I have been raising chickens in my backyard for about 10 years. I don’t know why I thought I could raise them; I am, after all, a transplanted city girl. During my youth backyard chicken raising was not the rising trend we see today. I probably read an article about small flocks in Mother Earth News or Organic Gardening and thought, “I can do that.” That’s how most of the trouble starts in my house.

Right now I have eight hens in the backyard. Well, hens might be too generous a term as four of them are mature and four are baby chicks we bought in March, so they’re too young to lay eggs. We have had various numbers over the years but six to eight is the right amount for our family. We purchase them as day old chicks and raise them under a warming lamp until they grow all their feathers and can move outdoors. My children and the neighborhood children have enjoyed watching the chicks grow and collecting eggs from the hens.

There are many different breeds of chicken; many of them beautiful, some of them whimsical. There are hybrids and heritage breeds – just like vegetable varieties that are hybrids or heirlooms. People raise chickens for eggs, meat, and showing. There are chickens that lay white eggs, brown eggs, and even blue-green eggs. Hens lay eggs whether or not a rooster is around; we have never had one, mainly because I like my neighbors and my sleep. I try to be practical when I’m choosing chicken breeds and opt for good egg layers, but someday I would like a Polish Chicken. They have a fabulous crown of feathers and look like they are ready to stir up some fun.

I initially got chickens because I wanted fresh eggs and discovered that the flavor is far superior to eggs shipped from afar and bought at the supermarket. Not only is the taste superb but the color, especially when the hens are allowed to forage on grass is a deep orange and the egg practically stands up in the frying pan. No watery, runny eggs here! You can get the same delicious eggs from many of our farmers here in Riverhead.

We decided that we would not have a permanent coop built in one part of the yard that the chickens would turn to dirt in no time, but rather we would build a chicken tractor that could be easily moved around the yard to give the girls fresh grass every day. When I say we I mean my husband, Dan, would build it. That chicken tractor was like a fancy duplex. It was a thing of beauty. It had an A-frame structure that was enclosed on the top and open on the bottom. It was screened in on the bottom; keeping the chickens safe from predators and restrained from my garden while still allowing the chickens access to fresh air, grass, and bugs. There was a ramp that let the chickens climb to their nighttime roost. It had a plywood roof that we were supposed to cap with metal to keep rain out but we had extra asphalt roof tiles laying around so we used them for weather proofing.

Do you know how heavy asphalt tiles are!?! Between the plywood roof and the asphalt tiles it was onerous to move the coop around the yard.

So several years later we built Chicken Tractor 2. This one is much better. In fact, I like it so much that I have two of them. It’s basically a rectangular frame, 2.5ft h X 4ft w X 8ft l, with ¼ inch hardware cloth on the tops and sides. There is a tarp attached on the top to protect from sun and rain. Two doors make it easy to feed and water at one end and harvest eggs from the other. In the winter we wrap the house in plastic sheeting for extra warmth. That’s all the girls need. They do just fine in the winter. And because the chicken tractor is lightweight I can move it all by myself!

Click here for the directions from GardenGirlTV for this chicken tractor.

Now, here’s the best thing about this new chicken tractor – its dimensions are just a fraction smaller than the interior dimension of my garden beds!

Once I’ve finished harvesting I put the coop onto the garden bed and the chickens hang out there gleaning any plants left behind, and more importantly destroying weeds, eating weed seeds, and eating insects that might be plaguing the garden. They have a great time and they are helping me keep the weeds down in the bed while depositing valuable fertilizer. From late fall through winter and early spring I move the chicken tractor monthly from bed to bed. I’ll throw in some straw and kitchen scraps for the girls to kick around and with the addition of their manure I’ll have a refreshed and fertilized bed – with hardly any work or additional expense on my part. (Disclaimer – chickens are indiscriminate in their bug eating habits, they don’t eat only the ‘bad’ bugs but are certainly eating beneficial ones, too. Worse still is if they are let into a garden with new planting they will rip it all up.)

One of our chickens, Chihiro, is quite old. She is no longer laying eggs but maintains a special place in our hearts. She is one of the chickens we got in our first flock ten years ago who has managed to survive raccoons and death by natural causes. Several years ago we noticed that Chihiro was having trouble getting around. She was limping and her wing on the same side was limp. We think she had a stroke and didn’t know what to do for her except make sure she had food and water. After a few days she was able to get around with this crazy kind of hop-walk and she started foraging again. The chickens particularly like to forage in the compost heap and soon Chihiro managed to get up the heap but then fell down onto her back. Because one side of her body wasn’t very strong she couldn’t get up and we had to come to her rescue. With time, determination, and her own physical therapy routine she still has a little limp but is able to keep up with the younger chickens.

