In my experience, chickens will eat pretty much anything. I even had one that was fond of killing and eating mice and once tried to eat a snake.

You can grow melons for them (f you want to put in the effort just for chickens) they love melons. I will sometimes cut cantaloupes in half and freeze them for the birds when it gets really hot out, Those things are gone in no times. But, maybe summer squash. Mine have typically enjoyed lettuce and cabbage (to include kale and collards) quite a bit too. I have read alliums are toxic to them though, not sure if it's true or just hear-say, but, something to be mindful of.

I'm not sure how far a 20x20 area of grain will go, depending on how many birds you have, and if you free range them or not, they're not exactly light eaters. I would think you need quite a bit of room to get any sizable yield out of grain crops, so I'd stick to stuff that you can get more production out of to help offset the cost of feed rather than trying to establish a more closed system with that size area.

This post was edited by ZachS on Thu, Jan 8, 15 at 19:53

My chickens enjoy eating grapes, chick weed and cherry tomatoes. They will destroy any garden you put them in.

I remember some of the seed companies had chicken forage seed mixes. At the time I thought it was over priced but you could look at the mix for ideas. I seem to remember greens being a big part of them. If they are scavenging for their own food, you will need to have rotational pastures/gardens as they can scratch it down pretty quickly.

To save on feed costs, do not forget that you can give them your kitchen scraps. We often give them things that we harvested too late to be desirable for us. Carol Deppe's book the Resilient Gardener has some information on feeding poultry from the garden if you want some other ideas. If you were to try vermicomposting, you could harvest some extra worms to feed the chickens as well. Then there is also soldier fly larvae. Harvey Ussery's book can give you ideas on that, I believe he also has information about putting chickens into a pasture.

I would think that, rather than a garden that the chickens will just decimate, growing the gardens around the chicken run (as long as you don't have gophers or other critters you have to cater to), then toss whatever is ripe into the pen. That way you can control how much the chickens get and not let them just peck at a few things and ruin them, then find they don't like them. Also, you could freeze some of the produce for winter, unless you're in a place that can grow year round (I see you aren't) Chickens do eat year round and aren't fussy about pre-frozen food.
I know nothing about grains etc.
You might want to go to the " Back yards chickens" forum. They are a wealth of information!
I had to get rid of my chickens due to rat infestation!
Now that I have that under control, I have to limit the eggs cause of cholesterol! =( No Mo eggies for me!

Maybe raising mealworms would be a good way to suppliment the feed? I have heard they are inexpensive to raise and chickens love them.

As for things you can grow in the garden:
My chickens love grapes, blueberries, melons (we give them our rinds and they pick them clean) cucumbers (we generally just give them the middles with the seeds as we eat the Dukes ourselves), corn (fresh and dried), sunflower seeds, certain weeds that grow in the yard, pumpkin/ squash seeds, cabbage, greens. I have found that each chicken has her own food preferences and at different times of the year they favor different foods. I have heard not to feed them so much dried corn in the summer, but to give it to them in the winter. We often give them scraps of veggies and fruits leftover from our meals, but still have to give them feed.

It is important to keep rats out of the coop because they will eat the feed. And will pilfer eggs if they can.

You can compost the chicken manure (mixed with yard waste and kitchen scraps) and put it in the garden.

The way to have garden and chickens is to integrate them. Make an outer fence, a coop on wheels, and inside the fence make paddocks with movable netting. The chickens use one paddock at a time. Let them destroy it good, then move them to the next paddock, and plant the paddock left behind. I know I plant in March, late May-June, and August, so I would need four paddocks at least. Extra paddocks (where you do not garden) could have forage. I suggest alfalfa, which can be grazed for 4-5 years without replanting, and some winter forage like oats. alfalfa and fermented/sprouted corn is quite a nutritious feed.

This is the only sustainable way to solve the weed problem, and you get fertilizer and organic pesticide (they eat all the bugs). Make sure the fence continues underground, has electric wires, and consider placing temporary netting over the occupied paddock, perhaps having a central post in each paddock to tent the netting. Also one tree in a corner in each paddock for shade.

With that much space you can set up a coop with gardens around it. By managing the fencing you direct the chickens into one area for a season while you garden in the other. Then you switch the chickens to the recently harvested garden area and you plant the part where they've recently been foraging. The suggestion to visit Backyardchickens.com is a good one.
I googled 'Chicken gardens divided' and came up with several ideas.

