I Grew a Food Forest Inside My Chicken Run — Here’s How to Protect the Plants from Chickens

Yes Rem, let's go. You're both moving very slow today. Welcome to Chicken City, my integrated chicken coop, veggie garden, fruit orchard and compost system all under the one roof and it's what you see behind me. Now this compound is so lush and green despite being inhabited by 25 chickens and I really really want all chicken owners to know and all wannabe chicken owners to know that your chicken coop can be a lush food forest both to be a productive garden for you but also to be an enriching experience for your chickens. Now there are some tips though to make that possible and without it you will plant a lot of plants that will end up dying because but I promise you I have been testing and perfecting this for 11 years now and I have got all the tips you're going to need to create such an oasis and I wish I had this video when I was starting. So let's go in and we can look at all the techniques I've got and I promise there is one that you are going to use in your garden but Remi you have to stay out here. I promise that having your chicken run be as green and lush as mine is actually really easy if if if you use the specific tricks and I wish that someone had made a video like this when I was starting out because I planted so many plants in here that time after time again the chickens just killed, just smashed them down. So I had to get creative about ways to keep the chickens around the plants but not let them ruin them. So I have many many ideas for you I'm going to go around and show you them all but the first thing I want you to know is when it comes to the greenery in the chicken coop there are some plants that we need to protect when they're young and once they're established like this apple tree behind me we don't need to protect them anymore and then there are other plants that the chickens will be able to kind of smash down for their entire life and those plants we need to protect always. So sometimes you'll see me protecting a fruit tree when it's young but you won't see it once the fruit tree is big so the more established your garden gets the more freedom you have with it. So let's go look at some techniques. The first strategy we've got is simply making a little wire ring around the plant you want to protect like this sage here. So I planted the sage in the middle maybe two years ago a year ago and now it is growing out through the mesh and you can see the chickens actually aren't eating this which would lead one to believe they could just plant the sage in the chicken run and it would survive but the thing with chickens is where they can actually do the most damage is not eating the leaves and eating the plant down but it's actually scratching up the roots and killing the plant that way. So even though they won't eat the sage leaves what's super important is we protect that root system in the middle and I will leave this like this with the wire forever because the base of the plant is safe and no matter how much grows out that's fine and if the chickens did decide they had a taste for the old sage that's not a problem either because I've still got sage growing in the cage area that is safe from them so there'll always be enough harvest for both of us. You can see here's another type of sage which we've grown over a cloche. Now a cloche is another great garden option for protecting plants they can be expensive which is why I don't recommend them but they are very beautiful. The problem now is I may never get this cloche off which wasn't the plan admittedly but nonetheless we've got a healthy sage that I can harvest I mean look at that have you ever seen such a big sage and that root section of the plant is protected forever more. So across here we've got the same thing with mint but as you can see the chickens actually enjoy eating the mint so they've trimmed off all these leaves so that same principle works in that the main center of the plant is protected I can harvest mint inside it's looking a bit lackluster but you can see like we've got we've got a few decent mint sprigs here we can harvest this inside and then whatever kind of comes out that the chickens harvest that's more forage and benefits for their diet so kind of everyone's winning and despite the fact the chickens can fly over these quite low wired sections I just have never found they do so that is seems to be pretty easy DIY option to keep those plants alive but we got more this is actually probably my favorite option because it's the easiest and these wire baskets from wardrobes turn up in hard rubbish at the tip all the time my mom is constantly scouting them for me so old wardrobe baskets wire baskets and I just put them upside down in the garden so what this does again it protects that root system and then everything that grows up through the wire the chickens can eat but they can't kill the plant now admittedly this kind of system is not going to lead to great harvests for me but that's okay because as long as the chickens are continuing to harvest that and they're happy I'm happy too rather than this just being a patch of bare earth in my fruit orchard so the other strategic thing about these baskets that you can see here is they're being used to protect this uh this what is this plum so this plum tree here so I planted this plum in spring so it's now end of summer so it's only you know six months old potentially so that tree once it's big and lush and grand it's going to be completely safe from the chickens but at this young stage we're still at risk of them scratching up the roots and actually killing that tree so by putting the baskets next to the roots the chickens can get around the roots they can do their weeding they can do their pooing and fertilizing but they can't get a really good scratch that they love to dig a great big dirty hole where those roots are so plants are protected but the chickens can still do their best work around so another option I've got is bricks which I'll show you later but you can see the two baskets next to each other are providing that protection for the roots of the tree yes they have actually dug up a little bit of the roots but that's not enough to cause any significant damage to the tree and if I was worried I would put a brick or a rock just over that section to stop that digging so again we've got that same system but slightly differently for this apple here he was also planted about six months ago and I was cautious to have those roots protected so instead of baskets this time I have these wooden I don't even know what you call these but I found these in a garage sale as things you put in the garden to protect