Ever since we got the hoophouse, it has had a connection with our chickens. When we needed compost to add to the soil in the hoophouse, the first place I looked was in the chicken yard. There is a compost pile there made up of the chickens’ old bedding and droppings. When weeding around areas that had been planted (or were about to be planted), the weeds would go into a bucket for the chickens. The chickens would also get any insect pests (mostly caterpillars) that were found on the crops. In the summer, the chickens weren’t too interested in the weeds; there were plenty of greens in their yards to choose from, so they might pick out a few favorite plants to nibble at, but they were more excited when they got caterpillars. Once winter came, though, they were suddenly eager to devour bucketfuls of weeds every day. I started intentionally leaving patches of weeds until they were of good size and pulling leaves off of them without even trying to pull the roots out. Things grow more slowly in the winter. I could hardly keep up with the chickens’ appetite for greens. The leafy parts of crops like carrots and radishes could also go to the chickens, and I even gave them some of the greens I was growing for us to eat (especially when they were most abundant). When chickens are able to eat greens, the yolks of their eggs are a rich yellow orange. When they aren’t they are a very pale yellow. Our eggs had once been very pale in the winter, and the chickens obviously craving greens. The hoophouse helped change that.
This year, we have moved some of our chickens inside the hoophouse for the first time. They are in a section that has not been used yet, really, and the chickens will be helping to prepare that area for growing things. The chickens frequently end up confined to their coops in the winter simply because they don’t much like walking around in the snow. The ‘front yard flock’ (which is the flock we moved into the hoophouse) doesn’t have a particularly large coop, so they will have more room than they would in their coop. On sunny days it can get quite warm in there too.
So far, they seem to be doing quite well in their new home.