My sister has a great system for her chickens and garden. Her coop is built right next to a "double" garden plot. The plot is divided in half and completely fenced. Each summer, one half is available for the chickens to roam and scratch, while the other is her vegetable garden. Each fall, after harvest is done, she switches sides. She roams the streets with her trailer and collects hundreds of bags of raked leaves, dumps them in with the chickens, and they spend the next year enjoying the bugs and worms the leaves attract. The chicken poop and leaves turn into wonderful compost and nary a weed survives their pecking. She is lucky enough to be in the country, so she can get away with this plan. She has had repeated challenges with predators, and spent more money on reinforcing vents and fences than I'm sure her chickens are worth. However, she's not trying to make it a money saving or making venture. Chickens can be wonderful, but they do require constant vigilance. Martha

Building a coop that looks Japanese would be what I would do to integrate it. You could also screen it with fencing and/or planting. Traditional Japanese gardening is formalized and stylized nature, with sheared trees and shrubs, raked gravel, groupings of rocks etc. used to represent things seen elsewhere in the world - like wind-blown wild trees on the coast or dwarfed ones on mountain tops, islands in the sea and so on. Nothing casual about it at all, as far as creating and keeping one goes. But you could certainly come up with something evocative or suggestive of Japanese gardening, if your thinking lends itself to that. Visit other gardens during openings/tours and look at books and web sites showing and describing the kind of thing you are pondering. Years ago there was one around called I believe A Japanese Touch for Your Garden, if a used book outlet has that it may have some ideas for you.

Moni, Well, you get a chicken sitter. Maybe you could offer free eggs to a neighbor if they will keep an eye on your chickens while you're away. Leslie, That is too funny. We once had a flock of wild turkeys take up residence at a gas station on the edge of town. Constant traffic and wild turkeys are not a good combination. Luvabasill, It is easy. Flip the chickens over. If they are wearing tighty-whities, they are guys. If they are wearing cute bikini panties, they are female. Once the chicks are a little older, you can tell the roosters from the hens quite easily.....the roosters will be the obnoxious ones. (sorry, guys, but it is true) If you buy your chicks from a reputable supplier with properly trained employees, you should be able to get what you want without having to flip them over to determine their gender. (see the link below) The key thing is that the birds have to be kept separate, so I'd rather buy them from a store that has the different sexes and different varieties of chickens in separate cages or brooder cages. Some stores keep them in open containers, like galvanized metal tubs or plastic wading pools, and in that case, I think it is too easy for all the hens and roosters and various types to get mixed together. In that case, you really have no idea what you are taking home. You have to wait for them to grow and feather out so you can see if you've got the types of chickens that you wanted. The stores where I buy chicks usually have them separate in different brooders and clearly labeled "pullets" (females that will lay eggs) and "straight run" (a mixture of males and females). Sometimes with very young and tiny chicks you may get a male mixed in with the pullets, but not often. If you buy straight run, you'll get a lot of males and a few females, and the males will spend all their time trying to kill each other so that they can be the #1 male. We never buy straight run unless we want a new rooster. I guarantee you if we buy three from the straight run brooder, at least 2 of them, and sometimes all 3, will be male. You only need (and want) one male if you want to avoid the inevitable Rooster Wars. Actually, I don't think we have bought new chickens since about 2009 or 2010. Since we have a regular-sized rooster for the full-sized hens and a banty rooster for the banty hens (the banties live in one coop and the regular-size chickens in another), we will let a broody hen hatch out at least one clutch of eggs every year so our little flock is self-sustaining. And, because I know y'all will want to know this....the full-sized rooster has fathered children with the little banty hens, but the banty rooster is unable to father children with the full-sized hens. The full-sized hens can stomp on that little banty rooster (and they will) while he is trying to figure out how to accomplish the deed with hens that are two or three times his height. Those hens know exactly what he is up to, and they don't put up with any nonsense from him.....and neither does the big rooster. When he sees the banty looking at the big hens with a gleam in his eye, the big rooster strolls over to that little banty rooster, doing his best Foghorn Leghorn high-step, and makes it very clear, sometimes painfully clear, to the banty that "you will not touch my hens". Generally, the big rooster only has to make that point once or twice a year. When you are the little rooster, you need to behave, and our little rooster knows it. However, in fairness to the big rooster, when a hawk or other predator threatens, he protects all the hens and the little banty rooster too. Poultry are great garden companions. They eat lots of bugs (especially ticks and grasshoppers), they scream to alert you if hawks, foxes, bobcats, coyotes or squirrels are nearby, and they provide chicken poop for the compost pile....plus an endless supply of fresh eggs year-round most years. They also devour lots of weed seeds. If you only want to order a small number of chickens online, check out the website of My Pet Chicken. I think I read somewhere that they sell them in numbers as small as "3" whereas most poultry companies require that buy 25. This is because 25 newborn chicks in a shipping box produce enough heat to keep each other alive while they are being shipped to you. The link below discusses the one way to "dangle" chickens to determine their gender. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Chicken Wisdom

Claire, my Rhode Island Reds survive the winter nicely in the milk house part of our old dairy barn, the cattle and horses have free range of the bottom part, they come and go in the winter as they please. None of it is heated, so they do require fresh water daily in the winter because it freezes but there is no heat source. I am considering getting a heated waterer so they don't have to be watered twice a day. That's why I have Rhode Island Reds, they can nicely survive Michigan's winter as long as they have shelter. They even go outside on sunny winter days and run about in the snow. In fact, I don't know anyone that has a heated chicken coop or barn. We do have a pond and in the winter a full 100 gallon stock tank with a heater so the water is always "open", but I've never had a chicken drown, or even go into the tank or the pond, so I don't think you have to worry about your chickens drowning either. The biggest issue with chickens running about free in a yard is predators. Everything from the neighbor's dogs to coyotes, hawks, fox. Skunks like to sneak into the coop and steal eggs. For the protection of my own personal flock they only are allowed to run about while I'm there to supervise (and besides, they peck only the ripe tomatoes if they are unsupervised in the garden) and they are always locked into their coop at night when they go inside to roost. All of mine are tame enough to be picked up and will run into their fenced enclosure if I pick up a bucket and call them, so it's easy enough to keep them confined when I'm not there to protect them. Annie