People
seem to have such an easy time turning their chicken run into a
moonscape, but it’s been a struggle around here. We started our
chickens out on an 800
square foot pasture full of weeds, planning to have the birds
denude the ground so that I could plant some grains while moving the
flock to another paddock. Over a month later, the pasture was
still quite green, so we chopped off two-thirds of the area and let the
chickens continue to graze on the small portion remaining.
Three more weeks passed,
in which our cockerels did a little work on the pasture, but mostly
entertained themselves eating up the wheelbarrow loads of garden weeds
I tossed into their enclosure nearly daily. So Mark and I took
some time to root out the perennials with
a shovel — goldenrod, deertongue (a native grass), young trees, and
poison ivy all bit the dust. Finally, the ground is beginning to
look bare.
I want the chickens to
continue to eat up any new sprouts for another week or so, then we’ll
rotate them into the other two-thirds of their original pasture.
The mother
hen and her chick
have been having so much fun in there that they barely eat any
storebought feed.
homemade chicken
waterer keeps drinking water clean.
Hi Anna, I was just perusing your chicken entries, as I’m about to take the chicken plunge with some meat birds (I ordered some aquamisers already). I’ve thought about fencing off an area and letting the birds go to work, thus saving me some work preparing a new garden bed for next spring. Then I herd Paul Wheaten from Permies.com talking about this subject. He thinks that there is about 40% of greenery that is great for the chickens, 40% that won’t hurt them, and 10% that is bad for them or toxic to them-making this a bad idea. What do you think of this opinion? Have you ever had any problems after doing this? Thanks for the great blog, it’s one of my favorites.
We haven’t had any trouble with chickens getting sick on pasture. From watching the chickens at work, I suspect they nibble at new plants a few times before diving all the way in, and if something makes them queasy, they probably back off. I know there are lots of plants that the chickens simply ignore in the pasture, though whether they’re poisonous or simply not very tasty is beyond me.
Of course, that assumes the chickens have enough to eat without having to resort to toxic food. I wouldn’t want to leave chickens on pasture with no other food available — they might have to eat the poisonous plants then.