Build a permanent chicken run next to your kitchen garden with cedar, cattle panels, and deep wood-chip bedding. Chickens produce solid manure that mixes with carbon to create rich compost, and they'll eat your garden waste like poison ivy and weeds. A dump truck load of mulch costs around $300 and keeps the run from becoming a manure wasteland.
Guys, put the chickens as close to the house as socially acceptable. And if you're going to have permanent garden systems like I have with these raised beds, we have our kitchen garden here in the front yard. Put the chickens right next to it. Get the chickens out of the backyard into the front yard. This is a situation where they're going to stay put. So if you're going to put them still, we've designed this compost corner where it's this permanent run. It's this nice wood cedar with cattle panels in between and then poultry wire all the way down. And notice these cattle panels, these are pretty tall. So even a chicken, if you clip its wings, will still jump over a small, maybe a regular size railing. So we had to make these super tall. Now nobody gets out of this. This is like the chicken run no one can escape. The only time is we don't— maybe that doesn't shut like I thought it shut, and that rooster buddy, he'll come climbing out. Just a regular gate shut here, and then 1x6s on the bottom to retain the deep bedding. We put a bunch of wood chips in here once a year. We made it so that we could open up gates in the middle so a dump truck could come. So you don't have a machine, you need a dump truck load, you could order you some mulch delivered, dropped in here. Even paying for the mulch, guys, you have to pay $300 for a dump truck load of of mulch, probably less for us, much less for a smaller dump truck load. You only need maybe 2 yards of wood chips in this big of a compost area. And you'll see we have our wood chips down, and the chickens are always here, but they're always manuring. Chickens don't pee, do y'all know that? That's a little fun fact. Chickens only— they put it all together in one— I was about to say cute, that's way too strong for describing chicken manure. Manure, but they put it all in one tidy package. How about that? It mixes with this carbon, and they scratching and working all day, and it turns into compost. Well, here's some— what's underneath exposed, that's compost. Like, let your kids play in that. I wish Henry were still here with me now. I wouldn't be nearly as nervous. You can see we throw everything in here. We throw our wheat scraps. Guys, this is a bundle of poison ivy, and they just devoured it. Okay. We throw our weeds in here. This is the static run method. I, you know, I call this the, the compost corner, and this is how a lot of people are going to need to raise their chickens. I see a lot of people raising their chickens this way in just one area, but it's nasty. It's like a moonscape of manure, and it's just, uh, just gross. No wonder the chickens get sick, right? They're not going to get sick on deep bedding. It's not going to smell, and they're going to give you compost.
If I had to start my Homestead all over again, it could only pick one animal… 
