Having chickens is great… they are amusing strange little creatures; I
could sit in the garden for hours and watch them as they gorge themselves
on the smallest of insects and chase each other around when the other has
found a worm or some such. They can also run the entire length of the
garden is nano-seconds when you open the back door. Oh, and the obvious, they give you eggs every day.
Having chickens is a pain in the arse… if you like your garden. As they
search the undergrowth they trample on smaller plants and peck at flowers
and leaves, many of which they don’t like but they seem to forget, so try
them every time they pass. The also scrat at the soil and unearth root
balls or distribute top soil around, often onto the grass etc.
I bought a lot of bigger plants at the weekend to fill two small beds. My
reasoning is that more mature plants can stand up to the chickens walking
around them and actually the chickens notice them and tend not to just
walk straight over them.
So far most of the plants have been relatively untouched and the plan
seems to be working, apart from two lupins… I’d say they have been
decimated, but that means reduce by one tenth… these have been stripped
bare in little under a few hours.