How To Landscape For Your Free-Range Chickens

If you’ve ever kept backyard chickens, you know just how much of a hassle they can be. As feisty animals that can be hard to coop up, chickens need plenty of space to roam around. Considering how many homes have private lawns, you’d think keeping chickens would be a breeze. However, letting them have free reign of your yard can be a bad plan if you haven’t landscaped your yard for them. Here are a few tips on how to keep your landscape fit for your free-range chickens.

• Use Layered Landscaping In Your Yard: Layered landscaping isn’t just good for your chickens, it’s good for your home’s resale value too! Adding layers to landscaping adds visual intrigue to your yard, and this sort of gorgeous landscaping can increase a home’s resale value by 14%. Your chickens will love it too; having a variety of plant types to provide shelter, food, and entertainment can be incredibly healthy for these clever birds.
• Plan Out Your Yard Ahead Of Time: Planning out your yard will help keep your chickens safe and will keep your yard looking great. Chickens need places to exercise, and if you’re not careful, their exercise can damage your plants. However, if you plan around this and give them places to forage where they won’t damage your yard, you’ll have both happy chickens and a happy lawn. Be sure to be careful and avoid certain plant types while you’re planning your yard as well; some plants that humans love to eat are poisonous for chickens. Some common vegetable garden staples, such as raw beans and certain varieties of tomato, are toxic to chickens.
• Protect Areas You Don’t Want Chickens In: As any owner of chickens knows, getting these energetic birds to go where you want them to can be entertaining, to say the least. Keep chickens out of your vegetable garden or the neighbor’s yard with some fencing and thick hedging, or fence off a specific section of your yard for your feathered friends to get some exercise in. Sometimes the hedges alone will be enough, but careful: if they sneak through, you may have a problem on your hands.

Free-range chickens are certainly not an easy animal to keep, but they are certainly worth it by most accounts. Just make sure that your landscaping and yard are prepared to host these delightful animals!