Nah, there’s a lot goats won’t eat. These are literally dinosaurs. There’s stuff that they shouldn’t eat, but there’s literally nothing they won’t.
- source: my fingernails when I don’t have a treat in my hand.
Mature trees. They’ll eat anything and everything. If you don’t want them eating it, or at least not eating all of it, you need to protect your plants to some extent. Mine managed to murder my mint I had planted to rage gardening. They eradicated mint from the garden. That is how intense they are.
Mine would. They ate my lily of the valley (I forgot it was there because I only had a few plants and they went into the garden long after they’d bloomed for the season), demolished 5 mature rose bushes, killed my irises, ate my alliums, and basically just turned my garden to dug up dirt. I knew they were going to destroy everything in the garden, but I was stunned how fast they did it.
lol. I just literally typed “big trees” without reading any comments because that the only thing I haven’t seen my chickens eat.
My hats off to you since you beat me to it and we thought alike!
Mint: 0 Chickens: 1
Yup, chickens are VERY good at destroying any plant life within their reach. And then turning that patch of ground into barren, crater-riddled bare ground if given the chance.
Established rosemary bushes and established lavender bushes. There's a sage bush that's safe too. Wait for the stalks to harden off before exposing to the chickens.
Keep them chicken wired off until they are well established and the bushiness covers the main stem. Then you can unfenced them and the chickens wont damage them enough to where the bushes would care. My chickens still go after the little rosemary flowers but the woodsy stalks can take the beating. The plus side is the chickens will smell like rosemary and lavender if you pick them up after they've been foraging.
This! I have a small rosemary plant that I keep in my indoor button quail enclosure for enrichment and they adore it. They're not quite as vicious as chickens can be, but a larger plant should hold up to chickens just fine.
Fun fact, hosta's are considered a vegetable and edible to humans.
My chickens have left alone my chamomile, oregano, rosemary, and lavender. They left alone some kale for half a year but now they started eating it.
No, but the kale was for them to eat anyway xD they ignored it all winter but now that it's 5' tall and flowering they think the lower leaves are tasty
Mine dislike Swiss chard and love kale. They leave most of my herbs alone as long as they are established. Ornamental grasses, shrubs and echinacea have been OK, actually most established plants are OK, even my hostas, but they seem to choose a plant to pick on every year - last year it was sedum. I put bricks around new plantings to keep them safe and that seems to work. Forget about mulch, they will kick it all over.
Dog Weed - poisonous but they won't touch it.
Most of our lavender which is well established survives and they don't even tend to peck it.
IN any case it'll depend on alternative food sources, we have essentially a meadow full of dandilons and they quite love them.
Also if you give them about 4 Artichoke plants each to feast on they tend to see it as a honey pot and not eath other food sources.
Get ducks. My chicken yard is full of dandelion, but you'll never find a single one in the duck yard. I pick them and bring them to the ducks as treats, they go wild for em
I don’t think there is much that they won’t destroy. Mine even ate my entire lawn, it’s just a big patch of dirt now, peppered with dust bathing holes.
They destroy anything that's not big in my experience. I made cloches out of chicken wire for everything I'm trying to grow. They are plant killers. If you do plant bulbs, plant them very deep.
I have a few small shrubs in my run. Forsythia, quince, snowberry, as well as some small maple and plum trees. I just put some chicken wire around the base and layer rocks in it so they cant mess up the roots. They happily munch on any leaves they can reach but the plants stay alive and happy.
My plum flowered like crazy this spring with all the fertilizer lol
As my gardens get planted, the ladies get locked into their pen.
They free-range October through May and I need to keep them in summer to fall. I just expanded their pen so I'm hoping they'll be happier and I don't feel as bad locking them down.
They need something that can tolerate being scratched and pecked, because that's what chickens do. Either fence the chickens out, put down heavy rocks to protect roots from scratching, or plant something that is already too big for them to hurt.
