Author: Anna & Mark

Earlier this week, I wrote
about Bill
Mollison’s tips on designing a forest pasture that produces as much
food as possible for your chickens.  But that’s not all he
had to say about poultry.  Mollison also provided a rundown
on other types of birds you might consider adding to your
homestead for specific purposes.



Pigeons/Doves.  I was intrigued
when I read a
recent blog post
about using pigeons as a way to bring much-needed nutrients from
the surrounding landscape to a concentrated location on your
farm.  The dream is that you can train your pigeons to
consider a dovecote their home, then let them loose every day to
forage for seeds on their own so you don’t have to feed
them.  At intervals, you harvest the squabs (partially grown
chicks) and manure.  This does sound like an intriguing idea,
but I have reservations.  What’s to stop the pigeons from
eating all of the seeds in your garden? We can handle the few
cardinals and song sparrows who eat our seeds and berries, but I
definitely wouldn’t want to add to their population.  And
would it really be worth it to pluck squabs for that small amount
of meat?  I’m waiting to see Milkwood implement the idea
before jumping on the pigeon bandwagon.



Quail.  I’ve read bits
and pieces about quail (especially Japanese quail, aka coturnix)
from time to time, but all of the sources I’d read about were
raising the birds in confinement, which doesn’t interest me. 
Mollison notes that quail are small and insectivorous enough that
they can often be allowed to run free in a vegetable garden
without causing damage (and, presumably, without requiring much or
any storebought feed).  Again, I’d like to see some firsthand
data from someone before risking my beloved garden, but the
potential for free eggs and meat is hard to ignore.



Ducks.  Ducks are less
likely than chickens to cause damage in a vegetable garden, but
will still eat tender plants and squash seedlings under their big
feet.  On the other hand, they eat insects, slugs, and
snails, and some duck varieties are reputed to lay as well as or
better than chickens.  I could see raising a batch of ducks
just to eat up slugs before planting your main crop vegetable
garden in the spring.



Geese.  As Harvey
Ussery noted,
geese can be trained to weed certain kinds of gardens, although
they will eat ripening fruit and can squish plants with their feet
just like ducks do.  Geese are the most herbivorous of the
commonly-raised poultry species, so they can get a lot more value
out of pasture than chickens do, turning grass into eggs and meat.



I’d be curious to
hear from readers who raise any of these less-common types of
birds in complex, permaculture systems.  Have you found a way
to integrate them into your homestead without damaging your
garden?

Bill
Mollison’s Introduction to Permaculture is one of the few texts
I’ve read that includes in-depth information on developing a
high-yield forest
pasture rather
than simply grazing
animals under existing trees.  Mollison describes a rotational
pasture
arrangement that we may try to replicate around our new starplate
coop, and which
I’ve diagrammed above.  Basically, fencelines are doubled,
which turns them into protection for useful trees and shrubs while
the perennials are getting established.  Mollison shows trees
encircling his whole arrangement, but I think I might just double
the cross-fences to protect trees, and perhaps eventually make
hedges along the outside fencelines.

Mollison assumes
you’ll be grazing several different kinds of animals in your
pasture, which we may eventually work up to.  In his vision,
chickens are allowed to run through the moat areas nearly from the
beginning, but larger livestock are kept out until the trees are
at least four or five years old (or potentially forever).  As
the trees mature, they arch out over the pasture, providing shade
and dropping their fruits and seeds into areas all livestock can
reach.  During times of drought when grasses aren’t growing,
you can also cut and toss young willow and poplar branches from
the protected moats to goats and sheep to provide fresh feed.



Another innovation of
Mollison’s pasture design is the strawyard around the coop or main
animal shed.  This is a high-traffic area, and it tends to
become bare in permanent rotational pastures, so it would be worth
considering mulching this zone to provide invertebrates for
chickens to scratch up and to prevent erosion and mud.  If
you don’t have a
forest to give your chickens a winter pasture, you could
potentially keep them in the strawyard during cold weather (or during overgrazed periods
throughout the summer) to prevent damage to the main pastures.



I suspect the hardest
part of this design for me wouldn’t be the extra work and expense
required to make the fenced moats.  Instead, it would be
choosing livestock-friendly trees and shrubs for the moats rather
than turning those zones into intensively-grown human food. 
Mollison’s top suggestions for temperate-area poultry fodder
plants include: mulberries, gojiberries (won’t fruit for us, but
maybe will for you), elderberries, black locust, serviceberry,
hawthorn, and autumn olive (beware — a bad invasive
here!).  We already have several black locusts that we
carefully cleared around in that pasture, and I’m rooting half a
dozen or more mulberries, so we’ve got a good start in that
direction.