Author: Anna & Mark

Speaking of things
I was wrong about,
here’s another example — mowing the chicken
pastures.  Last
spring, Mark took a look in my pastures, saw the grass shooting up
toward the sky, then pulled out the lawn mower.



“Wait, honey!” I
begged.  “Don’t mow their grass!  I want the chickens to eat
it.”



Fast forward ahead a few
weeks, and the plants
were hitting the bloom stage, becoming too woody for
delicate chicken stomachs to digest.  We ended up with
unproductive pastures that summer because I let the grass go to seed,
which slowed its growth to a standstill.



So, this year, I changed my
tune and begged Mark to mow the pastures.  (He also cut out some
stumps and dug up some dock to make the mowing go more smoothly.) 
My new plan is to mow each pasture as soon as the chickens leave,
cutting back the plants the flock didn’t like as much (which would
otherwise be encouraged by being ignored by chicken beaks).  If
necessary, I’ll mow some pastures twice between visits, but I hope to
be able to simply rotate the flock quickly enough that they’ll always
be on tender new grass with one mowing per rotation.



Meanwhile, it looks like
I should take Mark’s other pasture concerns to heart since he seems to
have more of an eye for chicken pasture management than I do.  The
fences are already becoming overgrown with Japanese honeysuckle, which
provides a safe spot for chickens to hide in but looks like it will
tear our chicken wire down in just a few years.  Any ideas for
honeysuckle removal other than ripping it out by hand?  Even more
important — ideas on keeping the invasive away?

I read one last book on
pasturing to finish up the year’s chicken book
learning before
delving into the “lab” portion of my self-made chicken pasturing
course.  All Flesh
is Grass taught me
more than I thought it would due to its handy focus on smaller acreages.



In addition to his fencing
tips, Gene Logsdon
provides plenty of ideas for plant guilds that provide year-round
pasture:

• Spring
  and fall pasture is the easy part, with bluegrass and white clover
  as his main recommendations.
• Summer
  pasture favorites include perennial legumes, but Logsdon presents
  some less common alternatives as well.
• Winter
  pasture is trickier, with possibilities ranging from stockpiled
  grass and fescue that grows even in the cold weather to annual
  plantings of roots like turnips.

Like all of the other
pasture books I’ve read, All Flesh
is Grass doesn’t
really cater to a chicken audience, but pastured poultry afficianados
will probably find at least a few tips to streamline their operation.