The photos above and
below show what chicken pasture 2 currently looks like — a nearly
impenetrable thicket of five to eight foot tall ragweed. This is
what you get when chickens eat the pasture bare over a long, cold
winter, and none of your spring
plantings take.
Honeybees
love ragweed pollen,
but can chickens get anything out of the weeds? Our six week old
golden comet cross and cuckoo marans have just about eaten the ground
bare underneath the towering ragweed. Here’s what the pasture
looked like at the beginning of June:
…and here’s the same
patch of earth a month later:
The whole pasture isn’t
this barren — this is the area right outside the coop door where the
flock hangs out the most. But the flaws of the ragweed forest are
all too apparent. The woody ragweed stems are useless for
chickens, and the flock can’t reach the leaves more than a foot off the
ground. Meanwhile, ragweed’s shade keeps most other plants from
growing, but doesn’t produce the leaf litter full of bugs that makes
the real forest so appealing to chickens.
The only really
definitive way of telling the quality of the ragweed pasture compared
to our other pastures is to look at how much feed it takes to keep the
flock growing. Unfortunately, this is our only flock of cuckoo
marans, and these heavier birds are likely to just eat more than our
australorps in general, so it would be an apples to oranges
comparison. Still, my gut says the ragweed isn’t really helping,
so I’ll probably let some of it bloom and then cut it all down before
the ragweed goes to seed.
First, THANK YOU for journaling your experience. It is so great to see the realities associated with your trial and error. I have a lot of trial and error to tell about myself. Maybe someday I will.
Anyway.. maybe what you need is another species or two. I have been considering making a few pens/pastures shared by pigs, poultry and goats. Goats are my main species.
Maybe just some miniature breeds of either would work in your setting. You can get wonderful milk from the smaller goat breeds, and of course lovely pork from pigs of all sizes. Or, just get neutered ones for pasture maintenance. (Cheaper to acquire.)
Thanks again. You are doing a great job.
Thanks for letting me know you’re reading and enjoying!
I’ve considered adding other species to the mix, but we just can’t handle them yet. Our fencing is currently only appropriate for chickens, and I love our garden so much that I would probably shoot a goat the first time it got out and ate my sweet corn. 🙂 That’s why we’re working on figuring out the best system just using chickens.
I’d love to hear more about your experiences if you ever get the time to write them up.