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| That's not an egg - it's an orange. |
Aside from eggs, these lovely creatures provide us with loads of chicken dirt for the garden. Chicken dirt is black gold for the garden. It is my fondest wish that it were black gold for the bank account, too, but alas it is not, and so we'll just continue to use it in the veg gardens.
During the fall and winter, Eric cleans out the coop and puts the debris in the garden beds. That's why we have such happy gardens.
During the spring and summer, that lovely dirt makes everything grow - including the weeds. I dump all our weeds back in the chicken yard for the chickens. They eat the bugs and the greens and convert it all to black gold.
By the end of the summer, there are a few more inches of dirt in the chicken yard. First thing in the spring, we scrape off those new inches of dirt and put it back in the garden.
When we clean the coop in the summer, we pile it near the garden to compost for a while. It's too hot - that means there's too much fresh nitrogen, which burns plants - to put right on the beds during growing season.
After the last fall harvest, I shovel the summer pile into the beds that will have melons and tomatoes next year so it can finish composting during the winter.
It's stinky, but worth it.