Spring Video Tour: Backyard Garden Edition
Come take a peek at our backyard garden on a beautiful spring evening! The chickens will help show you around, starting at their coop and the “coop garden” area. Then we’ll wander around the pollinator garden, and check out our many fruit trees. Last but not least, come around the corner and through the passionfruit arch, into the patio garden area.
Yes, it is possible to have a pretty, productive garden and free-range chickens!
I will write a post soon all about gardening with chickens, and the various chicken-proofing tips and tricks we use in the back yard garden. You’ll see many little fences around. This our way to keep the plants safe, and our chickens happy and able to range freely in the back yard. For more information about backyard chicken basics, click here.
As you can see, our gardens are much more than food for ourselves. We take great joy in providing food for the pollinators too! To learn more about the types of plants we have in the pollinator island, see this article: The Top 23 Plants for Pollinators: Attract Bees, Butterflies, & Hummingbirds! Many of the plants included are also used as companion plants in the raised beds, and in our front yard garden too! Finally, those autoflower cannabis plants sparked your interest, you’ll probably enjoy reading this.
Ready to wander with me?
Thanks for watching! I hope you enjoyed the tour.
I will take a you along for a longer tour around the whole property very soon! In the meantime, if you’re curious to learn more about our gardens, including before-and-after photos, see “Our Homestead”.
7 Comments
Mary Sotelo
How do you prevent your chickens from making holes? Is there wire underneath the bark in their entire area? If so, how deep is the wire and about how many inches of bark on top?
Thanks,
Mary
Aaron (Mr. DeannaCat)
Hello Mary, any place you don’t want a chicken to dig a hole needs to have some layer of protection. We have used green wire fencing found in garden centers to lay across areas that we don’t want to be turned into potholes (mainly paths or walkways), using landscape staples to keep the fencing flush with the ground. We work the fencing into the soil a little and top off the area with an inch or two of bark mulch. Hope that helps and thanks for reading.
Jamie
I am so glad I stumbled upon your blog! I recently moved back to Michigan after living in California for 5 years and we just purchased 15 acres to build on! I have been dreaming of a huge garden for years and soon it won’t just be a dream! I love watching your videos and reading your blog, your garden is gorgeous and such a great use of all of the space! Although we have a much different climate here i’m hoping to apply a ton of things ive read on your blog to our garden in the future! Keep up the awesome work, can’t wait to see more!
zayna idrees
Hi Deana,
I was wondering what you’re using in your chicken run? what type material for the deep litter method? thank you! love your post!
DeannaCat
Hey there! Their run floor is washed concrete sand, but we don’t use the deep litter method. We clean up their run weekly, and scoop the poop in their coop daily. The yard where they free range is small redwood bark and shredded redwood bark mulch over the native sandy soil there, so that is a bit more “deep litter” style – though we try to clean it up once a week also. Much of it get churned in anyways 🙂 I hope that helps. Have you see this post about our chickens, and our coop set up? I hope this all helps!
Tiffany Trejo
Thank you for the tour! I was very curious about your chicken proofing so thanks for sharing. =) I’m going to look for a bay laurel as well now.
DeannaCat
Sure thing! I will post more about chicken proofing gardens soon too, because that was just a taste! I didn’t get too in-depth here because this video was more for the general audience, not just “chicken people”, Ha! But even the ground has fencing in some areas! Under the mulch. Like along the pathways, so they can’t dig there.