Something I never knew until I had both a laying flock and a fairly successful garden, is that chickens love tomatoes. In a totally bad way, if you have an unfenced garden (me!) and free range chickens (me!). Along about the time that the tomatoes start to get orange on their way to red ripe, the chickens, without fail, rediscover the garden and proceed to help themselves to my beautiful almost-ripe tomatoes.
Repeatedly chasing them out of the garden doesn't deter them; they just come back when I'm not looking.
The only sure-fire way to keep them out of my garden (since fencing it would be a large expense and make it really difficult to work the garden with the tractor) is to keep the chickens shut in their coop all day long. Or, for most of the day, until there's not enough daylight left for them to venture over to the garden.
But that's not really how I want to manage my chickens: shut in for 8 weeks or more. This year, chasing them has been difficult, what with my knee being jacked up. So sometimes they are shut in until a few hours before dark, and sometimes--usually a weekend--DH has to be on tomato guard duty, watching for the chickens to stealthily meander across the front yard and toward the far side of the garden. Between you and me, I think he secretly likes chasing them out of the garden with his 4-wheeler.
Ironically, in a twist of fate, this year the chickens sort of planted their own tomato patch. The terraced bed behind the garage and accessible from the patio, the bed I usually plant garlic in each fall, sprouted rather a few tomato plants this summer. At first, it was 2 or 3, and I didn't pay them much attention. I didn't think they would actually produce any tomatoes, being volunteer plants in a climate where tomatoes have to be started indoors months before the ground thaws outside if they're going to have any chance of bearing mature fruit.
And then my knee happened, so the terrace went to crap with weeds because I couldn't keep up and DH hadn't yet decided that he was going to have to pitch in. And next thing we knew, we had a tomato jungle that crowded out the garlic crop. Not just big bushy tomato plants, but this whole trailing wall of tomato vines.
Where the heck did they come from? It's not like someone spit tomato seeds off the deck and they landed in the terraced bed to sprout the next year, like has occasionally happened with watermelons. The only thing I could think of was that tomato seeds must have been in the chicken litter that I'd dressed the bed with last fall in order to add lots of nitrogen to the soil. You know, litter that had chicken manure in it, chicken manure produced by those tomato stealing chickens last summer.
So we started referring to that rogue patch of tomatoes as the "chicken tomatoes". And left them there, hoping this tomato patch much closer to the coop might deter them from eating the ones I'd planted in the garden.
It didn't. Now they had two choices of where to eat tomatoes. And, interestingly enough, the chicken tomatoes have been prolific and ripe almost at the same time as my plants (started from seed in early March) in the garden.
Most of the plants are producing cherry tomatoes. Very extremely delicious cherry tomatoes.
There's one plant that had made a few large heart-shaped reddish orange tomatoes, and another that has dark pink brandywine type fruits. Which is interesting, because I haven't planted any brandywines in a number of years, and the coop gets shoveled out way way more often than that!
No comments:
Post a Comment