Author: Anna & Mark

Keeping a dog out of the chicken pasture

June 11, 2010 Posts No Comments
Chickens looking out a hole in the fence

Zareba K9 electric fence chargerSeveral
people warned us that a five foot high fence around our forest pasture would not be sufficient to
keep the chickens inside.  Other people worried that aerial
predators would swoop down and pick off our birds.  It turns out
that neither problem materialized, but we did end up having a fencing
issue — Lucy.



We’ve been throwing all
of our food scraps into the forest pasture, and food scraps are our dog
Lucy’s primary failing.  Try as we might, we can’t seem to teach
her that food of any sort is off limits.  She wanders through the
garden picking strawberries, peas, raspberries, and tomatoes, and if we
don’t put the trash safely in the barn we’ll find a ripped open bag
strewn across the yard.  So we shouldn’t have been surprised that
no amount of training was able to get across the message that food
scraps in the chicken pasture were off limits.  A few hours after
I tossed the scraps in, I’d come back and see that Lucy had broken a
hole in the chicken wire and eaten up the scraps, letting the flock out
in the process.



Mark solved this problem
with a Zareba
K9 electric fence charger.  The device was
absolutely perfect for our needs, with a low voltage so I don’t feel so
bad about zapping our beloved pet, and with no need for a grounding
rod.  Mark hooked up the charger on a wire about six inches off
the ground around the perimeter of the pasture, I threw in some scraps,
and we waited to see what happened.  When Lucy’s nose hit the
wire, she jumped backwards so fast it seemed to break the laws of
physics.


Lucy and the electric fence

I don’t know for sure,
but I suspect Lucy might have been zapped again later on a second part
of the fence, because now she keeps at least eight feet of distance
between herself and the chicken pasture at all times.  The weeds
have grown up to touch the wire and we haven’t bothered to cut them
back because I’m pretty sure the problem has been solved for good.


Our homemade chicken
waterer solves
another problem — drinking water filled with poop.

Gene Logsdon on chicken forest pastures

June 9, 2010 Posts No Comments

Small-Scale Grain RaisingGene
Logsdon, author of Small-Scale
Grain Raising,
posted on his blog last week about
a farmer who sold a large crop of grain and used the same money to buy
a much smaller amount of processed chicken feed.  Logsdon wrote:


I
have kept hens for over 30 years now, feeding them almost completely
on whole corn and wheat.  I could probably get a few more eggs if
I fed
commercial mash with all the supplements and vitamins that are supposed
to be in it but I’m confident that the extra eggs would have been just
about enough to pay for the extra cost of the purchased feed.



Since this concept is
right up my alley, I asked him for more information.  He explained
that his current flock of 12 laying hens and a rooster “range over
about an acre of woodland and a bit of pasture and some lawn.”  He
supplements their diet with about four ears of whole corn or a quart of
wheat every day, increasing the amount a bit in the winter and
providing oyster shell at all times.  Since we feed our chickens
about a cup apiece of processed feed per day, he’s cutting back his
feed by two thirds with his forest pasture.



On the other hand,
Logsdon does feed his meat birds commercial feed to “get them fattened
in a hurry and out of here.”  This bit of data makes me think that
my current forest pasture experiment is a bit too ambitious for phase
1.  I think our next incarnation will involve our layers on
pasture, and our broilers in tractors on commerical feed.



For those keeping track
of good
foraging chicken varieties at home, Logsdon and a
commenter suggested these breeds
— Rhode Island Reds, Buff Orphingtons, Golden Comets, Australorp,
Speckled Sessex, and bantams in general.


Our homemade chicken
waterer is perfect
for chicken tractors, forest pastures, and traditional coops.

Forest pasture moonscape

June 7, 2010 Posts 2 Comments

Chickens runningPeople
seem to have such an easy time turning their chicken run into a
moonscape, but it’s been a struggle around here.  We started our
chickens out on an 800
square foot pasture full of weeds, planning to have the birds
denude the ground so that I could plant some grains while moving the
flock to another paddock.  Over a month later, the pasture was
still quite green, so we chopped off two-thirds of the area and let the
chickens continue to graze on the small portion remaining.



Three more weeks passed,
in which our cockerels did a little work on the pasture, but mostly
entertained themselves eating up the wheelbarrow loads of garden weeds
I tossed into their enclosure nearly daily.  So Mark and I took
some time to root out the perennials White Cochin hen with Rhode Island Red chick on pasturewith
a shovel — goldenrod, deertongue (a native grass), young trees, and
poison ivy all bit the dust.  Finally, the ground is beginning to
look bare.



I want the chickens to
continue to eat up any new sprouts for another week or so, then we’ll
rotate them into the other two-thirds of their original pasture. 
The mother
hen and her chick
have been having so much fun in there that they barely eat any
storebought feed.


Our
homemade chicken
waterer keeps drinking water clean.