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livingontheland - Re: [Livingontheland] question for Harvey on "chicken power"

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  • From: Harvey Ussery <huboxwood@earthlink.net>
  • To: R_DQuay@compuserve.com, livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] question for Harvey on "chicken power"
  • Date: Sat, 20 Jan 2007 17:05:55 -0500

Harvey - A year ago you wrote about using chickens to incorporate rye in
the spring. How "grown up" is the rye at that point? What time of year is
"spring" to you (and what are you planting in the cleared ground)? I can
visualize the chickens decimating a bed of fairly tender rye plants, but
wonder how much biomass is actually produced underground by that point.
Thanks,
Dianne in soggy SC (if it would only rain like this in the summer)


Dianne, sorry I never got to responding, just found this at the bottom of the stack (have been insanely busy on big update to my website).

The basic answer to your questions is that, if you park chickens on a plot of ground (I use electronet, as I'm sure I originally mentioned), then they will eventually till in *whatever* cover there is, given enough time. "Whatever" includes tough established rye, sure. "Enough time": that's a function of the nature of the cover (tough estab'd rye being a diff proposition from tender young plants, as you observed), the nature of the soil (friable garden soil being tilled much sooner than a pasture sod), and population density (# of chooks per unit ground). So obviously no set formula can be given. But no cover will survive the assault of the chooks if given enough time--witness the state of any static chicken run: sooner or later (usually sooner), it is completely bare of every blade of grass, looks like the surface of the moon dotted w chicken poops.

"Spring" means really late winter/very early spring--i.e. final couple of weeks or so before putting in the first of the early crops. I'm talking about a garden area, so what I'm planting is "everything"--the early stuff like potatoes, onions, hardy greens, etc. first, warmer season stuff later.

You're right about not getting much biomass if the rye is little bitty plants, but I was talking about rye as a winter cover planted the previous fall. So should be a lot more biomass.

This past fall I was more organized than ever before about getting in a cover crop soon as the last crop was off--I had *lots* of nice covers everywhere, what was where depended on the point in the season I was able to sow, but peas, grain grasses, crucifers, etc. Then in mid-winter I put the chooks (and a few waterfowl) onto both garden plots w their lovely covers, confined w a long, wandering electronet. Once the birds had taken off the covers, I rolled out mulch hay (big round bales of spoiled hay), and now the birds are happily working that mulch. It's a beautiful system for keeping the birds outdoors in the winter rather than confined, keeping access to live animal foods for them (mulch keeps ground from freezing, hence access to worms & slugs etc. underneath), an abundance of finely-shredded mulch for use in garden come spring, on and on. I'm excited about it. Will put up more about these experiments with the update of the website soon. Also, some of this will be covered in an article I'm writing for the April/May issue of Backyard Poultry.

BTW, I've been putting the chooks on the garden before the beginning of the garden season for years now, and they decimate the slug population so thoroughly they take several months before getting to problematic levels again. Also, the birds eat a lot of weed seeds, so help with weed control as well.

~Harvey in northern VA
www.themodernhomestead.us




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