Plants or Chickens First? What I Learned Building Chicken City

Free Guide · Starting a Chicken Run From Scratch

I gave my plants a nine month head start. It bought me almost nothing, and I would not do it again.

Should you plant before getting chickens? No, and I say that as someone who did exactly that. I waited nine months for the plants to establish before the chickens arrived, and they destroyed almost all of it anyway. What protects a plant in a chicken run is protection at the base, not a head start. Get that right and you can plant and bring the birds home the same day.

This is one of the most common questions I get after the Chicken City tour. When you are building an integrated chicken coop, veggie garden, fruit orchard and compost system all under one roof, what order do you do it in? Plants first, then chickens? Chickens first? Both at once?

I have a clear answer, and it is not the one I would have given you at the time, because what I actually did was wrong.

What I did, and why it did not work

I thought I was being clever. I planted the whole thing out first, the fruit trees and the herbs and everything else, and then I waited for it all to establish before bringing any chickens in. The logic seemed sound: give the plants a year of growth and they will be big enough and tough enough to take a bit of scratching and pecking.

I waited nine months.

Then I brought the chickens in, and very soon after that they started destroying the plants I had spent all that time building up. Not some of them. Nearly all of them. Of everything I planted in that first year of the fruit room and Chicken City, I would almost guarantee that nothing except the feijoa is still alive today.

So the head start did not save anything. It just delayed the point at which I found out what the real problem was.

Timing is not the lever. Protection is.

Here is what I should have done, and what I would tell anyone starting now. Plant it all out, protect every plant properly on the day it goes in, and bring the chickens home whenever you like. Same day is fine.

The protections are not complicated or expensive. Baskets sat over the top of young plants so the roots cannot be scratched up. Bricks placed around the base of fruit trees. Wire roped off around the base of things like passion fruit while they get away. That is the sort of thing, and it is the whole difference between a plant that lives and a plant that quietly disappears.

Everything green you can see in Chicken City now was planted much later than that first attempt. The difference is not that it had longer. The difference is that it had protection from day one.

The one thing genuinely worth waiting for

There is an exception, and it is a practical one rather than a horticultural one.

All the soil for the veggie gardens, the berry room and the fruit room had to be wheelbarrowed in, and that took me a couple of months of sweat and tears. Doing that with chickens underfoot, opening and closing gates, chasing birds away from an open barrow, would have been an absolute pain.

So get the heavy earthworks done first, by all means. But the moment the soil is in, plant it out, protect it, and get the chickens. I should have had this oasis years earlier than I did.

The point of all of it, in the end, is that this room pumps out a huge amount of food for us to eat, and most of what comes out of it just wants salt and not much else. The original Flavour Bomb is the one I reach for on nearly all of it.

Alyce's Favourite

The one that started it all

Alyce's Organic Flavour Bomb Salt

Organic, smoky and savoury. The all-rounder for everything the garden gives you.

Shop the Flavour Bomb Salt

Shop all the Flavour Bombs

What goes wrong

Waiting, and then losing the lot anyway

This is the one I did. A head start does not toughen a plant against scratching, because scratching goes for the roots, and roots do not get tougher with age in any way that helps here.

Assuming a few chickens will not do much

Six did all that damage. A small flock in a big space is still a small flock with nothing else to do all day.

Protecting the leaves instead of the roots

A bit of nibbling on the foliage is fine and the chickens enjoy it. What kills a plant is the digging around its base.

Doing the earthworks with the birds already in

This is the genuine argument for staggering. Barrowing tonnes of soil through gates with chickens escaping around your ankles is miserable. Do that part first.

Frequently asked questions

Can I put chickens straight into a newly planted garden?

Yes, provided every plant is protected at the base from the day it goes in. That is the condition, not the calendar.

How long should plants establish before chickens go in?

In my experience the answer is that establishing time is not what saves them. I gave mine nine months and lost nearly everything anyway.

Will chickens kill fruit trees?

They can, by scratching out the root zone rather than by eating the tree. Bricks or similar around the base stop it, and after that the chickens are an asset to a fruit tree rather than a threat.

How many chickens is too many for a planted run?

Six was enough to strip an unprotected garden. With protection in place I have run around twenty comfortably, and at one point twenty seven.

What should I do before the chickens arrive?

The heavy work. Get the soil in and the beds built, because doing that around chickens is far harder than it needs to be. Then plant, protect and bring them home.

More from Chicken City

Simple tricks to protect plants from chickens is the companion to this one: the actual methods, in detail, and the thing I wish I had read first.

How to stop chickens destroying your berry plants applies the same protect-the-base principle to berry canes specifically.

How to stop your chicken coop smelling is the other thing to get right early, because the floor is where the whole system starts.

Chicken City, the details has the structure, the design thinking and rough plans.