I am convinced that watching chickens lowers my blood pressure. We love cooking and eating outside during the warm weather. I’ll let the girls out just before dinner to forage throughout the yard. They are a stinking riot to watch. They take dirt baths, sun themselves, and chase each other around the yard if one has a particularly juicy bug. It is great entertainment to eat supper and watch the chickens. I call it chicken TV.

Backyard chickens can be fun and provide delicious eggs. If you are interested in raising some of your own Tara Besold at Talmage Farm Agway puts orders in every spring and chooses a very nice selection of breeds. New York State Law requires that you purchase a minimum of six chickens. If this is more than you want consider splitting an order with a friend.

In the garden this week:
• Get new plants and do a good deed! Go shopping at the 17th Annual East End Garden Festival, May 10-13, 9am – 6pm, at Staples Shopping Center in Riverhead to benefit Peconic Bay Medical Center’s Pegasus House Palliative Care.
• Harvest Lettuce, Spinach, Radish
• Plant Carrots, Radish, Kohlrabi, Bush Beans, Cucumber, Zucchini
• After the 15th plant Muskmelon, Pumpkin, Winter Squash, Watermelon; set out transplants of Tomatoes, Eggplant, Peppers, Basil
• By the end of May all warm weather vegetables can be set in the garden.
• Start mulching plants with compost, straw or tree mulch. Wait to mulch warm weather vegetables after soil warms up (June).

My family and I are no strangers to living outside the norm. I had my babies at home, I nursed toddlers, we homeschool, make our own laundry soap, and gave up our yard to beds of fruits and vegetables.  When the kids have friends over, inevitably we surprise (and sometimes horrify) our small guests when the peanut butter and jelly sandwich is served on homemade bread, made with home ground flour, homemade peanut butter and our own jam. But even I felt we were stepping outside our comfort zone when my husband, a lover of all things new and odd, discovered knotweed.

One of the things I love about living on the East End of Long Island is passing by the rows and rows of vegetables growing in our farm fields. It’s peaceful to have my eyes rest on a farm landscape. Growing long rows of vegetables on a farm is perfect when using tractors, or even animals like horses and oxen, to tend to fields; the rows are spaced for the farm equipment to travel along and cultivate, fertilize and harvest.  But as a home gardener I don’t have that much land to dedicate to long rows of vegetables. And I don’t want to spend so much time weeding between the rows!

For a long time the home vegetable garden copied the farm model and used the single row method and planted long rows of one vegetable, laid a path, and then planted another row, laid a path, and on and on. But in 1976 Mel Bartholomew wrote a book that was a great influence on the way home gardeners utilize space and treat their soil. His method, Square Foot Gardening, allowed gardeners to grow on a smaller piece of land but get a higher yield.  

Here is the gist of his methods that I use at home and in River and Roots Community Garden.

No more single-row planting. Install your plants next to each other instead of next to walkways. Mel Bartholomew suggests four-foot wide raised beds and two- to three-foot wide permanent paths in between. Four-foot wide raised beds allow you to comfortably reach to the middle of the bed from either side to weed and harvest. You can make the beds as long as you like. At home mine are eight feet long and at the community garden they are 10 feet. When you have dedicated paths you never compress your garden’s soil or walk on your plant’s roots. It also allows you to amend your soil with fertilizer and compost and not waste it on paths you aren’t growing in. Permanent paths can be mulched to prevent weeds or you can let grass grow between the beds or line them with brick. For ease of planting the bed is divided into one foot square sections. If you’re not planting in rows you can plant seeds in each direction.  Mel’s sample garden is a four- by four-foot square raised bed which he divides into 16 one-foot squares. Each one- by one-foot square gets its own vegetable, herb or flower spaced according to its own needs.