Here is a link that might be useful: Chicken Paddock system

Chicken also can eat almost any leaf weeds. Especially good for them is Lambs Quarters, nettle, chickweed. You can dry them for winter as well - if you have hot attic, it will dry very fast. In summer, if you collect chicken manure, mix it with some brown materials like wood chips or leaves and keep it in a low profile piles, you will get a lot of worms - chicken loves those as well. You can just let them dig through the pile when it is half composted.

The fixed coop with multiple entrances is the other option as junco shows. But the basic is the same: sturdy perimeter fence, paddocks built out of netting. If the flock is too big, the coop is too big, and you can not move it easily, then this is the only solution.

My preference for a movable coop is due to the possibility of having more paddocks. Also for defense against raptors (overhead netting) it is easier if the paddocks are rectangular. If you then choose to have hens, you can use paddocks for them, as they need to be separated from the main flock during brooding and chick rearing (you will need extra, smaller coops). Same if you want to keep meat birds separated from the layer flock. They have personalities...

Sandhill Preservation has some seed mixes and info that may be of help, also. Others above have given good advice, too.

They also have a poultry catalog but I don't remember it talking about feed for the poultry....but it has descriptions of more breeds than I ever knew existed.

Here is a link that might be useful: Brooder yard greens....scroll down a bit

Suggest the use of a chicken moat; see the link.

http://www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/garden-pest-control-zmaz88mjzgoe.aspx#axzz3OKKoYNnd

You will love having chickens. My hens range in the veggie garden, and I fence them out of sensitive areas. The chicken moat concept really works, though, and I've seen several setups in action.

Chickens love mulch and weeds, and sunflowers are a good crop for them. You can give them whole dried heads to pick at in winter, keeps them amused. Of the easy to grow grains, I think they like millet best.

As someone suggested backyardchickens.com is a great resource. A quick Google turned up this thread, which should be helpful:

Here is a link that might be useful: Plants for poultry forage

Probably the best compromise in the paddock system is to have most beds in each paddock for humans, so the chickens will sterilize them, and a couple of beds for the chickens, so they get their greens. During the cool season no plant produces more and better biomass than fava (use cover crop favas, as sold by Territorial for example). High protein, vitamins, and minerals, and tons of biomass. Mulch will also grow chicken food in the form of slugs and earthworms.

During the warm season I have no experience, but it is best if the plants are fast growing legumes. It is also important that these be cover crops, like favas, that get destroyed before setting seed, not like alfalfa that establishes itself and becomes a perennial. Ideally one wants to rotate the cover crops in the beds, and even if the chicken eat the whole fava crop, the roots still fertilize quite a bit.

We are gardening for the chickens also (6 full size and 5 bantams currently), many of the above posts are excellent suggestions on types of crops to plant. one I did not see mentioned was comfrey, our hens love this plant and it grows quite well here.

There are also many weeds that not only do they eat but they love and some are quite good for both them and us. If purselane is native for you you might already have a natural chicken resource on your property. Purselane is one of the plants that are high in omega 3 fatty acid and the hens will pass this along to you in the form of enriched eggs.

They will devastate any planting they take a liking to in no time at all. Last fall we were a little late in getting a legume pasture mix out in an area about 20 x 20, it got too cool for it to grow much more before it was much over a foot tall. The hens had this scratched down to dirt inside of a couple of weeks.

One thing you can do is only let them out later in the day to limit the number of hours they are on it since they will head back in on their own pretty much at a set time depending on when the sun goes down. A tall fence or electric is needed because once they begin to eye whats on the other side they will start trying to get to it if there is a way.

We had a 4' fence and The Wife tried the red flagging on it to discourage them but it did not help. We are going to be using 8' fence from here on out. Using 10' toprail for posts, 4' welded stock wire for the bottom and 4' light chicken wire for the top.

This year we are going to be adding quite a few more chickens and along with that are adding new gardens for them, outside of their runs of course. Our intention is to grow a wide variety for them. Have also started with mealworms and compost worms that will add some extra protein especially in the winter months when natural bugs are not so prevalent. Our hens have free choice layer feed all the time, the goodies in terms of worms or fresh vegetables are just an offered option which they will always take us up on.

