Hen Chronicles: A symbiosis of sorts between foliage and fowl

We have our fair share of trees in the backyard. Maples. Two pear trees. A lone birch. There are trees in the neighbors’ yards too, near our property line. Most of them are quite large, so there’s raking — a lot of raking —  to do at this time of year.

When I was a kid growing up in Massachusetts, my father and I would rake the leaves onto a large tarp and drag it out to a vacant, unused no man’s land between our property and Cady Brook. We’d dump the leaves there and start all over again, until the job was done.

I have no such option here in Maine; the neighbors wouldn’t take kindly to me using their yards as a dumping ground. The city does pick up bagged leaves and compost them, but we accumulate too many to make that our only solution. We do have two large compost bins, but they fill up quickly, leaving plenty of leaves to dispose of by other means.

That’s where the chickens come in.

Our three hens cannot free range in our urban neighborhood, with its close quarters and busy city streets, but they love to scratch and peck their way through piles of leaves when I toss them into their pen, which I do with some frequency in the fall. “The girls” are animated disposal units, attacking and shredding the leaves and burying leaf bits as they search for edible creepy-crawlies.

Just as Snow, Nellie and Hope help me deal with the overabundance of leaves that blanket our yard, so too the foliage helps the hens cope with winter.

Some chicken owners heat their coops but we don’t, partly because of the fire danger. Our chickens spend most of their daylight hours outdoors year-round, and heating the coop at night during the winter would make it difficult for them to acclimate to outside temps during the day. That may sound cruel, but experts say chickens cope with winter’s cold far better than they do with summer’s heat. That certainly has been our experience.

Still, I set aside 15 large bags of leaves every fall, to stack against the outside of the unheated coop. This provides some degree of protection from winter winds and chilly temperatures without overheating the interior. I don’t know where I got this idea, but I’ve insulated the coop this way for the past four years and it has worked out well.

All of which still leaves several bags of leaves that will have to go to the city for composting. But at least the hens are doing their part, and when winter's worst rolls around, Mother Nature will return the favor.