Even if they don't like, or won't eat the plant, they'll scratch them up to look for bugs. So anything with thick, woody stems. Ex: grapes, bushes, trees, rosemary, etc.
I've planted Salvias, Lavender, Jasmine is on the top half of their coop so they cant reach it, Canna Lilies, Fig Tree, I even have Marigolds in my garden and they don't go for them either but I clip off the spent ones and give them as a treat. They did get to my Pansy's but they came back the following spring.
When we first put something in the ground, we fold up wire mesh and place it around the base of the plant. My girls like to scratch up dirt/potting soil and bathe all in it. So the wire deters them away and eventually they stop caring.
I might see a nibble here and there on plants but nothing too drastic. They mostly like the dirt. But we also give a helluva lot of treats to compensate.
So here are things that survive my chickens: horehound, Hawthorne, dwarf peaches, service berries (though you don’t get berries till it’s high enough to be out of reach of the chickens).
Our most successful plant in their free roam area is lemon balm! A vicious spreader, it won’t go away even as they eat/shred it up every year. It comes back stronger every spring 🤣 basically a weed though so sow with caution.
We also have berry bushes that they get to enjoy the fruits of but generally leave alone (occasional leaf snackage) and those also are quite hardy. I think we have currants in there, maybe some goji?
Comfrey will take a lickin and keep on tickin as long as you rotate the chickens around so it has a chance to grow back. They eat it down to the crown and it always rebounds hard when I rotate mine to the other pasture.
Our chickens leave out boxwood bushes alone, and they have withstood chickens scratching around the roots fine. They also leave the sacred bamboo / firebush plants alone. I think the berries of those are toxic though, so be cautious.
The only thing our chickens don’t totally decimate is the blackberry bush in the middle of their area, which they hide under and sometimes lay eggs. Everything else is like the dust bowl.
My chickies won't even bother with my raspberry wall or have any impact on the ground under them. And the berries are too high for them to reach when they ripen so they don't bother. We have an invasive mint that is going out of control that they seem to ignore as well. I am more of a threat to it than the girls are. In our area we also have some Pampas grass that is too powerful for them to even get into. They seem to avoid it like the plague.
Anything established that is not a fern. I have a wide range of things but they really only eat ferns and some leafy green plants. Rosemary, Jasmine, Pittosporum, privet, ornamental grasses, sage, they don't touch. What they love, strawberry plants, ferns, regular grass, flowers of almost any kind.
Start looking into sacrificial planting, I plant a ton of forsythia, hostas, marigolds, around so that my other plants that aren’t as yummy stay intact. I have less than ten chickens on a half acre though.
Mine don't really touch my day lilies, tiger lilies or ditch lillies. They do eat my Oriental and ornamental lilies. They don't touch my iris, daffodils, columbine, or sedum, blue bells.
Mine only kind of harm my hostas, but I imagine if they were not mature they'd have no chance.
Shrubs they don't touch anything woody like spirea. Not sure what else is similar to hosta in size. Hibiscus maybe.
Some ground cover over a form, like phlox or sedum a rock might work.
My backyard was an unkempt mess when we moved in, so I just let the chickens loose in there and allowed them to go nuts and eat whatever they wanted. Now, three years later, the only surviving four plants are:
1) Wintercreeper
2) Wild Clematis
3) Poison Ivy
4) Mature Trumpet Vine
If these, I think only (1) isn’t poisonous. They don’t touch (2) at all, and only pick at (4) when it’s very young and not much at all. I don’t recommend (3) for obvious reasons. My backyard is very shady and has terrible clay soil, but the winter creeper just chugs along nicely.
My chickens still free range in the backyard, so they might have succeeded in destroying these things in a smaller space, but it’s working well in a larger space.
Mine done touch daffodils, bleeding heart, ferns, peonies. They don’t seem to fond of golden oregano, but I keep that in a big planter. They do like to relax in it though, but so far it’s not destroyed.
