Author: Anna & Mark

After two weeks on their
first
spring pasture, we rotated our flock onto a new area. Their old pasture
was still quite well vegetated, but after a week I started to notice
the chickens eating grass, which I figure means they ran out of the
good stuff.  Time for my favorite part of chicken pasturing —
watching
to see what the flock flocks to on new ground!



Chickweed remained a favorite, but two
new plants made an appearance on
the top of our chicken taste test list — red clover and
fleabane.  I’ve read that some people plant white clover in their
chicken pastures, but our chickens had a choice between red and white
clover and demolished the red while ignoring the white, so I think I’ll
change my clover planting plans.  Our rooster was especially
interested in a young fleabane rosette and in picking violet flowers
— he thinks everything might be food, though, so I’d take those
preferences with a
grain of salt.  The ladies followed his lead to pick at the
fleabane, but didn’t seem nearly as interested in the weed as they were
in that red
clover.



I’ve noticed in both pastures
that spots which had been home to the
annual (and invasive) Japanese stiltgrass and thus had a grassy mulch
with no living plants make good scratching spots to hunt for
invertebrates.  I’m not suggesting that anyone plant Japanese
stiltgrass in their pasture, but I think we can mimic this effect by
letting the chickens degrade a pasture to the point where there are
some bare patches before moving them on.  Of course, accumulations
of leaves at the edge of the pasture were also quickly scratched over.



I plan to keep the chickens
in this new pasture about two weeks, just
like I did on the last pasture, and then hopefully rotate them to a
third pasture if we’ve got it fenced in time.  This second pasture
is in a shadier spot and has more weeds than grass, which looks less
lush to the human eye but I suspect will be tastier to the chicken
beak.  I probably should consider cutting back our ladies’ rations
to compensate for all of the forage they’re currently getting — our
hens are starting to look fat and their crops are always bulging full.

As soon as the chickens moved
on to their new, sunny pasture, I got to work improving their
old pasture. 
The flock had scratched the ground relatively bare over the winter, and
I had also used it as a spot to toss compostables, weeds from the
garden, and tree prunings, so it needed a bit of work.  The
chickens ate everything tasty out of my compost piles and spread the
rest out over the ground (adding in some droppings to expedite
composting), so I
raked the remaining debris up into two woody compost piles (for
long-term composting) and two normal compost piles.



Several large branches had
fallen out of the wild cherry in the middle of the pasture, and I used
these to shore up the sloped part of the pasture.  Chicken
scratching plus hillsides equals erosion, and I wanted to be sure to
hold all that soil into place.  I spread a healthy dose of white
clover seeds across bare patches on the sloping land in hopes of
creating a solid groundcover that can stand up to later chicken abuse,
adding in a bit of oat seeds on a whim.



The flat part of the pasture
will be a new grain/legume paddock this year, so I planted about a
third of it in oats and another third in field peas.  The last
third is going to be bare until the frost-free date, at which time I
plan to plant it (and probably the field pea section if the plants are
mature by then) with amaranth, millet, field corn, cowpeas, and
sunflowers.  Come fall, I’ll seed the paddock once again with
winter wheat.

Meanwhile, our first
pasture has been home to wheat since November, and the grass-like
leaves are finally starting to grow again.  A heavy covering of
snow over the pasture for half of the winter tempted moles to come in
and dig around, uprooting wheat in several areas.  I’ll be excited
to see how the remaining wheat pans out over this summer, and will
replace it with rye in the fall.



These two pastures are
our grain paddocks, meant to grow some of the chickens’ feed for the
winter months when insects are hibernating.  But I may still run
the chickens through the pastures in August or September when the
grains have grown up over their heads and the chickens can do little
damage.