March has come in like a
lion, and our chickens are wet and muddy.  I’ve been wanting to
focus on making
our cochin go broody and set on some chicks, but she’s had a low-level
case of diarrhea that she can’t seem to shake.  I’ve dosed her
with yogurt, garlic, and earthworms, all to no avail.  I know that
deep
bedding is supposed to be healthy for chickens, but I also know that it
takes several months for the good bacteria to colonize bedding, so it’s
possible that my experimental bedding is responsible for her ill
health.  Just as likely, though, is the current forest pasture’s
position in the shadiest spot in the yard.

Meanwhile, Mark has been
hard at work putting together a used
pallet chicken coop
in the sunniest area so that we can move our flock there soon. 
Green grass is pushing up through last year’s dead foliage in the new
pasture area, and I suspect that fresh greenery will be the health cure
our cochin has been looking for.  I’m chomping at the bit to get
our flock moved into the sun and our cochin sitting on some eggs, but I
have to remind myself that the farm has its own timeline.  Maybe
by the end of the week….

I’ve been tossing new bags of
leaves in the chicken coop every week or two to refresh
the deep bedding,
and the chickens kept scratching and matting those leaves down into a
thick, warm layer.  However, the bedding finally got so high that
if I added any more, the chickens wouldn’t have been able to come in
their pop hole.  Time to harvest a bit of the leaf and manure
mixture to go on the compost pile!



Since deep
bedding’s benefits increase the older it gets, I didn’t want to harvest
everything or I would have been back at ground zero.  So I just
used a pitchfork to remove the top four inches, adding fresh leaves to
cover up what was left behind.



The wheelbarrow full of
litter didn’t look decomposed enough to put on the garden, so I wheeled
it to an out of the way spot to finish decomposing.  I’ll let you
know how it looks at the end of the summer, at which point I hope to
have some of the world’s best compost.