Gardening with Chickens: Helpful or Harmful?

Gardening with chickens can boost your garden or ruin it. Understand the pros and cons of including chickens in your garden and how I put mine to work.

Gardening with chickens sounds like the perfect situation: chickens clucking around eating bad bugs, weeding and laying eggs for the family.

In reality, it might look like a war zone in your garden if you aren’t careful.

Let’s go through the pros and cons of gardening with chickens and how to maximize their presence in a beneficial manner.

✅Gardening with Chickens as Natural Pest Control

One of the most satisfying benefits of raising backyard chickens is watching them gobble up pests in the gardens. 2024 was one of the worst Japanese beetle seasons I ever had in my garden. They were disgusting and on EVERYTHING. All they did was eat, stink, and reproduce- until I got the girls involved!

They would follow me around the orchard every morning while the beetles were still hungover from their previous day of debauchery. I would shake the branches gently and watch the beetles fall to the ground where my ravenous hens would eat them for breakfast.

*Ginger Tip: Do not spray pesticides and then let your chickens eat the pests!

My brother actually used his chicken like a beetle weapon. He carried his hen around the garden and she snagged the beetles off his plants.

When I don’t have time to monitor my chickens in the garden (more on that in a minute!), I will knock the beetles into a bucket of water and then leave it in the chicken coop run. Bobbing for Beetles!

Sometimes the pest is not quite so easy to see and the chickens need a little help. Tomato hornworms (ugh-don’t get me started) are another pest that chickens loooove to snack on.

Wearing my gardening gloves, I pick off the tomato hornworms and toss them into the coop. The chickens were a little unsure the first time they saw one, but once the first girl took a nip- it was GAME ON. Talk about chickens playing “keep away” with each other!

My third pest that chickens love to eat is the grub. These are the c-shaped white larvae that live underground and eat turf roots. Then they become the dreaded Japanese beetle.

While digging holes in beds for new plants, I often find these little stinkers and save them for the chickens. I either have the chickens help me ‘dig’ for them or I collect the grubs in a container and dump them in the coop when I’m done.

❌Gardening with Chickens and Beneficial Insects

Guess what? Chickens have no idea if an insect is beneficial or problematic. If it hops, wriggles or flies they will chase it down and give it a taste. They don’t always like it, but they usually try it!

Gardeners love earth worms and the value they bring to our soil life. Worm castings (poop) and aeration are all essential to healthy soil and that means a healthy garden!

Unfortunately, chickens love the way they taste and slurp them down like spaghetti noodles. While I don’t worry about chickens decimating the supply of beneficial earthworms in my gardens, this is the perfect example of how they will eat something you want to keep.

✅Chickens Helping with the Compost Pile

Chickens in the compost pile are quite the sight to see. They have the best scratch-scratch-scratch-PECK system to literally turn the compost for you. Their claws and beaks do the work to help shred and aerate material quickly.

Their fervent activity speeds up the compost process by breaking down food scraps and new material faster.

Bonus: they often leave their own little compost ‘addition’ while they’re working to increase nitrogen.

❌Chickens Overwhelming the Compost Pile

Not known for their neatness, chickens will quickly spread unfinished compost material all over the place instead of just ‘turning’ it over like a pitchfork. Keep an eye on them while they’re working and be prepared to redirect them once they get too carried away.

They will also eat the earthworms (remember?) in the compost pile which are essential to keep the break down process going smoothly.

Also, be careful of adding too much chicken manure to your compost pile. Naturally high amounts of nitrogen need to be balanced with brown material to prevent a slimy stinky mess that can burn your plants.

✅Chicken Manure as a Natural Fertilizer

Chickens are the best recyclers! Give them leftover kitchen and garden scraps (appropriate ones) and they will turn it into manure which becomes fertilizer for the garden which becomes more vegetables and fruits which we feed back to the chickens and then they…okay you get the idea!

Chicken manure is often called black gold because of its desirable nitrogen content. Every time you clean out the chicken coop, you have free green material to add to the compost pile. When it’s mixed in with pine shavings or my favorite, hemp bedding, it is in perfect condition to ‘cook’ and eventually break down into usable compost.

I even used one of my raised beds as ‘compost pile’ over the winter to prepare it for spring planting. In the fall I dumped the old hen house bedding complete with manure, hemp and feathers into the depleted raised bed and added a layer of leaves to cover it. By May, it was ready to plant!

❌Chicken Manure Can Burn Plants and/or Introduce Bacteria

Notice that I let that chicken manure/bedding sit for an entire season! It does require time to age, break down and lose some its intense nitrogen levels before application.

Fresh chicken manure can also contaminate edible foods with bacteria like salmonella, e. coli and listeria. When you see food recalls on lettuce and other produce at the grocery, it is sometimes a result of the fertilizer.