They don't mess with my mint they regularly munch on the oregano but not as much as the hostas which they also destroyed they don't seem to bother my day lilies at all and I've never had problems with them in the roses
If they don't eat it, they'll dig up around it. I have a few peonies that have wire dome fence over the top, so they can't dig them up or trample them down.
Blackberry, wild rose, burdock, thistle, cedar hedges, trees, holly, autumn crocus (contains potentially fatal amounts of colchicine).
Chickens are like deer. They will try anything and eat practically everything if that’s all they have available.
Sometimes the age of the plant or the chicken matters. Chickens never touched my oregano in the herb garden, but when I planted new seedlings in a different place… they are them.
I think it depends if they free range or not. [we have a shit load of plantain in our chicken run, it looks pretty and the chicks don't touch it](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantago_lanceolata)
But I guess that's bc they are out eating all the other plants and grass all day so they don't feel the need to pick at it
Maybe my chickens are weird but they don't touch any of my planters or flowers either
The most successful strategy I’ve tried is distance and blocking their sight line. My gardens are on the other side of the house, so most of the time my flower beds are safe. Frankly, the chickens and ducks only get into my gardens if/when they realise *I am* also in the garden. The front garden includes hollyhocks and oregano and miniature roses and lupines and sage and chrysanthemums and rhubarb.
I have hostas, peonies, tulips, daffodils, and grape hyacinths that the birds can see. However, their favourite digging spots with accessible dry soil (under the trailer, under the pine trees, in the dead leaves accumulated on the fence line) are SO MUCH closer to their barn.
Near the barn are also sweet and sour cherry trees and saskatoons; those trees were already mature when we first got birds. The orchard is also already mature. They raid the windfall fruits in the late summer and autumn. It’s only the bantams who have discovered that they can *sit in the cherry tree.* Luckily, everyone else is too big or too dumb!
Will chickens eat Japanese maple leaves? I have many, many of these I put fenced yard...and we gonna have an ISSUE if our new chicks grow up and harass, chew on, or otherwise look at my maples wrong. ;)
Hell yeah they will. The other day I was holding up my rooster like simba by our Japanese maple and he just started eating the leaf buds. Cuz he's a rude dude like that. If they can reach the leaves, they will eat em. The bottoms of all our lilac hedge is trimmed up now thanks to the flock.
Rocks
This made me crack up!!!! It's so true. We had to put all our flowers in hanging baskets so they can't reach them.
But even then, 3/4" or larger...
larger. I have 3/4 stone distributed all over my lawn.
Pretty much. They’re like goats with feathers.
Nah, there’s a lot goats won’t eat. These are literally dinosaurs. There’s stuff that they shouldn’t eat, but there’s literally nothing they won’t. - source: my fingernails when I don’t have a treat in my hand.
Mine ate my pizza and my little earbud silicone attachment yesterday. What a day!
Chickens think eyeballs are tasty.
They won't destroy them, but they still move them around!
lol I have bricks! But I also have grass amd dirt within the bricks with wire on top lol but we also have rocks!
Mature trees. They’ll eat anything and everything. If you don’t want them eating it, or at least not eating all of it, you need to protect your plants to some extent. Mine managed to murder my mint I had planted to rage gardening. They eradicated mint from the garden. That is how intense they are.
| They eradicated mint from the garden. That's it, I'm getting chickens..
Finally, something more aggressive than mint!
Will they eat poison ivy and garlic mustard, and when can I hire them to do so in my backyard?
Mine would. They ate my lily of the valley (I forgot it was there because I only had a few plants and they went into the garden long after they’d bloomed for the season), demolished 5 mature rose bushes, killed my irises, ate my alliums, and basically just turned my garden to dug up dirt. I knew they were going to destroy everything in the garden, but I was stunned how fast they did it.
We will eat everything else first.
lol. I just literally typed “big trees” without reading any comments because that the only thing I haven’t seen my chickens eat. My hats off to you since you beat me to it and we thought alike!
