Free Guide · Growing Plants With Chickens
Twenty five chickens live in here, and it is still green. That is not luck, it is six cheap tricks.
How do you protect plants from chickens? Protect the roots, not the leaves. Chickens rarely kill a plant by eating it. They kill it by scratching a great big hole at the base and tearing up the root system. Cover that root zone with wire, a basket, a cloche or a few bricks and the plant survives, while the chickens carry on weeding and fertilising around it.
Chicken City is my integrated chicken coop, veggie garden, fruit orchard and compost system all under one roof, and it is lush and green despite having twenty five chickens living in it. I want every chicken keeper, and everyone thinking about it, to know that a run can be a genuine food forest: productive for you, and far more enriching for the birds than a patch of bare dirt.
But there are tricks, and without them you will plant a great many things and watch the chickens ruin all of them. I did exactly that for years. I have been testing and refining this for eleven, and I wish someone had handed me this list at the start.
Watch
Every method, in place
I walk the whole run and show you each protection actually doing its job, including the ones I would not bother buying again.
It is the scratching, not the eating
Almost everyone assumes chickens kill plants by eating them, and almost everyone is wrong. They will nibble at things they like, certainly. But the damage that actually finishes a plant is the digging. Chickens love to excavate a great big dirty hole, and when they do that at the base of a plant they expose and wreck the root system.
The sage in my run proves it. The chickens will not touch sage leaves at all, which would make you think you could plant it in the open and be fine. You cannot, because they will still dig it out from underneath.
So every method below does one job: it stops them digging where the roots are, while leaving them free to do everything else.
Two kinds of plant, two lengths of sentence
Before the methods, the thing that decides which one you use.
Plants that only need protecting while young. Most fruit trees. My apple and my plum were both protected when they went in and are not any more. Once the roots are deep and established the chickens cannot do meaningful harm, and the protection comes off.
Plants that need protecting forever. Herbs and anything shallow rooted. Citrus is the important one here: citrus roots sit close to the surface, so the bricks around mine are never coming off, for the whole life of the tree.
The upshot is cheering. The more established your garden gets, the more freedom you have in it.
Also on the channel
Do the plants need a head start first?
Short answer, no, and I found that out the expensive way. I waited nine months before getting chickens and lost nearly everything regardless.
The six methods
1. A wire ring around the base
The simplest one. A ring of mesh around the plant, and it stays there permanently. My sage was planted in the middle of one a couple of years ago and now grows straight out through it. The base is safe forever, and whatever grows out the sides is fair game.
The mint next to it shows the other half of the deal. The chickens do like mint, so they have trimmed every leaf that pokes out. It looks a bit lackluster from the outside, but there are decent sprigs in the middle for me and the rest is forage for them. Everyone is fed.
And yes, they could easily fly over a low wire ring. In all these years I have never once seen them bother.
2. Wardrobe baskets, upside down
This is my favourite, purely because it is the easiest. Old wire wardrobe baskets turn up in hard rubbish and at the tip constantly. My mum is permanently on the lookout for them. Turn one upside down over a plant and you are done.
The roots are protected, everything that grows up through the wire is available to the chickens, and the plant lives. It will never give me a big harvest, and I have made peace with that: the alternative was bare earth, and this way the birds get something out of it.
Two baskets side by side also work well flanking a young tree, which is how my plum spent its first six months.
3. Bricks and rocks, spaced deliberately
My favourite hack of the lot, and free if you have a pile of old bricks. Lay them over the root zone.
The spacing is the whole trick. Close enough together that no big hole can be dug. Far enough apart that the chickens can still get in between and do their best work: pecking out weeds, and fertilising as they go. You are not building a fortress. You are leaving them the good jobs and taking away the destructive one.
That is the whole philosophy of chickens in a garden, really. Harness the good parts, block the bad parts.
4. Horticultural fleece around an obelisk, for young vines
A passion fruit or another evergreen vine is one of the best things you can put in a run: enormous greenery, a real harvest, and shade for the birds on the other side of the wall. And if your run already has mesh walls, you already own the trellis.
The problem is getting it established, because chickens do like passion fruit leaves. Mine still haircut every low-hanging bit they can reach. Left to its own devices from a seedling it would never have got away.
