By Nick and Elizabeth Mahmood

of Green Source Gardens

For: Oregon Cannabis Connection

At Green Source Garden we believe that chickens can greatly increase the fertility in your garden for all crops—especially cannabis. Cannabis has the ability to consume a lot of nutrients, and by keeping a small flock of chickens you get lots of nutrients. Below are a few pointers for efficient chicken management.

Set up your chicken yard near your house. We suggest keeping chickens close for several reasons:

1. Having chickens close makes it more convenient to bring them scraps from the kitchen. Feed scraps in the morning—not the evening— kitchen scraps can attract raccoons, skunks and other wildlife if left outside overnight. Usually, if you feed in the morning/early day the chickens will have them taken care of by evening.

2. They are safer being close. Generally, if chickens are in a high-traffic zone near your house, predators that regularly eat chickens and or steal eggs are discouraged from coming around as much.

3. Chickens are great entertainment. There is a lot to learn by watching the animals you are keeping. You can also check on them easily from a window, eliminating the need to have to go outside in the middle of the night to see what the ruckus is all about. Be sure to have a coop that is can be closed up at night.

4. You are more likely to regularly collect eggs if you don’t have to trek to the coop.

The chickens become your farm workers and they play one of the most important roles on a regenerative farm as compost turners! They cost very little for what they produce in fertility for the garden. Keeping plenty of carbon-based materials on the ground in the chicken yard gives them material to scratch through, as well as soaking up the nutrients from their manure. Keeping heaps of leaves, straw and woodchips in their yard effectively creates compost with very little effort. Every few days, just go in and turn the piles a bit with a pitchfork to open up new areas for the chickens to scratch and work. Whenever nutrient-rich top dressing is needed for plants, just retrieve it from the chicken yard and use as mulch in the garden. This is all that is needed to supply your garden with the energy the soil life craves. If soil life is happy then the garden is happy and productive.

The first cannabis plants I ever grew were in small pots with dirt scraped out of chicken yards, in combination with chicken manure tea. The results were impressive and I never bought anything from the store. This was how I realized that there isn’t a need for products when growing plants.

For the four plants you grow at home, I highly suggest adding a few chickens to your space. Watch your yields greatly improve and stop spending so much money on creating fertility. Oh, yeah; and enjoy the best cannabis flowers that can be grown. Good luck and happy spring.

Both images from Green Source Garden. Flower image is a Pinkleberry Kush.

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