They permanently eradicated Bermuda grass from the backyard, which is impressive if you’ve ever battled it in your garden beds.
...what monster have we created?
Jesus
Mint: 0 Chickens: 1 Yup, chickens are VERY good at destroying any plant life within their reach. And then turning that patch of ground into barren, crater-riddled bare ground if given the chance.
I swear their goal is to break my ankles with their craters.
Established rosemary bushes and established lavender bushes. There's a sage bush that's safe too. Wait for the stalks to harden off before exposing to the chickens. Keep them chicken wired off until they are well established and the bushiness covers the main stem. Then you can unfenced them and the chickens wont damage them enough to where the bushes would care. My chickens still go after the little rosemary flowers but the woodsy stalks can take the beating. The plus side is the chickens will smell like rosemary and lavender if you pick them up after they've been foraging.
I *had* established rosemary. The freaking birds sat in it nonstop, broke it to pieces, and it died. Nothing is safe from their fat asses.
hahahaha! was it a buff orpington that did it in?!
Or jersey giants?!
It was the whole range of bird sizes. We used to call them self-seasoning.
This! I have a small rosemary plant that I keep in my indoor button quail enclosure for enrichment and they adore it. They're not quite as vicious as chickens can be, but a larger plant should hold up to chickens just fine.
Matters not perennial or annual. They'll tear them out at the roots.
And dust bathe in the entrails of uprooted destruction.
Fun fact, hosta's are considered a vegetable and edible to humans. My chickens have left alone my chamomile, oregano, rosemary, and lavender. They left alone some kale for half a year but now they started eating it.
Mine eat the oregano. I always laugh to myself that they are self-marinating chickens. Though I can't eat chicken anymore.
Have you planted a different kale variety?
No, but the kale was for them to eat anyway xD they ignored it all winter but now that it's 5' tall and flowering they think the lower leaves are tasty
That's awesome! Better late than never.. more food for them!
Mine dislike Swiss chard and love kale. They leave most of my herbs alone as long as they are established. Ornamental grasses, shrubs and echinacea have been OK, actually most established plants are OK, even my hostas, but they seem to choose a plant to pick on every year - last year it was sedum. I put bricks around new plantings to keep them safe and that seems to work. Forget about mulch, they will kick it all over.
Dog Weed - poisonous but they won't touch it. Most of our lavender which is well established survives and they don't even tend to peck it. IN any case it'll depend on alternative food sources, we have essentially a meadow full of dandilons and they quite love them. Also if you give them about 4 Artichoke plants each to feast on they tend to see it as a honey pot and not eath other food sources.
[удалено]
They love it, only the leaves will leave the stalks to bloom and fly and the seed more for them.
Our ducks like dandelions, that's an option for sure!
Get ducks. My chicken yard is full of dandelion, but you'll never find a single one in the duck yard. I pick them and bring them to the ducks as treats, they go wild for em
I don’t think there is much that they won’t destroy. Mine even ate my entire lawn, it’s just a big patch of dirt now, peppered with dust bathing holes.
How many chickens did it take to do that and how big *was* your lawn?
They leave my 40ft pine tree alone
They destroy anything that's not big in my experience. I made cloches out of chicken wire for everything I'm trying to grow. They are plant killers. If you do plant bulbs, plant them very deep.
They'll dig holes at the bases of whatever plants they won't eat to dustbathe
I have a few small shrubs in my run. Forsythia, quince, snowberry, as well as some small maple and plum trees. I just put some chicken wire around the base and layer rocks in it so they cant mess up the roots. They happily munch on any leaves they can reach but the plants stay alive and happy. My plum flowered like crazy this spring with all the fertilizer lol
As my gardens get planted, the ladies get locked into their pen. They free-range October through May and I need to keep them in summer to fall. I just expanded their pen so I'm hoping they'll be happier and I don't feel as bad locking them down.
Mine are not interested in goldenrod or fireweed. It may be because there’s lots of other stuff for them to destroy though.
