Plant a Chicken Grazing Garden

Fresh eggs from garden-fed hens are golden-yolked, buttery, and delicious. The greens and veggie scraps do their bodies good while insects and garden pests give them feather-and-egg-building protein. How do you give your hens access to fresh growing greens without letting them tear up your vegetable garden? One clever idea is to plant a chicken grazing garden. Here are some diy ideas to help, no matter how much space you have:

a golden hen looks for insects among fucshia blooming zinnias in a lush garden landscape, illustrating a chicken grazing garden

The Chicken Grazing Garden

I love the idea of letting chickens graze among lush, green growing herbs and vegetables. Yet I know hens will destroy a garden in mere minutes. They absolutely will scratch every inch of your carefully tended, no-till compost right out of the deepest raised beds until they are certain no more worms are hiding from them. They will then strut away from the epic mess to start ruining the next bed…and an entire growing season’s worth of produce. There’s no way I’m letting my hens do this. So what are my options?

3 hens range along a mulch path where strawberry plants are growing in a bed to their right, hunting for bugs

Laying Hens Want Bugs

It hurts me to be such a kill-joy because the idea of huge, fluffy butt hens lolling peacefully along mulched garden paths, daintily plucking off caterpillars and nipping weeds from the beds sounds like a homesteading dream. The reality is our flocks are protein-hungry garden wreckers who don’t really want to eat that many greens all day. Your carefully cultivated tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers, and flowers are all in the way of her finding the best soil-dwelling insects. (Well…the ripe tomatoes will be eaten first and then she’ll dig up around the roots.)

The Hens Need Their Own Grazing Garden

If you’d like to protect your plants but also allow the hens to naturally scratch and peck among green growing things, the flock needs their own grazing garden. This can be a carefully curated container garden or a compost pile where you let volunteer tomatoes and mystery pumpkin vines grow wild.

two red hens eating the leaves of a common garden weed called wild lettuce on a weedy patch of earth near a tree — When first let out, hens will quickly gobble down some greens and then will spend the rest of the day digging for bugs or hunting protein-rich spiders.

Plants to Consider & Avoid

It is not good for hens to eat tomato or potato leaves (and some other types of nightshade leaves) nor raw garlic or onion bulbs. Which is fine because hens will ignore these things unless they are starving. They enjoy plucking cherry and micro or spoon tomatoes from the vines, eating bell pepper plant leaves (and any pepper plant leaves), nibbling on sweet potato leaves (different than Irish potatoes, which are a nightshade), and sampling herbs of all types. Young, tender green weeds that crop up are almost all enjoyed by hens.

Ideas of What to Plant:

Your hens are going to ruin a garden if they have full access to it. But planting some things just outside – or trailing over – the wire of their runs gives them the ability to graze a bit. Here are some healthy ideas:

green 5 lobed leaved with purplish maroon center veining on each leaf with a maroon colored vine belonging to the purple sweet potato plant is growing in a mulched garden bed — These are the leaves of purple sweet potato vines. Orange sweet potato leaves look different but hens greedily eat the leaves of both types.

Vines & Vining Plants:

Sweet Potatoes: This member of the morning glory family has leaves that are 100% edible by both chickens and humans, which taste similar to spinach. They vine along the ground and the tubers will keep sending out new vine shoots, even when eaten to the ground. Plant sweet potato slips along the run and then drape the vines over it if desired.

Cucumbers: Hungry chickens will eat cucumber leaves. Mine seem to enjoy the smaller, more tender leaves and fruit of the cucamelon (mexican sour gherkin) variety.

Currant or Spoon Tomatoes: These plants grow wildly fast, providing summertime shade and a huge crop of tiny tomatoes that ripen quickly. The variety “Spoon” is popular. I grew White Currant one year and it has come back on it’s own and climbed our 6.5 foot tall chicken run, no matter how certain I am that the hens have eaten every single fruit. Yellow Pear is another highly productive tomato that grows large. Remember, tomato leaves are not good for chickens to eat so trim away all the lower leaves and try to ensure they have other greens to eat so they leave the tomato leaves alone.

Plant Just Within Reach:

Beets & Turnips: If you don’t want to eat them yourself, the hens will LOVE the delicious green tops. Beet greens are slightly sweet and you may find you love them, too, and no longer want to share!