birds scratching up your bulbs when you plant them so by putting that over things can go through and the chickens can eat them but they can't do damage to the soil underneath and Mr. Apple here whose roots are coming down there again they can't get a big scratch on and dig a dirty hole and ruin those roots so it's just a safety technique while the plant is young and when he's older we can remove these the other thing I do is I might lift these up for a day or two let the chickens come in it's like a salad bar for them and then they eat all the stuff underneath there and then I put it back on and let you know the grasses and the weeds grow up again and this is just a way to keep them enriched and healthy and you know free food for them so why not excuse me back over here and we are onto the cloche situation again this is a fancy lovely garden cloche this is a great way to do it but like I said these can be pricey whereas these baskets I get from hard rubbish in the tip so with the cloche I've got the chives under here now chickens love eating the chives so if I didn't have that fully enclosed I probably wouldn't get enough chives for me to harvest but with this what I do is I lift the cloche up and then I've got my beautiful chives there for my dinner I harvest what I want yeah so you can see the chickens already like get me the chives we've got the chives there I harvest what I want and then I just put the cloche back over it now what will happen like you can see is the chives will poke through when I put that back on I'm not worried about this in fact the chickens will come now and haircut that so you'll see like tomorrow probably there will be no chives sticking out so again it's a way to supplement the chicken's diet but ensure that I have enough chives for my diet too a passion fruit vine or other evergreen vine are one of my favorite ways to add intense greenery and lushness to your chicken coop and being passion fruit it's also going to produce a huge amount of fruit for me so it's wins it'll produce shade for the chickens behind it in the other room and because I've already got these walls built into the chicken coop I've already got a whole trellis made so it just you know tick tick tick but how did I get this guy established when he was young because the chickens actually do really like eating the passion fruit leaves as we can see down here so these low hanging bits they will give a snip to and give a haircut so if I had have just planted him and left him to his own devices with the chickens we absolutely never would have got this lushness so you've got to think like this is when the plant is small and it's in reach of the chickens how do we protect it once it's up off the ground out of their little beak height then we've got you know we're kind of in the safe zone so what I did when he was young come down here is I planted him here and then I put this garden I think it's called an obelisk I don't know this thing that you train plants are just a metal structure I put that over it planted him in the middle and then I wrapped horticultural fleece around this was done maybe two years ago now and I haven't touched it since I could probably take this off but why would we so that horticultural fleece protected him from the chickens coming up and pecking and then once he kind of got to here I could train him up onto the wall without risk of the chickens nibbling his bits off oh god so horticultural fleece is like very cheap and very effective at a barrier method I will say this for horticultural fleece the stuff you get at most nurseries is really thin and ---- quality and if you wrap it up probably like two months later you're going to have little bits of horticultural fleece all through your garden get the like the heaviest thickest like densest horticultural fleece there is I buy it online and it's it's super thick and it just doesn't break off into the garden so you can see two years later he's still offering brilliant protection and now we have this amazing passion fruit canopy okay to the bricks this is actually my favorite garden hack to get a lush green chicken coop is simply bricks or rocks I have lots of old bricks lying around but rocks work just as well and we put them over the base of the plant to protect it from the chickens digging up the roots now the trick is you want to put the bricks or the rocks close enough together that there'll be no great big dirty holes dug but far enough apart that they can still do their best work in the gaps so we want them to be able to peck out any of those weeds we want them to be able to poo there and fertilize we don't want to create a complete fortress around the root system of this plant but we also don't want to give them too much leeway so when it comes to chickens in your garden you've just got to keep thinking how can we harness the good parts of chickens and not let them get to the destructive parts and this brick placement strategically done means that we get all the benefits of their work without the bad side or the downside because this is a citrus I actually will never take the bricks away from the base because citrus are quite shallow rooted so forevermore for the life of this guy I would be worried that the chickens could do damage without the bricks whereas some of the other trees in the fruit room that you saw earlier like the apple tree the plum tree I have taken the bricks away and I'm a bit less precious because the roots of those trees are so deep and big and established that the chickens aren't going to be able to cause any damage to those with those tips and the right plant selection although that's a totally another topic which we would do another video on you really can have a super lush green chicken coop that brings joy to you and brings joys to the chickens so it's you know it's a win-win and that is what I'm all about in my garden design the final comment I will make though is that any garden if you've got too many chickens in it if the population is just too high relative to the size you're going to have difficulty keeping those plants alive so there's a bit of a critical mass although I will say the space the size is less important than the enrichments in it you could have a bigger chicken run than mine and have it be a lot less enriching and enjoyable for the chickens but if you've got a small space and they've got heaps of things to keep them entertained that's going to stop them being destructive as well so for me I think my critical mass in this space is about 25 chickens which is probably bigger or more than what people would think but once you exceed that you are gonna they are gonna be destructive so my final piece of advice is read the room