If you know me but at all, you know that I have planted a number of fruit tress and berry bushes across 0.75 acres protected with a deer fence. And that I have chickens that I let roam around the whole thing, including a uniquely designed greenhouse chicken run.
This setup is technically called “silvopasture”, and it’s an interesting technique to reduce the amount of effort required to grow fruit and raise chickens. Why? Well, to be frank, the chickens eat bugs, and weeds, and they poop onto the ground near the trees. Chicken poop has a lot of nitrogen in it, so it makes for a great fertilizer for the fruit trees, especially those in the chicken run area that doubles as a greenhouse.
The fruit trees, of course, make fruit for me and the chickens to eat, and seed the next generation of trees and bushes. And the chickens give me eggs. I feed the chickens with supplemental feed and water to ensure egg production, but since the chickens forage most of the day, they eat less feed.
So, clearly, nothing is perfect, so what is wrong with this setup? Well, for one, the chickens like to poop on my front porch and walkway. Not ideal, but manageable with a hose. What I really need to do is setup a gate and fence to keep the chickens on the back half of the property where people don’t really need to go.
Also, the first flock of chickens I was raising got eaten by a fox, so I had to build a fortress of a run to go around their coop. The deer fence was also not easy to put up – 660′ of fence stapled to trees.
But now I can use that same greenhouse chicken run as a shelter for fruit trees that typically grow only in zones a bit higher than ours. We’re in zone 8a, so we can reasonably grow zone 9 or even 10 plants in the greenhouse. In terms of temperature, that means we get an extra 5-10 degrees F, and can grow plants that can survive winter temps as low as 30 F (zone 10) in addition to our outdoor plants that survive down to 20 F (Zone 8).
