Safe Mosquito and Tick Control: Raise Chickens, Guineas or Ducks

(Page 2 of 4)

June/July 2009
By MOTHER EARTH NEWS readers 
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Our garden is not fenced and the chickens roam it freely. There will be an occasional peck in a pepper or tomato, but the only real problem has been with Thai hot half-inch peppers — the chickens will totally strip the plants of peppers unless they’re protected.

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I’m not quite sure what else they are eating in the garden, but we have few grasshoppers or caterpillars. When we plow or till, the chickens follow behind to feast on the insects that have been turned up.

We also leave a chicken-sized opening in the fence around our 7-foot-by-17-foot compost heap, and the chickens thoroughly work it over for us.

Karen Moore
Adrian, Michigan

Cricket Control

We have a small farm with what seemed like millions of crickets. At times, the garden was black with them — especially in July and August. For a few years, I had been purchasing hundreds of dollars worth of every cricket-killing pesticide we could find, all to no avail.

We decided to try a few chickens and so we ordered 10 20-week-old Rhode Island reds in the spring of 2005. They foraged heartily, and by October the chickens had developed a daily cricket route that scratched out almost every covert cricket on the farm. Our initial concern had been cricket control, but other bugs also have been seriously reduced since 2005.

David Lindsay
Val Caron, Ontario

Foragers for Fly Larvae

We started out on our new farm with about 50 chicks, 25 keets (day-old guinea fowl) and 15 turkey poults. They ate anything that moved. As they grew to free-range size, they fanned out over our 10 acres and continued to eat everything that moved slower than they did. Eventually we had almost no bugs left on the property, and the ticks that infested every shrub and blade of grass were gone.

The guineas were well-behaved, but the chickens were destructive to all my flower beds — and gardening became impossible. We fenced in the chickens to confine them to the barn and pastures (using a lot of goat wire fencing, which we needed for the eventual arrival of the goats), and let the guineas range the yard and unfenced areas. The chickens help with fly control because they scratch through all the llama and goat poop in the barnyard and pastures to eat the fly larvae.

Linda Stevens
Marshall, North Carolina
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