 The final bed might look like this:

4 feet long by 4 feet wide

No tilling required. OK, I admit I am not a fan of heavy, noisy, smelly power tools but not tilling is actually good for your soil. Tilling your soil does aerate it and turn weed plants under, but it also disrupts your soil’s fragile environment of beneficial fungi and brings up weed seeds that had been in the dark and dormant – now they are in the sunlight and germinating a nice new patch of weeds! If you have a dedicated garden bed that is never compacted by walking on it you will have nice airy soil and you can leave those weed seeds in the dark. You will find that with each year you will do less and less weeding and if you really want to avoid weeds I suggest covering the bed with a straw or tree mulch. A layer of compost, a couple of inches thick, can suppress weeds and nourish your plants at the same time.

Save money and grow only the amounts of fruits and vegetables you can eat or preserve. Many seed packets still give planting instructions for single-row planting and thinning. For example, a packet of Swiss Chard instructs you to plant seeds in a row, two inches apart, in rows 18 inches apart; once the seed germinates you should thin seedlings to six inches apart. I don’t know about you but after watching the miracle of a seed grow into a plant the thought of ripping out seedlings to get the correct spacing seems sacrilegious. I know many of us can’t bring ourselves to thin the plants and then end up with an overgrown mess that reduces production in the plants and invites disease. Besides, my seed germination rates are pretty good and if I plant three seeds but have to remove two seedlings in order to get the proper spacing of six inches apart I’m wasting over 60 percent of my seed.  

To use a one-foot square section to grow Swiss Chard with the final plant spacing six inches apart I divide 12 inches (one square) by six in each direction giving me four sections. Set one seed in the middle of each section. Now the center of each plant is six inches away from the center of the next plant. 

This can be done for any plant spacing. Large plants like tomatoes, peppers and eggplant get one whole square; smaller plants like carrots can be filled with up to 16 seeds. Using this close spacing allows the plants to form a living mulch which blocks the sunlight from reaching the soil and blocks out weeds.

And you don’t even have to do any math if you take advantage of the free garden planner at Gardener’s Supply Company’s website.  Just put in the dimensions of your raised bed and then drop icons of vegetables you want to grow into each square and it tells you how many to plant!

For the advanced ninja gardeners you can stagger planting.  Seed packets that contain hundreds of seeds makes it tempting to spread all of them out at once, but our family only eats a certain amount each week. For example we easily consume four heads of lettuce a week but not ten. So I’ll plant four plants in a square one week and four plants the next and four plants the next until it’s too hot for growing lettuce. In this way the harvest is staggered over many weeks instead of all at once when I couldn’t possibly eat all the food and it would go to waste. You can do this with many vegetables like carrots, radishes, kale, cucumber and squash.

And once you harvest a square you can plant it with something else!  I can plant 16 radishes in one square foot in early spring and it will be ready to harvest in 30 days. Once the radishes are removed just add some fresh compost to the square and it’s now ready to plant with a warm weather vegetable like tomato, eggplant or peppers.

I strongly encourage you to read All-New Square Foot Gardening by Mel Barholemew. It is packed with information and I find myself referring to it frequently. Also, visit Mel’s website, as well as Patti Moreno’s Garden Girl TV  for more extensive information about square foot gardening.

In the garden this week:

• Transfer tomatoes, eggplant and pepper seedlings to hoop house. (If you don’t have a hoop house or cold frame keep these seedlings indoors until mid-May)
• Direct sow: Beets, Carrots, Lettuce, Radish, Cucumber, Cilantro, Kohlrabi
• Around May 4^th Direct Sow: Bush Beans, Melons, Winter Squash, Lettuce, Radish, Swiss Chard
• Start Harvesting Spinach and Lettuce
• Keep weeding
• Keep making compost

Amy Davidson is a resident of downtown Riverhead and co-founder of River and Roots Community Garden. She has been a backyard gardener for 15 years. When she is not in the garden she is herding seven chickens, two dogs, two cats, two kids and one very patient husband.

Last Saturday, as many slept, my husband and I awoke at the break of dawn. Along with Amy Davidson, we were preparing for a trip into Hofstra University to attend the Long Island Small Farm Summit, through the generous support of Cornell Cooperative Extension. This year’s keynote speaker was Will Allen, the CEO and founder of Growing Power, Inc., a working farm in the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We arrived early to register and were able to get excellent seats in the auditorium. We were not disappointed. Will Allen’s presentation included over 1,000 slides yet at no point did I feel the need to yawn, glance at my watch, or mentally make a shopping list for the next day. Those around me must have agreed because at the conclusion of his talk, Mr. Allen received a standing ovation. Let me repeat: A farmer got a standing ovation.