What I did was plant it in the middle of a metal obelisk and wrap horticultural fleece around the outside. Two years later I still have not taken it off, because there is no reason to. Once the vine cleared beak height it was safe, and I trained it up the wall from there.
One warning worth the price of the guide. The horticultural fleece sold in most nurseries is thin and poor quality, and about two months later you will find shreds of it all through your garden. Buy the heaviest, thickest, densest fleece you can find. I get mine online and it simply does not break up.
5. A cloche, if you want the pretty version
Cloches look lovely and work perfectly. They are also expensive, which is why they are not my first recommendation when a free wardrobe basket does the same job.
Where they earn their keep is a plant the chickens genuinely love. My chives live under one, fully enclosed, because otherwise there would be none left for me. I lift the cloche, cut what I want for dinner, and put it back. Whatever pokes out afterwards gets haircut by the girls within a day, and that is fine, that is their share.
Fair warning from experience: I grew a sage so enthusiastically under one that I may never get the cloche off it again. That was not the plan.
6. Whatever else you find, honestly
One of my apples is protected by a set of wooden garden guards I picked up at a garage sale, the sort meant to stop birds scratching up bulbs. They let things grow through, they stop the digging underneath, and they cost almost nothing.
The principle is what matters, not the object. Anything that covers the root zone and lets green stuff through will do.
A free trick with any of these
Lift a basket or guard off for a day or two and let the chickens in underneath. It is a salad bar for them, they clear out everything growing under there, and then it goes back on and regrows. Free food, and it keeps them entertained.
The limit nobody mentions
All of this has a ceiling, and it is worth being honest about it. If the flock is too big for the space, you will struggle to keep plants alive no matter what you cover them with.
In this space my critical mass is around twenty five birds, which is probably more than people expect. Beyond that they get destructive.
But raw size matters less than what is in the space. You could have a bigger run than mine and have it be far less interesting to a chicken. A smaller run with plenty going on in it will give you far less destruction than a big empty one. Read the room.
The reward for all of this is a room that hands you dinner most nights, usually at the exact point in the evening when you have no energy left to cook it properly. That is what the Bolognese Boost is for.
Alyce's Favourite
Slow-cooked depth, no slow cooking
Alyce's Bolognese Boost Salt
Tomato and porcini, for the nights the garden took all your energy.
Shop the Bolognese Boost SaltWhat goes wrong
Protecting the leaves instead of the roots
Netting the top of a plant while leaving its base open achieves nothing. The hole in the ground is what kills it.
Bricks packed too tightly
A sealed fortress around the root zone loses you the weeding and the fertilising, which is the whole reason the chickens are in there. Leave gaps they can work in.
Cheap horticultural fleece
The thin nursery stuff disintegrates and you will be picking bits of it out of your garden for months. Buy the thick kind or use a basket instead.
Taking the protection off a shallow rooted tree
Fine for an established apple or plum. Not for citrus. Those roots stay near the surface for life, so the bricks stay too.
Too many birds for the space
No protection method survives an overstocked run. If nothing is holding, that is the thing to look at before buying more wire.
Frequently asked questions
Do chickens eat plants or dig them up?
Both, but the digging is what kills them. They will happily nibble leaves without doing lasting harm. Scratching out the root zone is fatal.
What can I grow in a chicken run?
Mine has apple, plum, citrus, passion fruit, sage, mint and chives among plenty else. Plant selection is a whole topic of its own, but protection is what decides whether any of it survives.
When can I remove the plant protection?
Once a deep rooted tree is properly established. Never, for herbs and shallow rooted things like citrus.
Will chickens fly over a low wire ring?
They certainly could. Mine never have, in all these years.
How many chickens can a planted run take?
Here it is about twenty five. But enrichment matters more than square metres: a busy small run is kinder to plants than a big boring one.
Building your own version of this?
I have been refining Chicken City for over ten years and I share what works, what failed, and what I would do differently. Come along for the rest of it.
More from Chicken City
Should you plant before getting chickens? is the companion question, and the mistake I made before I worked any of this out.
How to stop chickens destroying your berry plants takes the same principle and applies it to berry canes, which have their own quirks.
How to plant a plant is the beginner's version of getting one in the ground properly in the first place.
Chicken City, the details has the structure, the design thinking and rough plans.
Watch next
The whole thing, room by room
Every protection in this guide is somewhere in this tour, along with the rest of the system it all sits inside.
