Free-Range Chicken Gardens

Free-Range Chicken Gardens

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In this richly illustrated, 224-page handbook, Jessi Bloom (award-winning eco-landscape designer) guides you and your family through the entire process of creating a chicken-friendly garden that’s both beautiful and productive.

Homeschooling families will love this book because it turns learning into real, hands-on experiences where kids plan, build, plant, and care for both chickens and gardens. Along the way, they’ll touch on science, math, art, and responsibility in a natural, engaging way.

With flexible designs that work for small yards or larger homesteads, the book blends beauty and function, offering inspiring layouts and photos. It also encourages sustainability, neighborly consideration, and a mindset that values both community and the environment.

Here’s what you’ll discover inside:

• Chickens & Gardens — Working Together: Explore how to integrate a flock into your garden ecosystem, balancing plant protection, forage zones, seasonal needs, and neighborhood considerations.
• Practical Chicken Considerations: Learn how to pick the right breeds, acclimate new birds, train them, and keep your plants safe from overenthusiastic scratching.
• Designing a Chicken-Friendly Garden: Includes landscape planning, permanent structures, fences, sample garden layouts, and “extra elements” that enrich both plantings and poultry life.
• Landscape Materials & Hardscape/Softscape: Which materials and textures work best for paths, fencing, ground covers, and plant beds to harmonize with chickens’ behavior.
• Plants with Purpose: Dive into lists of edible, medicinal, and fragrant plants that chickens won’t decimate — along with plants for forage, shelter, and beauty.
• Innovative Chicken Housing: From stationary coops to mobile tractors, geodesic domes, arks, modular designs, and coop interiors. Tips for materials, layout, and aesthetic design.
• Friends & Foes: Identification and control of predators, pests, diseases, injury care, and troubleshooting common issues.
• Conversions & Hardiness Zones + Resources and Appendices: Guidance on adapting plans to your climate, plus additional reading, contacts, and source material.