Another resource is a compost pile in the run, dump all of your garden cleanup and spoiled fruits in there and let them till and turn it. I have been thinking about tossing a couple of logs into the compost pile to create a place for worms and bugs somewhat secure from the hens.

Lastly looking into next winter there will be lots of late year crops that store well such as squash, pumpkins ect to try and have goodies for them until the following years garden takes root.

Best of luck to you on your effort. I think gardening for the chickens is just a given as they love the fresh greens even the weeds and we love the rich eggs they in turn provide us with.

Comfrey is a perennial, like alfalfa, so it needs its own permanent bed. But I know it is toxic to humans and some livestock. Perhaps not to birds? Concur on the purslane, but unfortunately here in the cold North purslane season is about one month, and not that productive either because of cool temps.

My chickens love root crops, especially turnips, radishes, and beets. When the root/veggie is a inch or two across, pull some of the dirt away and they'll eat it in the ground.

I literally feed mine like they are pigs giving them almost all our table scraps. They love almost everything. They love pasta for some reason.

Anyway anything you grow for yourself in the garden can also be fed to the chickens. They just love getting anything other then feed lol.

Thanks for all the information folks, I really appreciate it. Lots of really good ideas here!

There's no way you're going to save on feed costs by growing things - you can't grow anything as cheap as large scale farms can grow corn, soy, etc. Chicken feed is actually really cheap (about $12/50lbs), and is a pretty good nutrient mix.

You can feed them scraps, but if you're going to - you need to be careful to make sure you feed them plenty of protein - chickens aren't herbivores. Almost all of the health issues people commonly have with chickens (and egg laying issues) boil down to improper nutrition - usually because they're feeding a 14% protein layer mix and then 'supplementing' with veggies (which brings the birds down to about 10% protein in their diets).

So, if you're going to supplement - either supplement with plenty of meat, nuts, etc, or have your base feed be something with a higher protein content than layer mix.

any kind of legume (alfalfa for example, which is an almost perennial) will give you close to 20% proteins from the leaves. Lots of ways to fit chickens into gardens.

Kale

We had our hens on the outside of the fenced garden as a chicken moat

But they can clear a garden in no time at all

glib, on the comfrey being toxic. Still have yet to be convinced of that. I mean I understand the information that is available and it has to do with exposure volumes, pretty certain that beer, wine or spinach is in the same range of toxicity when talking about pyrrolizidine alkaloids but you and I both know we are not going to make any one of these things our primary diet not make it the primary diet of our animals.

Just got 10K more mealworms today to add to the 2K I got a few weeks ago. I decided I did not want to wait so long for a second crop before being able to pull a reasonable amount of them for the Hens. Also got our first beetle today from the first batch.

Interesting thread! I never thought of a plot just for chickens (but a chicken tractor is on my to-do list). They did so much damage we fenced them away from our garden plots. We just toss 'em the parts of the garden plants we don't want (chewed up collard leaves, misshapen strawberries, etc --and snails) As someone else mentioned, ours love melons and other soft fruits. I never thought of freezing one for them, what a great idea. Ours mostly just get the rinds after we're done with them. They also love corn and decimate an ear in minutes. But ours avoid tomatoes, I'm not sure why. Otherwise, they'll pretty much eat everything.

Gourds, Armenian cucumbers,Zuchinni for summer. Chard, beets, daikon,Comfrey. Mustard is an easy winter green and you can start it from bulk seed from a spice store. A lot of older books mention mulberry trees in the chicken yard.

amaranth gets huge and they eat the seeds and plant.

I have also let my chickens free-range in my garden. Once the garden is in full swing, they usually didn't do enough damage to the plants to kill them (though I know that is possible). Of course, it's also related to the number of chickens and size of garden. But what I do find is that with the chickens roaming around, I find less of the icky, squirmy bugs or insects around my plants, and just more of the bugs that I like having around. I have also found termites in some rotting wood and once I exposed them, the chickens made short work of that colony.

And I could swear that once having chickens around free-ranging, the mosquito population seemed to be much less also.

We had to stop free ranging ours because of loose dogs in the neighborhood. You can use a chicken tractor and wheel it around. After your garden is done for the year you can place it there and they will clean it up for you and fertilize too!