Heirloom Gardening for Backyard Chickens

Free-range Chickens

 

Raising backyard chickens is becoming increasingly popular, no matter where you live. There have always been rural chickens, but now there are small and large city chickens, happily living in coops and backyards all across the country. Chickens can do a lot for you, both in the garden and in the kitchen. First off, they give you a real measure of food security and increase your resiliency. The eggs are a great bartering tool, as very few folks that we’ve talked to weren’t interested in some fresh home-raised eggs. Chickens are great for bug control, light soil tilling and fertilization. The chicken manure is very high in Nitrogen and is a great addition to your compost. Home raised eggs are some of the highest nutritional content of any chickens, including free-range. The reason is that most home raised chickens are pampered and given extra nutrition and care. It is very easy to provide a highly nutritious and healthy diet for your backyard chickens from your home garden. We will look at several heirloom vegetables, herbs and flowers that you can easily grow in your garden that will not only provide some tasty treats for your chickens, but give you some great greens as well.

Almost any of the greens and vegetables that you enjoy your chickens will love. You have probably seen them get really excited if you share salad fixings or old veggies from your refrigerator. Think of how they will get when they know that the garden is providing treats for them all of the time! You don’t have to plant a special garden just for the chickens, as they will happily devour any greens that come their way.

The question is often asked of why grow your chicken’s food, why not just buy the 50lb. bag of chicken scratch and call it good? There is nothing wrong with going this route, and realistically you will most likely need to have some commercial feed available as your garden may or may not produce enough greens and grains for your flock. This will vary depending on the size of your garden compared to the size of your flock. The real answer to growing fresh greens for your chickens is the same answer as to why you would want to grow your own garden- taste, nutrition and choice.

A plant growing in the dirt on a sunny day.

Spring Chicken

Let’s look at several varieties of vegetables and herbs that are easily grown in a home garden setting that will provide some tasty and highly nutritious greens for both you and your birds. Starting off in the cooler season with some cold-hardy greens will help jump-start the hens energy levels. Kale, Swiss Chard, mustard greens and beet tops are a great start to the season. They all like a cooler soil, sprout quickly and will provide some serious nutrition. Speaking of sprouting, sprouts are an absolute powerhouse of nutrition and are ready to eat in 4-7 days. Alfalfa sprouts are possibly the best known, but there are several different types of sprouts such as radish, mung bean and red clover that work well. Sprouts take up minimal space, use little water and need only the most basic equipment to produce a couple of pounds of fresh food. This is a technique that works especially well in the depths of winter when other greens are scarce and expensive. You can produce plenty of sprouts for yourself and a half dozen chickens from a half gallon jar with a sprouting screen lid on your kitchen sink.

Once the weather starts warming up more options open up for different vegetables and greens. Cabbage, chicory, mustards, spinach and a number of greens do well in the early spring once the soil has started warming up. These include Miner’s Lettuce, French Purslane and Aztec Red Spinach. Once the true spinach starts to bolt in the warmer weather, switch to the spinach substitutes such as red and green malabar spinach, the Aztec Red spinach and New Zealand spinach. All of these love the heat, won’t bolt and produce all through the hotter weather. Traditional winter cover crops such as alfalfa, clover, vetch and annual rye should be considered for later in the year.

If you have the space, pumpkins and squash- both summer and winter- can be excellent feed choices. Winter squash and pumpkins that can be stored until later in the winter give you an additional resource for high quality feed when nothing else is growing. Corn is another great choice, space permitting, as it is the base for the commercial feeds. Other grains that will grow well in a smaller home garden set up is Mennonite Sorghum, Amaranth and Quinoa. Don’t forget Sunflowers, as they can provide both shade and a wind break for your garden along with seeds for your girls.

Many folks don’t think of herbs when it comes to providing food for chickens, but there are some great choices here. Borage is one such, as it has lots of mineral-rich leaves as well as flowers that are edible and make excellent additions to a chicken’s diet. Comfrey is in the Borage family and is another great choice.

To help you get started, we have created a section on our website called “Backyard Chickens Collection”, appropriately enough. We list all of the varieties that are mentioned in this article to save you the time of looking throughout the website to find them. It is really easy to incorporate the chicken feed aspect into your existing gardening plan. Planting one or two extra plants of each variety for each half dozen chickens is usually sufficient, with grains such as Amaranth and sunflowers going almost exclusively to the chickens. As with most things gardening related, a little experimentation will prove the way as you see what volumes of fresh garden produce you particular flock of chickens needs.

