Why raising chickens is good for your garden
Who doesn’t like raising chickens in their garden?
They provide you with fresh eggs and you can even enjoy their delicious meat in different recipes. It only costs you the price of some poultry food! But you may not be aware that keeping chickens can also help you flourish your garden.
Gardeners raise chickens to reap the following benefits:
Pest control
Insects and wild animals are the biggest enemies of plants. Many gardeners use chemical pesticides to keep this nuisance at bay. But due to the negative impacts of chemical products on the plants as well as the environment, it’s not a good option to buy these products.
Instead, chickens can help you kill off harmful insects and pests in a safe way. They can take away your worries about snails, mosquitoes, flies, and ticks.
Natural fertilizer
In order to keep your plants healthy and increase the yield of your garden, you should raise chickens in your garden. Chicken manure works as an organic fertilizer for any garden and aids in the growth of the plants.
However, it’s best to compost the manure before adding it to the soil. It’s because chicken manure contains high nitrogen level which isn’t good for the plants.
To prepare compost, take a composting bin and add chicken manure along with other ingredients such as food scraps, cardboard, and fallen leaves. Cover the compost pile and leave it aside until the organic matter is decomposed. Now, you can add it to the soil.
Eliminate weeds
Every gardener knows about the risks of weed growth. If you don’t eliminate weeds in time, they will spread all around and affect the growth of other plants. To prevent this problem, you should remove weeds and raise chickens in your garden.
It’s because when chickens forage for food, they eat weeds plants and the seeds from your garden. They will eliminate the invasive weeds and prevent their growth. Therefore, chickens make it easier for the gardeners to control weed growth with minimum efforts.
Improve the quality of the soil
Tilling the soil is essential to break up crusted soil, mix compost, control weeds, and improve the fertility of the soil. Chickens can make the task easier for you. If you want to prepare a particular area in your garden for growing plants, you can use fencing to restrict them in that space.
Clean garden
Fallen fruits affect the appearance of your garden. You can raise chickens in your back garden to keep your garden clean.
Your chickens will munch on the fallen fruits and vegetables. This way, you won’t need to spend time in removing these fruits. But don’t forget to get rid of debris from the garden on a regular basis, so that the chickens don’t end up consuming unhealthy items.
Not only will the garden chickens improve the health of your plants, you can also reduce the feed cost by keeping them in your garden. Grow plants of corn, squash, mint, cilantro, and barley to feed your chickens with healthy food items.
