The Cottage Smallholder

So did you grow the beans, tomatoes and courgettes in containers?  Last year we successfully grew purple climbing French beans, early potatoes and tomatoes in containers.....actually, the potatoes we grew in those heavy duty supermarket shopping bags, the reusable ones you can buy (well, over here anyway) for 50p.  We also grew cut-and-come-again salad leaves in growbags, placed on top of an old garden table, in an effort to keep the mice off - that worked well too.  Our strawberries too were in growbags, on shelving fixed to the garden fences, they cropped very heavily.

So if you want to keep your hens away from your crops, I would suggest growing in containers, growbags or simply heavy duty bags full of compost, but try raising them up off the ground out of reach of the hens.  They need lots of water, of course, when grown in containers.

I  grow everything in Containers, as am Disabled, have some purpose built ones, simply made from Pallets. Oblong and Square, so they are the right height for me. You can Fertilize Marrows yourself, simply by picking the Male Flower and inserting it into the Female Flower. Also with Courgettes, which are just young Marrows anyway. A trick I find works is to grow a few Flowers in the same Container, the Bees are attracted to the Flowers, and Voila!

I think once tomatoes get to a certain size, the chickens won't be interested, we have free range chickens and they never touch my tomatoes in the greenhouse. Or potatoes, I think the leaves are poisonous and they must somehow know this?!

I have inherited a lot of containerised plants- Flowers shrubs and the like, but I grew onions and garlic in some containers last year, they were smaller than you would expect, but I like them that way.