 

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Fearing Burr on Savoy Cabbage

A basket of green leaves in the middle of a field.© 2024 Terroir Seeds | Underwood Gardens

Discover the captivating history of Savoy perfection cabbage. Learn about its origins and why it’s considered the best in the world.

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Growing Your Salad In A Container Garden


We recently completed our second salad growing bed in our greenhouse, and here’s how we did it!

 

We started the salad growing bed so that we would have fresh salad greens during the Fall, Winter and early Spring when the garden wasn’t growing or things were just coming up. We can supplement our diet with fresh, healthy and extremely nutritious greens like lettuce, Swiss Chard, beets and beet tops, carrots, mustards and even some kale if we want to.

The salad bed has it’s own heat cable buried at the bottom of the sand under the growing soil, so the roots stay warm and don’t need external, expensive heat in the greenhouse during the colder seasons. We grew fresh greens almost all winter in one bed, and have expanded into a second bed.

Both beds are 6 ft long, 18 inches wide and 13 inches deep. The material was from a local metal recycling facility and is really heavy corrugated sheet metal. We bought 3/4 inch thick exterior grade plywood, drilled 21 drain holes in the bottom and sealed it with an exterior decking stain. We then screwed the corners of the sheet metal together and inserted the plywood bottom into the bottom slot made by the corrugations, and screwed it to the sheet metal as well.

Next we put the heating cable in. This is a sealed unit made to heat seed beds that has a built in thermostat. We attached it to the bottom side of 1/4 inch hardware cloth- a heavy metal mesh- to prevent damage to the cable if we needed to dig into the soil. You can see the drain holes in the plywood here.

This is part of the magic that allows us to be able to grow tender greens year round in an unheated greenhouse. Many people don’t realize how little it takes to be able to grow their own fresh green produce year round at their home. They are used to the idea of the Spring through early Fall garden, but that is it. The thought of growing farther into the year, and starting earlier, is new to most people.

However, there is much more time available to grow if you look at things a little unconventionally, and look at ways to manage the temperature and moisture to extend your growing season. Whether it is a weekend project like this, or it is constructing a small row cover from PVC and heavy weight painter’s plastic drop cloth from your local hardware store, you can positively affect your growing season with a little work that will pay you back for several years.

After the cable/mesh was laid down, we put about 2-3 inches of sand. The sand acts as a medium of heat exchange to heat the growing soil from the bottom up. It is surprising how little heat is needed to make a real difference. We had several nights at freezing after we started the salad pit growing, with a plastic sheet draped over the top, and the little “saladlings” did just fine. The water trickles down and keeps the sand moist, which acts as a perfect heat conductor to the soil above.

The soil was put in next- about 5-6 inches of good organic potting soil. We saved some time and bought some pre-made potting soil that is certified organic and has mycorrhizae added to it to help the roots develop into the soil better. The mycorrhizae are microscopic fungi that help both the plant get more nutrition out of the soil, as they extend the reach of the root’s micro tendrils into the soil and bring in nutrients that were out of reach of the roots. The plants will grow stronger and have more vigor, production and disease and pest resistance. In return the plants feed a sugar substance to the mycorrhizae. A wonderful symbiotic relationship!

After some gentle watering to get the soil and sand below well moistened but not wet, the salad bed is ready to plant! The new bed is in the foreground, with the established bed in the background. You can see the difference in growth in the first salad bed from this photo as compared to the top photo.

One of the hidden benefits to growing salad greens this way is the lack of dirt in the greens when harvested. There is no wind or rains to push dirt up on the leaves and stems, so the greens only need a light rinse before they are ready to eat. As we don’t use any type of chemicals to grow with, we don’t have to worry about chemical or fertilizer contamination to wash off.

The white box in the foreground is a small hydroponic setup, the blue top is rigid foam with 5 holes in it for the lettuce cups and growing medium, which is rock wool. There is a small aquarium pump in the bottom to recirculate the nutrient solution to the roots. We have grown lettuce indoors in the winter in our small house, so the greenhouse will be an expanded experiment. If if works well, and it should, we might expand this to be a vertical hydroponic rack made from several sections of roof guttering along the North wall, which is straw bale and tires.

This could give us a substantially expanded growing opportunity with very little square foot commitment. We will keep you posted on the progress!

If you don’t have your own greenhouse, a similar container system can be done in a sunny window, in your garage under some lights or even on a back deck. Let your imagination be your guide. If you are interested in the heat cables, post a comment. If there is interest, we may carry them in the near future.


