Let’s face it, poultry of all sorts are the best!  They are not only our pets and companions; they are useful around the home. You can put your flock to work all over the yard. There are great reasons why we love our chickens, ducks, geese, guineas, turkeys, pheasants and any other kind of poultry flock. The benefits are enormous!

Eggs

• We know they lay tasty eggs but most poultry can recycle their own eggs shells by eating them for calcium
• The delicious recipes we can make with eggs are endless
• The egg shells can be crushed up and planted with tomatoes and roses
• You can use the water from boiling eggs, once cooled, to water your tomatoes and roses
• Egg shell halves can be used for seedling starters and planted right in the ground come spring
• The sharp edges of crushed egg shells can also be put around plants to keep snails and slugs away
• Eggs that have been blown out can make lovely Christmas and/or Easter ornaments
• Put crushed eggshells in your compost to add a calcium boost

Bug Eaters

• All poultry love to scratch and peck for bugs. You can even let them in your vegetable garden before and after the growing season to help turn the dirt and fertilize
• Poultry eat grasshoppers, flies, worms, grubs, crickets and pretty much any crawling or flying insect they can catch, even spiders, eeeeeek!

Poop for Compost

• Chicken poop is great for the compost pile BUT it should be composted so it can break down before being used as fertilizer. It is too HOT in its natural form and will burn plants if it is not composted and given time to cool off.  It should always be well-worked into the soil before planting begins.

Miniature plows

• Chickens are like miniature plows. They can dig up a spot faster than you can say Cock-a-doodle-do!  Make sure that wherever you put your chickens you are alright with scratched up, torn up earth and never let your chickens in your garden during the growing season unless you expect losses or maybe you’ve planted them a garden of their own

Leaf rakers

• Do you really want to rake leaves and bag them up? Not me! Let your chickens out in a yard full of leaves and they will scratch them down to mulch. If you do rake leaves into a pile, your chickens will see that as a challenge.  Let the scratching begin! It’s also a great boredom breaker for your flock

Weed Eaters

• Chickweed, dandelions, wild grasses, clover, thistles, crab grass, wild strawberry, plantain and on and on and on. If you have a flock of poultry, you have some built in weed eaters just make sure you haven’t used pesticides or weed killers on anything which your poultry grazes upon and beware, they’ll eat and scratch up your good grass, too.

Chick producers

• Need more weed eaters, leaf rakers, miniature plows, bug eaters, egg producers or poop for your compost? Well, they can produce mini replicas of themselves given that you have a male or female.  Poultry will also usually adopt brand new babies or hatch fertile eggs even of other species of poultry

So the next time people don’t understand your love of chickens, ducks, geese, etc., just tell them you have an almost constant supply of eggs and lawn & garden care for the price of feed!