Author: Anna & Mark

Last year, I concluded
that seeding
new species into a chicken pasture doesn’t work unless you can keep the
flock out of that pasture for several months.  Chickens love tender
new growth, and they’ll happily peck up baby clover and grass plants
before they get established.  So I’m continuing to set aside
Chicken Pasture 6 in 2013 in hopes of establishing a good colony of
clover.



To back up, we fenced
this pasture in 2011, but by the middle of the summer we discovered
that the plants coming up in the trees’ shade weren’t able to handle
much grazing.  By the beginning of 2012, the ground was pretty
much bare, so I seeded buckwheat followed by oilseed
radishes to improve
the soil.  This winter, I let our flock eat up the oilseed
radishes, and by early February the ground was once again bare and
ready for clover planting.

Although we can get
white and red clover seeds more cheaply at our local feed store, I
opted to try out some fancy varieties purchased online.  This
mixture of New Zealand White Clover and Strawberry Clover is supposed
to be low-lying and good in orchards, able to deal with shade and/or
sun.  The recommended seeding rate is a bit high for clover (20 to
25 pounds per acre), so I scattered the entire pound of seed in our
twentieth of an acre pasture.

After giving the pasture
the rest of the year off, I’m hopeful we’ll have a delectable stand of
clover for the chickens to start grazing in 2014.  I’d like to do
the same in two other pastures, but I’ve got to weigh the benefits of
food now versus food later, so it seems to make sense to take one spot
at a time.

Meanwhile, isn’t this
the most beautiful stick you’ve ever seen?  Lichen and moss atop
lichen atop bark….

Mark and I are about 50%
decided to finally branch out into new livestock this year. 
Long-time readers will know I’ve seriously considered dairy goats and sheep, but pigs just have a lot
going for them as starter livestock for our farm.  Most
importantly, I remember seeing hand-lettered signs on the bulletin
board in our local post office last spring about weanling pigs for
sale, which means we could buy a couple of piglets, raise them as
“broilers” and then put them in the freezer in the fall.  Another
bonus is that we’d need to do a lot of ripping up perennials to turn
any new areas into pasture, and pigs are really good at ripping things
up.  Even though there would definitely be a learning curve,
fattening two pigs would be a low-enough-risk proposition that it got
the Mark seal of approval.



The
big question in my mind is — what’s the best way to mix pigs and
chickens?  Some books would have you believe that you can’t let
chickens wander into the pig pen or the hogs will scarf down their
feathered friends.  On the other hand, free range pigs seem to be
healthy and happy enough that they don’t need to hunt chickens, as the
beautiful photos on the Sugar Mountain Farm Blog (a couple of which I’ve
stolen for this post) attest.  The author of the blog actually
lets his chickens go wherever they want and doesn’t feed them anything
through the summer months since there’s so much excess food around the
pigs.



The deciding factor in
whether 2013 will be the year of the pig is transportation.  Mark
and I just don’t like electric fencing, and I’ve saved enough cash to
fence in a third of an acre in cattle panels.  But since our truck
had to go to the crusher last year and our golf cart got damaged by a
flood in January, we’re a bit stuck on how we’d get heavy cattle panels
from the store to our parking area and then from the parking area a
third of a mile through the woods to our pasture.  Something may
materialize in the next couple of months, and if not, I’m content with
waiting for next year, although I’d rather not put off new livestock
until the real Year of the Pig in 2019.