Therefore, it is essential that you compost properly and wash your fresh produce if the chickens have been ‘helping’ in the garden.

✅Chickens Can Prepare the Ground for Planting

If you have a chicken tractor or portable pen area, chickens become mobile ’tillers’ for planting. Their natural scratch and peck foraging will quickly remove any grass, weeds and compacted areas leaving a perfectly cleared area enriched with some added fertilizer (read above).

I have an Eglu Omlet chicken coop that features wheels in the back and ‘wheelbarrow’ type handles to move it around the yard as needed. I like being able to move it around and try it in different locations. The best part though, is the ground left behind after relocating it. The soil is rich with nutrients and ready to become a new garden bed!

I’ve even had my chickens “plant” tomatoes, sunflowers, and squash! They poop in the garden after snacking on certain seeds and voilà -nature in action! See those tomato plants above? Chickens planted them, not me.

❌Chickens Can Decimate Existing Gardens

I love my chickens, but there have been times when I left them unattended and regretted it. One year they hopped up into a raised bed with rows of new spring greens growing and cleared it out in a matter of minutes! All of it! Gone!

As soon as I finished mulching my flower gardens, who came in and scratched it all out into the grass? My little helpers- aaarrggh.

Blueberry bushes? Watch out! They will be picked clean faster than you can say chicken nuggets!

Although, watching Marigold jump for blueberries might be the funniest thing I’ve seen a chicken do. So cute!

How to Harness the Power of Chickens in the Garden

You’ve read the pros and cons and can see how helpful chickens can be in the garden. You can also understand that they can wreak havoc in the garden as well.

So how do we maximize our time gardening with chickens? It’s all about supervision and prevention.

Supervise the Chickens in the Garden

I realize that there are plenty of people who let their chickens free range during the day, and that works for them. If you want to protect your gardens (and your chickens for that matter), let them free range under supervision.

My routine is to let them out in the morning when I do my garden rounds. While I check all of the raised beds for pests and problems, I let them follow me along and toss any bad bugs to them. If they lose interest and start going after plants that are off limits, I call them and put them back up until I’m finished.

Read about how I train my chickens to come when they’re called in my post: The Truth about Raising Backyard Chickens.

I keep a close eye on them as they cruise around the property and search for goodies. For the most part, they like to stay near me and wait for snacks. Sometimes I pick them a raspberry or blueberry which they love.

Overripe cucumber? I toss it them to let them work on it for a while. That keeps them busy!

Prevention is Key to Gardening with Chickens

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, right? If I don’t want my chickens to eat my spring greens or other seedlings, I need to block them off. I use netting, plastic fencing and cages to keep them away.

Not only did this keep the chickens off the blueberries, it kept the other birds away, too. Here are links to the two mesh covers I used:

• The Zip Up Mesh Cover in the middle
• The Pop Up Mesh Cover on the left and right

My kitchen garden is comprised of Vego raised beds, and I recently added their framed netting accessory to protect against frost damage. Surprise! It kept the chickens (and other pests!) off my lettuce plants this past year. It also provided shade as the temperatures kicked up and allowed my lettuce to last longer before bolting.

This is a raised bed that my husband built to protect my lettuce plants. The hinged lid with chicken wire worked perfectly to keep out the chickens, squirrels and the neighbor’s cat!

Here’s Waffle trying to figure out how to get in it!

Keep in mind that some chickens like the red hybrid breeds are more active than other chickens. Read my post Beginner’s Guide to Choosing the Best Backyard Chicken Breed to learn more.

If you need temporary fencing to block chickens from certain areas, use metal t-bars and plastic fencing.

*Ginger Tip: Avoid plastic bird netting! I’ve had snakes and birds get stuck in it in the past.

Another preventative measure is to plant landscaping that doesn’t appeal to chickens in the yard. In our neighborhood, we have deer to discourage as well. I find they share similar distastes for fragrant, fuzzy or prickly vegetation.

For the most part, my chickens have never been attracted to anything in my herb gardens. They leave the heavily scented herbs like rosemary, sage, lavender, and oregano completely alone.

I recently saw the kitchen garden in the New York Botanical Garden and all of the tomato plants were surrounded by deterrent plants like basil and marigolds. I believe this was meant to deter pests and critters other than chickens, but the practice is a useful one them as well.

Another way to keep chickens out of a particular area while you let them free range is to turn on the sprinkler. Water your plants and keep the chickens out-bam! Sometimes I will even use the hose sprayer to steer them away from certain areas.

The bottom line is that you need to be intentional and proactive to maximize your chickens’ help in the garden.

By supervising and planning ahead, gardening with chickens can be highly rewarding and productive!

Do you have other tips and suggestions? Drop a comment below!

For more help with gardening in harmony, read my post: The Homegrown Gardener’s Guide.