When’s the best time to
start silkworm eggs?  Probably about
two weeks ago, although I only pulled mine out of the fridge on May 8.

The trick is to time
your hatch for a period when there are plenty of young mulberry leaves
around, and for the sake of safety, you probably should also work
around the frost-free
date.  It would
be a shame to get baby silkworms going, only to have a frost nip back
the leaves so you end up without a food source.

What I forgot to factor
into my calculations is that it takes about two weeks for silkworm eggs
to hatch after you take them out of cold storage and put them in a dish
at room temperature.  So we’ll be getting a slightly late start
this year, but it shouldn’t be a big deal.  I’ll report more once
we have little white caterpillars crawling around.

First of all, I
apologize for the low quality of these photos.  You can’t talk
chickens into posing unless they feel like it, and when they did, my camera
was broken and I had
to borrow Mark’s.  Plus, the day was dark and damp, which makes
for bad photos.  All of those caveats aside, I did want to show
you how our broilers are enjoying their forest
pasture.

I usually like to rotate
chickens out of a pasture after a week or less, but our flock had
barely explored beyond the lower fenceline during that time, so I opted
to leave them in this pasture longer.  I could tell they were
really getting a kick out of the complexity of the environment, and the
mulch
boxes were a
definite favorite.

One of the most
intriguing things I noticed as I watched the flock was that the
chickens walked right up the terraced pathways just like people do,
ignoring the steeper slopes wherever possible.  Maybe that means I
don’t have to worry about erosion on the near-vertical slopes from
chicken scratching.

The only downside of the
glee with which our chickens explored their forest pasture is that I’m
likely to lose their favorite species since I can’t talk myself out of
leaving the flock in this spot until they explore to the furthest
extreme.  The solution to that problem is to break the pasture
apart into smaller sections and rotate through them faster, but I’ll
have to put some thought into how to divide the space without losing
the pathway aspect of the terraces.  In the meantime, I’m enjoying
watching the chickens graze.