With a few ideas from "Permaculture: A Designers Manual" by Bill Mollison, I thought I might be able to save some work by letting the chickens help out with the gardening.  As it turns out all our chickens just happen to have green thumbs.   Typically a chicken pen will get matted down and become rock hard because the chicken manure will make the soil very acidic.  No bugs or bacteria want to live in the soil, it gets compacted, starts to stink, and then people don't want to be anywhere within 100 feet of it.   The trick is to add in leaves as you go.  The egg layer chickens are close to the back porch so it is simple to get to this chicken pen from the kitchen to feed them scraps.  The coop, has a feeder built into it that holds two 50lb bags of feed.   Keeping the chickens close geographically to your everyday routines helps to fend off predators trying to eat your chickens.  

It takes about an hour to move the pen and coop.  After the chickens their new location they start by eating the grass.  After a few days it is time to start adding in some type of dry carbon material.  I use leaves from the woods near the house.  This will help soak up the ammonia smell from the chicken manure and allows it to compost very quickly.  The chickens love scratching around in the new leaves for bugs.  You don't have to spread out the leaves; the chickens will begin kicking it around right away.  Within a few days it will be hard to tell you ever put leaves in it unless you look very closely....(the leaves get scratched into bits).  Then just ad more leaves.  Eventually the soil will build up a few inches and you can plant a garden, at least that is what we did.  Its not a bad idea to amend the soil with a few bags of peat moss and top soil at anytime.  I added probably 9 bags to the first spot and maybe 6 to the second spot and none so far to the third garden spot.