Lettuce Greens: Anything from the lettuce and spinach family is enjoyed by hens. They’ll even eat the bitter leaves when lettuce begins to bolt.

Cabbage and Brassicas: Hens enjoy the dark leafy green leaves from brassica family members like cabbage, kale, and broccoli. You’ll love the orange yolks she gets from eating them – especially kale!

Oregano: Hens will pluck a few of the spicy leaves if they feel they need them. Otherwise, oregano is only nibbled at.

three red hens watch as a shovel turns up fresh soil as new vines are being planted just outside their wire fencing — Hens can reach through rectangular no-climb fencing, like what is shown here, to nibble nearby plants on the other side. Use this to your advantage by planting things out of reach while young but that will be within reach as they get larger.

Edible Flowers:

Zinnias: All parts of the zinnia plant and flower are safe for chickens to eat. These pretty blooms won’t hurt your flock if they nibble on them!

Nasturtium: An edible flower variety that fancy restaurants add to their salads. The hens will nibble at them, too!

Sunflowers: Hopefully these can grow tall before the hens knock them over! Hens will eat the leaves but the harvested and hung-to-dry seed heads are what the hens will really enjoy.

a red hen walks through lush green grass and a patch of red zinnia flowers — Zinnias are safe because the entire plant is edible for chickens.

Hen-Friendly Grains:

Non-GMO Corn: Hens LOVE seed corn, sprouted corn, corn shoots, young corn plants and full grown corn plants. I’ve never seen my hens reach so far through the wire of their run as when I had corn planted nearby. If you don’t mind a bit of crop loss, they would love to have some of this growing within reach. They will eat all of it in one sitting so anything you want to harvest should be protected by a fence.

Milo/Sorghum: This earthy red round seed is found in nearly all bird seed mixes. Chickens don’t always eat the grain but when it sprouts and grows into the sorghum plant, the hens are much more interested in nibbling. They will eat sprouted seeds, young shoots and growing sorghum leaves. (Milo is what the red seeds are called in the bird seed industry but the plant is actually sorghum.)

Amaranth: This wholesome grain can be grown and fed to hens or used as an ingredient in homemade feed blends. The beautiful colors amaranth comes in makes it ornamental and fun to grow. Chickens will eat the sprouted seeds, young plants and growing leaves.

Grazing Garden Ideas:

Here are some diy ways your hens can nibble at some greens without destroying everything:

**Wire Caged Pots:** I added 2×4 inch homemade wire cages around the potted plants on my deck to protect the growing veggies from my adult hens and the juveniles shown. They would nibble a bit but the plants still grew and produced.

**The Garden Run:** On our homestead, the chicken run is right up against the garden, where the hens can reach some of the weeds and pesky bugs. This arrangement makes it easy for me to shove garden clippings through the wire for them to eat.

**Small Area Fenced Ranging:** If you’re able to fence off a lush, weedy area your flock could free range in, they will love access to the fresh greens and the bugs they conceal. Premiere1 moveable poultry fencing is perfect for this!

**Garden Row Run:** A pair of hens can enjoy the sunshine and eat the weeds growing in your garden paths without destroying your beds with this set up, which can be temporary and moved from row to row if desired.

**Garden Chicken Tractor:** This triangle tractor was built to fit over the garden beds. After each harvest, 2 hens make quick work of eating everything in each bed and preparing it for the next planting in less than 2 days.

Hungry Hens Will Eat it All

If you’d like to have some greenery around the chicken pen, you’ll need to ensure the hens receive daily feed in the form of layer pellets/crumble, homemade feed, or homemade scratch grains. This will help ensure they are getting enough calories between their own grazing and what you’re providing. Hungry hens will eat everything within reach, including nightshade leaves which are not good for them, if it is the only food available.

a charcoal gray, light gray and white hen are perched on the wood board edge of a raised garden bed full of green growing weeds near a black rooster — If all else fails, you can let the hens into the vegetable garden to graze once you’re done with the growing season!

No Grazing Garden? No Problem!

If you can’t commit to planting anything for your flock right now, it’s fine! They will still benefit from the garden weeds, clippings, and kitchen scraps you have always shared with them. It is the variety of fresh foods with their varying spectrum of vitamins, nutrients, and trace minerals that benefit your hens the most.

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Plant a Chicken Grazing Garden