Having a food forest and chickens is a huge step towards a successful homestead and self-sufficient lifestyle. Free ranging chickens can be a huge benefit to your soil. Not only do chickens eat insects that could be causing damage to your food crop, but they add nitrogen through their droppings. Free ranging chickens can reduce your need for supplemental feed and help you achieve a closed loop system between the garden and your chickens.

But chickens can also be destructive to the garden on their own. Chickens love to scratch the ground in search of edible critters. While this is a great way to have your garden's soil tilled and weeded, it’s not so great when they scratch underneath your food plants. If you don't replace the soil they scratch out quick enough, you could easily lose plants due to damaged roots. Losing plants can be costly. Especially for high value fruit trees.

So how can we protect these plants? Well, the first obvious answer is by fencing off plants. While this is a solid idea, it reduces the chance that the nitrogen rich chicken droppings will ever make itself available to the fenced off plants. Another downside to fencing is that some breeds of chickens can fly over fencing. Our bantams can fly as high as low hanging Oak Tree branches. A fence would be no match for them.

What I wanted for our Foodscape was to prevent damage from the chicken's scratching while making it as low profile as possible. That's why I came up with the idea of using cattle trellis along the ground. I believe the lifespan of this material to be at least 5 years before it rusts out. I also like that the chickens will still have access to weeds that appear around the plants I am protecting. Their droppings should fall right through and become available to the plants.

What has worked for you? Or what HASN'T worked for you? Let us know in the comments below.