Everett’s
free range chickens are Buckeyes, so I felt him out about the breed’s
potential as foragers.  At first, Everett
told me that the
chickens were great foragers, but it turned out he meant they were
quite predator resistant — he hasn’t lost a chicken to the elements
yet, despite allowing them to roam free next door to the woods.



Upon further
questioning, I discovered that Everett feeds his
chickens about the same amount of laying feed every day that I feed
mine, in addition to scraps from the kitchen and all the bugs they can
catch.  He said that when he cut back their laying feed, egg
production plummeted, which tells me the Buckeyes are getting the
majority of their nutrition from the storebought grains.  I was
disappointed to have to scratch another breed off my list of potential
forest pasture scavengers.

I
spend a lot of time reading up on homesteading topics over the winter,
and this year I fell in love with buckwheat in the abstract.  But
as I experiment with the crop in real life, the scales are falling from
my eyes.  In our vegetable garden, buckwheat
failed as a cover crop
in our dense clay soil, and I’m not all that impressed with its
progress in the grain
half of the chicken pasture either.



I opted not to irrigate
in the forest pasture despite a moderately dry summer since I want to
eventually grow trouble-free crops that can be planted and then
forgotten about.  The buckwheat doesn’t enjoy this decision —
every afternoon the plants wilt and look very sad.  They bounce
back overnight, but the chicken pasture buckwheat’s growth is slower
than that of the later-planted buckwheat in the irrigated garden, even
though the chicken pasture soil is a well-drained loam enriched with
copious chicken manure.



Unfortunately, our old
field corn seed didn’t even come up, so our droopy buckwheat and some
beans are the only plants currently growing in the grain paddock. 
In retrospect, I wish I’d planted the whole area with oilseed
sunflowers — next
year!