production and the sale of eggs and birds. But they are not always productive and we don’t always have birds for sale. So I have found other ways to keep them useful here. I am going to show you some of the ways I get the chickens to help me out around the house. These ideas can even be used if you have a typical back yard flock. No matter the size of your flock, chickens being chickens can be useful for many things.

I mentioned in the previous post that we use “chicken dirt” in our garden and pots. It comes from a couple of places. In our coops we use pine wood shavings on the ground. With the birds constant scratching these chips break down and we add some more. Over time, we get a soft powdery soil in the coops. During the summer the birds digs down into this for dust bathing. When I get several inches of this dirt I get the wheelbarrow and shovel and remove the loose dirt and take the coops down to a solid layer. Then we add a bag of shaving to start all over again and the removed dirt is used around the house for my plants. More often than not, the soil goes out in the garden. But, I also like to use it in my houseplants and in the containers we use on the gutter gardens. The soil is a mixture of the broken down shavings, chicken manure and dirt. It often will still have bits of the shavings in the mix adding texture and water holding ability to the soil. I have never had a problem even using just this in my plants. With all the scratching around the birds do, everything has been broken down and so can be used without any wait. This year I will be keeping a pile of this dirt next to the compost pile so I have easy access to it. Usually I decide I want to pot some stuff up and then go looking for a coop to clean. Having a pile handy will stop giving me an excuse to not repot.

Another way for me to get chicken dirt is from a turn out area. I have birds in pens and I used some safety fencing to enclose an area for them to get out and between the pens. I take turns letting out a different pen each time. We throw out some scratch to give them something to do and I also will throw kitchen scraps and leaves in the area to keep the birds busy. Weeds that I do not want in the compost pile also end up here. Bermuda grass and anything that has gone to seed gets thrown out here because in time it will break down and if anything manages to sprout, the chickens will make short work of it. Nothing survives long in this area. The birds also kick shavings out of their runs and they end up being worked into the dirt to break down. Over time, with the birds scratching and the seasons, everything thrown into this area will turn into some wonderful soil. The top is always the partially broken shavings from the pens, so I will scrape this aside and get the dirt down underneath. If I want to have a coarser mix, I will grab some of the stuff from the top to mix in.

Initially I enclosed the turn out area to control weeds and grass. It is not an area the mower will fit and I hate to weed eat. So, I enclosed the area and let the birds keep the vegetation under control. When spring comes and things start to green up, I will keep them out of the area for a bit to give the greens a chance to get growing. It will not take the birds long to get an overgrown area under control.

A few summers ago I had a bad grasshopper problem. I had grasshoppers every year and they really put a dent in my garden. While I was moving some Juvies to larger pens to grow out, a couple of young cockerels got loose. I figured I would eventually get them so let them be. They were mixed breed males headed for the freezer, so figured a few days running around would not hurt. And, if a hawk or dog got them it would not be a loss. Over the next few days I watched the cockerels hunt and chase grasshoppers. I turned a few more males out so I had five of them running the yard and decided to see how things went.

The young birds did a great job on the grasshoppers and it was not long before I saw significant reduction of them in the yard. The cockerels still got some feed or scratch scattered out for them, but for the most part, they were on bug patrol and did just fine. They figured out how to get up in the trees at night to roost and survived some pretty bad storms up there. I did see on my cameras during one bad storm at night, three boys hit the ground because of some very high winds. The decided they did not want to make their way back up in the tree and found a dry place under the chick brooder. They finished out the night under the safety of some cover. But we have had several bad storms and they seem to ride them out in the trees just fine.

Another thing I noticed with the boys was their scratching was keeping certain areas void of vegetation. So, I decided to use that to my advantage and would put their morning scratch in the high grass of places that needed weeding. It did not take them long to get an area cleaned out of vegetation. I began putting them to work and have been using them to clear and keep clear certain areas here at the house. I had grass a good foot high in the two areas above. Under that fallen tree was a mess and they now pretty much keep that area cleaned out. It took a week to knock out the tall grass next to the pen on the upper right and a little longer than that to get the grasses around the tree in the bottom right. I have just started them on the piles of woodchips in the lower left photo. In the chips I have for the chicken runs there are some tall grasses growing that need a weed eater. And the Bermuda has run crazy through the pile. Going to see how long it takes them to get this area under control. I am sure they will find lots of fun bugs in the piles as well as they work the chips.

My garden got out of control with the over abundance of spring rains and we are slowly getting this back under control. I have two portable pens with roosters in the garden helping with the weeding as well. I move those pens around in the garden and get the birds to knock the high stuff down and loosen up the dirt. The tall grasses are dead and they are good at breaking up those dead stems. They also tend to scratch them out of the dirt and I think east some of the seeds as well. Bermuda is another story. The birds will get the stuff on the surface pretty tore up and loosen the soil. After that it is fairly east to then come in and dig up the deeper runners from the Bermuda.

We have been putting the roosters to work for about two years now. Since I always have a supply of young birds coming along, we rotate who is running the yard. As the younger ones come along we catch the current batch and try to find either flocks or freezers for them. I have one old Cream Legbar rooster that was a breeder for me that is the only permanent resident running free. For the most part, the birds stay in my yard and do not wander off. But that colorful pair pictured above, that I called Tom and Jerry, decided to check out the neighbors yards on a regular basis. So .. they ended up trapped and rehomed. Tearing up my yard where I want them to is a lot different than tearing up the neighbors yard.

As a breeder I hatch a number of chicks every year. They are on shavings for several weeks before they go outside on wire bottomed hutches to grow a bit before heading to their grow out pens. I end up changing out their bedding at least once a week. I use a finer shaving for the chicks and when I clean their brooder we bag up the shavings and this goes in the compost pile. Even with the finer shavings, there is still pretty fresh chicken poo in the mix and I want it to break down some before using with my plants. In the compost pile, in addition to this bedding mix I also use shredded paper. I hate to put anything in a landfill, so we try to recycle as much as possible here. I have a paper shredder and everything that fits in it gets shredded. We use this shredded paper sometimes in nest boxes and have thrown it in pens instead of shavings. In the compost pile we layer the chick bedding with shredded paper. We are trying to keep it moist and flip it when we can. This is my first year doing this so we will see how long it takes to get some usable compost out of this. I currently only have one compost bin, but we will have another one before too long.

As you can see, a few chickens can be a bit more helpful than just providing meals. Their diets of bugs and vegetation and their constant hunt for food can be used to your advantage