We decided to let the girls do some of our dirty work this fall.

According to the book Free Range Chicken Gardens: How to Create a Beautiful Chicken-Friendly Backyard; chickens can be wonderful garden helpers – ummmm, yeah.  It’s pretty obvious to anyone within a few hours of having chickens in their backyard that they love to scratch in the soil, looking for bugs and worms, and will turn the soil over and aerate it.  And destroy any living plant in their path.  However, if you stick them in the garden after harvest, they’ll also clean up any left over plants bit or roots (or, let’s be honest, weeds).

So today, the girls went to work.  We used a snow fence to corral them into a part of the garden that was finished (peas and beans, thank you very much), and away they went.  They weren’t too interested at first, but then Will turned some of the soil over with a pitch fork, and that got them going.  They love scratching in newly-turned soil.  They happily scratched away for almost three hours.  I really wanted to stay and watch them, but alas, I had to go to rehearsal.

(What is it about watching chickens!?  I could seriously watch them for hours.  They’re better than TV.)