🐔🥬😤 Hens vs. Garden, Round 3: Less Fog, More Cardio | My Actifit Report Card: October 3 2026

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COVER: Hens vs. Garden, Round 3

Good news: this morning there was less fog than on the other mornings. Bad news: it meant I could see the hens perfectly... and they could see my winter vegetable garden perfectly too. 👇

🌄 Morning walk: a clearer sky

I started the day with a walk together with my faithful @choko.shock. After a week of misty, "where did the hills go?" mornings, today the view was back: soft blue sky, a few thin clouds and the hills of Cagli standing there like they'd never left. ☀️

PHOTO: hills and a clear morning sky over the fields, reeds in the foreground

Choko Shock, as usual, had a very precise itinerary: smell everything, check everything, run ahead and look back as if to say "are you coming or what?" 🐶

PHOTO: Choko trotting on the white gravel road with his tail up

🌸 Autumn flowers refusing to quit

Along the path, the meadow was still full of colour. The flowers apparently didn't get the memo that it's October:

PHOTO: a fresh yellow flower next to a withered one

PHOTO: pink knapweed flowers in the grass

PHOTO: blue chicory flowers among the mint leaves

Pink, yellow and blue (chicory, if I'm not mistaken, and surrounded by wild mint). Lovely, wild and, importantly, not planted by me, so nobody is digging them up. 😅

🐔💥 Hens vs. Winter Garden: the sequel nobody asked for

Now, the serious part. Today too I had to run after the hens. Again. The scene is always the same: I turn around for one minute, and when I look back there are five feathered "gardeners" scratching up the straw mulch, digging little craters around my brassicas and nibbling the leaves with an air of total innocence. 🥬

PHOTO: fuve hens scratching and eating in the winter garden, with the coop behind

In the photo you can see the crime in progress: straw all over the place, holes between the plants and a hen having a little snack straight from a cabbage leaf. The evidence is overwhelming, the defendants plead "not guilty".

The conclusion is simple: I absolutely have to solve this problem. My winter garden can't survive being a free-range restaurant for six hens. 🛑 The options on the table:

🧱 a proper fence or net around the beds (the hens will test it, of course)
🌿 low protective tunnels with netting over the young plants
🐓 keeping the hens inside the new run for a few more hours a day
🎓 negotiation (success rate so far: 0%)

I'm open to suggestions from anyone who has already won this war. 😄

🌆 Evening walk

After the usual day of work and chasing, I closed the day with a second walk in the evening, once again with Choko. One walk in the morning, one at sunset: not a bad way to keep the step counter honest, and to forget (for a while) the hens' latest masterpiece.

So that's it: morning walk, evening walk, a lot of hen chasing in between. Less fog, more cardio. 😄

Your turn: how do you protect your vegetable garden from chickens (or from any other uninvited guests)? Any tricks that really work? Tell me in the comments! 👇

🌿 Matteo — Ca' Paradiso, Cagli (Marche, Italy) | www.caparadiso.com