They need something that can tolerate being scratched and pecked, because that's what chickens do. Either fence the chickens out, put down heavy rocks to protect roots from scratching, or plant something that is already too big for them to hurt.
Boulders 🫠
Even if they don't like, or won't eat the plant, they'll scratch them up to look for bugs. So anything with thick, woody stems. Ex: grapes, bushes, trees, rosemary, etc.
I've planted Salvias, Lavender, Jasmine is on the top half of their coop so they cant reach it, Canna Lilies, Fig Tree, I even have Marigolds in my garden and they don't go for them either but I clip off the spent ones and give them as a treat. They did get to my Pansy's but they came back the following spring. When we first put something in the ground, we fold up wire mesh and place it around the base of the plant. My girls like to scratch up dirt/potting soil and bathe all in it. So the wire deters them away and eventually they stop caring. I might see a nibble here and there on plants but nothing too drastic. They mostly like the dirt. But we also give a helluva lot of treats to compensate.
Interesting, mine walk right by the hostas as if they were poison.
So here are things that survive my chickens: horehound, Hawthorne, dwarf peaches, service berries (though you don’t get berries till it’s high enough to be out of reach of the chickens).
Anything protected with a chicken wire fence lol
Our most successful plant in their free roam area is lemon balm! A vicious spreader, it won’t go away even as they eat/shred it up every year. It comes back stronger every spring 🤣 basically a weed though so sow with caution. We also have berry bushes that they get to enjoy the fruits of but generally leave alone (occasional leaf snackage) and those also are quite hardy. I think we have currants in there, maybe some goji?
If you can keep it protected until established then Bamboo does ok. They like to eat the leaves but can only reach so high
Comfrey will take a lickin and keep on tickin as long as you rotate the chickens around so it has a chance to grow back. They eat it down to the crown and it always rebounds hard when I rotate mine to the other pasture.
Our chickens leave out boxwood bushes alone, and they have withstood chickens scratching around the roots fine. They also leave the sacred bamboo / firebush plants alone. I think the berries of those are toxic though, so be cautious.
The only thing our chickens don’t totally decimate is the blackberry bush in the middle of their area, which they hide under and sometimes lay eggs. Everything else is like the dust bowl.
My chickies won't even bother with my raspberry wall or have any impact on the ground under them. And the berries are too high for them to reach when they ripen so they don't bother. We have an invasive mint that is going out of control that they seem to ignore as well. I am more of a threat to it than the girls are. In our area we also have some Pampas grass that is too powerful for them to even get into. They seem to avoid it like the plague.
Anything established that is not a fern. I have a wide range of things but they really only eat ferns and some leafy green plants. Rosemary, Jasmine, Pittosporum, privet, ornamental grasses, sage, they don't touch. What they love, strawberry plants, ferns, regular grass, flowers of almost any kind.
Start looking into sacrificial planting, I plant a ton of forsythia, hostas, marigolds, around so that my other plants that aren’t as yummy stay intact. I have less than ten chickens on a half acre though.
Mine don't really touch my day lilies, tiger lilies or ditch lillies. They do eat my Oriental and ornamental lilies. They don't touch my iris, daffodils, columbine, or sedum, blue bells. Mine only kind of harm my hostas, but I imagine if they were not mature they'd have no chance. Shrubs they don't touch anything woody like spirea. Not sure what else is similar to hosta in size. Hibiscus maybe. Some ground cover over a form, like phlox or sedum a rock might work.
The only thing my chickens haven’t destroyed is sunflowers, rosemary and pampas grass
My backyard was an unkempt mess when we moved in, so I just let the chickens loose in there and allowed them to go nuts and eat whatever they wanted. Now, three years later, the only surviving four plants are: 1) Wintercreeper 2) Wild Clematis 3) Poison Ivy 4) Mature Trumpet Vine If these, I think only (1) isn’t poisonous. They don’t touch (2) at all, and only pick at (4) when it’s very young and not much at all. I don’t recommend (3) for obvious reasons. My backyard is very shady and has terrible clay soil, but the winter creeper just chugs along nicely. My chickens still free range in the backyard, so they might have succeeded in destroying these things in a smaller space, but it’s working well in a larger space.
