Letting Chickens Loose in the Vegetable Garden! | Our Self Reliance

Now (early August) that the vegetable and grain crops are mature and less susceptible to damage, I'm giving the laying hens free range access to half of the raised bed garden to forage all of their own food. They are quickly consuming all of the pests, chasing the chipmunks away from the grains and eating many of the weeds that I've allowed to grow in the garden specifically to feed to the chickens. Their favourite plants are by far the clover. They're eating the plants down the ground which will kill part of the roots, releasing nitrogen into the soil. That, along with the manure they're adding as they forage and a fall cover crop I'll plant soon, will make these beds extremely fertile for next year's growing season.
Welcome to our self reliant homestead! Join us, Shawn and Dervla, as we create a resilient, abundant and sustainable ecosystem that feeds our families from the land in Ontario Canada. Using permaculture as our guide, we strive to become independent in water, food, energy and shelter, focused on beauty in form and efficiency in function.
Our Self Reliance is a life of compromise between my two daughters and my wife's preference for culture, comfort and formality, and I, with my love of chaotic and beautiful but challenging and often uncomfortable wilderness living. The resulting homesteads are an eclectic blend of modern with traditional, whimsical with practical, formal with informal, civilized with rustic.
Over the last five years, my wife and I designed and built our dream homesteads from scratch with very little outside help; from undeveloped, declining forest to a comfortable home and cabin with a prolific edible landscape for people and wildlife equally. For many years, we have strived to lessen our burden on others by taking full responsibility for the health and welfare of our immediate family while building a strong community around us, both online and offline. Now that the infrastructure is in place here, we will be spending more time working cooperatively with community members, including extended family, to collectively become more resilient while living a deeply satisfying and meaningful life. Thank you for being part of that!