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Homegrown Vegetables Are the Most Nutritious

Dacha Garden


I came across a great article about how fresh colorful vegetables offer the most nutrition for the money spent. While I definitely agree with this, I believe there are some lost opportunities here; namely growing your own vegetables will prove the truth of several recent findings. Below is the link for the article:

Fresh Vegetable Salads Provide Maximum Nutrition for Each Food Dollar Spent

The first finding is that fresh colorful vegetables have the most nutrition when compared to prepackaged and prepared foods. The second is that naturally grown chemical free vegetables have more minerals and nutrients as compared to conventional chemically grown ones. The third is that the dollar return on money spent for seeds to grow a vegetable garden- even a modest one- is staggering. Several articles I’ve read put the return from $100 in seeds at anywhere from $1000 to $1800 in fresh produce!

“Salads that offer the most nutrition for the money are made with fresh, unprocessed vegetables. Color is the key. Those veggies with the bright, vibrant colors are trying to tell you something. The more colors added to the bowl, the more the salad can keep you looking and feeling young, and put a bounce in your step for the rest of the day. That’s because vibrant colored veggies are loaded with antioxidants, plant compounds that slow the aging process and ward off disease.”

The more colors in the vegetables you eat, the more different types of nutrients, minerals and other vitamins that you get. This is a great start!

“All of these varieties are excellent sources of Vitamins A, E and K. Vitamin A supports eye and respiratory health, and makes sure the immune system is up to speed. It keeps the outer layers of tissues and organs healthy, and promotes strong bones, healthy skin and hair, and strong teeth. Vitamin E slows the aging process, maintains positive cholesterol ratios, provides endurance boosting oxygen, protects lungs from pollution, prevents various forms of cancer, and alleviates fatigue. Vitamin K keeps blood vessels strong and prevents blood clots.

Greens are also excellent sources of folate, manganese, chromium, and potassium. Folate prevents heart disease, defends against intestinal parasites and food poisoning, promotes healthy skin, and helps maintain hair color. Manganese keeps fatigue away, helps muscle reflexes and coordination, boosts memory, and helps prevent osteoporosis. Chromium helps normalize blood pressure and insulin levels. It prevents sugar cravings and sudden drops in energy. Potassium regulates the body’s water balance and normalizes heart rhythms. It aids in clear thinking by sending oxygen to the brain.”

Now if we take this a step further and grow these vegetables ourselves, or at least buy them locally- from the farmers market or “our” farmer/gardener/neighbor that grows way too much to eat themselves- we can stack the advantages of the nutrition in our favor.

Several recently released studies show what is at first glance somewhat common sense- naturally grown vegetables have more nutrients, vitamins and minerals than those grown in the conventional chemically grown manner. The common sense part comes from the fact that chemical agriculture on any scale depends on very few chemicals- NPK familiar to anyone? Nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium are important, but they aren’t the only elements that plants need to grow and produce healthy fruits and vegetables. One study I’ve read showed that a naturally grown vegetable had 84 minerals and elements that were identified as opposed to 8-10 in the same exact vegetable planted from seeds from the same seed packet but grown conventionally with the standard chemical fertilizers and pesticides/herbicides. Something to note- the test didn’t identify the negative elements in the vegetables- such as chemical residues.

Which do you think has better nutrition, which has better taste, and which would you want to eat or serve as dinner to your family?

Continuing the stacking of benefits idea- this is the introduction to the article:

“It looks like food prices will continue to creep steadily higher throughout 2009, even in the face of an economic crisis that has reduced the purchasing power of most Americans. This makes it more important that ever to get the best nutritional value for every food dollar spent.”

I agree completely with this, and seeing this at the end of 2009, the truth of the cost of food vs purchasing power is apparent. What if we can turn this truth around, and make it pay instead of save money? That’s an exciting idea, as saving money is good, but saving in this case is only a stop to spending money. Growing a garden can actually pay you! It is truly not very difficult to grow a garden that produces more than you and your family can eat. Sell the excess, make some money! Farmers and local markets are the fastest growing segment of agriculture for the past several years. Most have a booth just for the backyard gardener to sell/trade their abundance.

Or trade it to your neighbor in return for services or something you need. This won’t give you dollars, but will give you something of value that you didn’t have to spend dollars to obtain.

Or donate some to your local food bank/soup kitchen/Meals on Wheels/etc. Again, not dollars, but karma is good too. So is the increased community that you’ve just created that can help you in ways unforeseen right now.

Now please don’t misunderstand me. I really like the article! I think that there are some ways to capitalize on a good idea and great benefit to achieve much greater results for all of us. Please take the time to read the entire article.

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