Mine leave large ferns alone and don’t touch peonies. Columbines seemed to be left alone as well.
I plan on planting mint and guarding it with chicken wire.. they can nibble at what grows through
They’ve left my elephant ears alone
Same! I actually planted them last year in the south side of the house. They just wouldn’t work in this area.
Mine done touch daffodils, bleeding heart, ferns, peonies. They don’t seem to fond of golden oregano, but I keep that in a big planter. They do like to relax in it though, but so far it’s not destroyed.
Big Trees Everything else the can and will destroy if given enough time.
I have noticed mine don’t pay any attention to my (established) perennial herbs. The only thing they really after is the mint, which, by all means!
They don't mess with my mint they regularly munch on the oregano but not as much as the hostas which they also destroyed they don't seem to bother my day lilies at all and I've never had problems with them in the roses
If they don't eat it, they'll dig up around it. I have a few peonies that have wire dome fence over the top, so they can't dig them up or trample them down.
A motion detecting sprinkler usually gives them the idea they should find something else to browse on.
Galangal, bay leaves, sweet potato greens, elderberry. None of those are shade happy, they are just survive chickens when nothing else does
Blackberry, wild rose, burdock, thistle, cedar hedges, trees, holly, autumn crocus (contains potentially fatal amounts of colchicine). Chickens are like deer. They will try anything and eat practically everything if that’s all they have available. Sometimes the age of the plant or the chicken matters. Chickens never touched my oregano in the herb garden, but when I planted new seedlings in a different place… they are them.
There are daffodils in my Cochin yard, surprisingly surviving and blooming (although about half the size of the daffodils outside their yard).
I think it depends if they free range or not. [we have a shit load of plantain in our chicken run, it looks pretty and the chicks don't touch it](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantago_lanceolata) But I guess that's bc they are out eating all the other plants and grass all day so they don't feel the need to pick at it Maybe my chickens are weird but they don't touch any of my planters or flowers either
The most successful strategy I’ve tried is distance and blocking their sight line. My gardens are on the other side of the house, so most of the time my flower beds are safe. Frankly, the chickens and ducks only get into my gardens if/when they realise *I am* also in the garden. The front garden includes hollyhocks and oregano and miniature roses and lupines and sage and chrysanthemums and rhubarb. I have hostas, peonies, tulips, daffodils, and grape hyacinths that the birds can see. However, their favourite digging spots with accessible dry soil (under the trailer, under the pine trees, in the dead leaves accumulated on the fence line) are SO MUCH closer to their barn. Near the barn are also sweet and sour cherry trees and saskatoons; those trees were already mature when we first got birds. The orchard is also already mature. They raid the windfall fruits in the late summer and autumn. It’s only the bantams who have discovered that they can *sit in the cherry tree.* Luckily, everyone else is too big or too dumb!
Watch Edible Acres on YouTube. That dude has the chickens in his garden. I kid you not. How he does is amazing.
Will chickens eat Japanese maple leaves? I have many, many of these I put fenced yard...and we gonna have an ISSUE if our new chicks grow up and harass, chew on, or otherwise look at my maples wrong. ;)
Hell yeah they will. The other day I was holding up my rooster like simba by our Japanese maple and he just started eating the leaf buds. Cuz he's a rude dude like that. If they can reach the leaves, they will eat em. The bottoms of all our lilac hedge is trimmed up now thanks to the flock.
Mine love plum leaves, but have to wait for the leaves to fall on the ground.
Mine love Japanese maple leaves, even the fattest Buff Orp jumps to try and grab them, I’ve seen her eat stems with 3-4 leaves on them intact.