By Sheri McGregor
Dozens of recipes pair rosemary with chicken. That’s why it strikes Nina Ronstadt as funny that her chickens won’t touch the stuff . Rosemary is one of the few plant varieties at Ronstadt’s Point Loma, Calif., home that her small fl ock hasn’t bothered or destroyed. Before getting chickens, Ronstadt (a chicken keeper and garden blogger at ninagarden.wordpress.com) recalls seeing several books and magazines with beautiful pictures of chickens in gardens. “It makes it look like having chickens in the garden is going to be all golden and great,” she says. “But it’s not quite that easy.”
Lisa Steele, author of Fresh Eggs Daily: Raising happy, healthy chickens … naturally (St. Lynn’s Press, 2013), laughs at pictures of chickens on beautiful green lawns. “They must have just put the chickens there about five minutes earlier,” she says. “Chickens scratch the roots out, so grass doesn’t stand a chance.”