What is up everyone? Welcome back to the Epic Gardening Podcast. My name is

Kevin as always and I'm joined today again with by Ann Quo. She is RealHens

of O.C. which is a wonderful online screen name on Instagram.

And she's also the upcoming author of The Beginners Guide to Raising Chickens

How to Raise a happy backyard flock.

So yesterday we talked a little bit about

the overview of how chickens are being used

on her property, on her homestead,

and just some of the general ways that she's keeping her

chickens. Today we're going to talk about some of the pros for having chickens

in the garden and as someone who has never kept chickens myself I I'm definitely going to lean on you, Anne, here for what did you notice maybe before you had chickens in the garden and then after?

Before we had chickens in the garden, we had a a lot of scary spiders as I mentioned in the previous episode

We had a lot of black widows and brown widows. I mean they were on my door handles before I entered the house

All over the patio, we had tons of just a lot of other pests,

like grubs, and then we would get skunks frequently in the backyard,

possums, we still have possums, and there used to be ticks actually also in our hill.

We have that back hill and I know we have ticks because once when my chicken

went up there, this was when we only had had four she came back down with a ticks

embedded in her comb and that kind of freaked me out but ever since then I haven't

seen a tick on any chicken at all and they come out with clean combs but they

definitely keep the grub beetle spider population down. I have no spiders. I mean there's still

spiders obviously but there's no more of black widows on my patio. I don't have to

...