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  • From: Permacltur@aol.com
  • To: permawest@olywa.net, owner-permaculture@envirolink.org, permaculture@envirolink.org
  • Subject: Re: Fowl forage more recollections
  • Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 12:51:48 EDT

First Kirk, why don't you share what you have learned, too. OK?

Forage is a word with out a lot of specificity. While as a verb it
seems to have meant to cast about looking for something to eat, or looking
for something of value, people use it nowadays to refer to food brought to
animals too. I was just reading last night about amaranth being peletized as
feed for sheep. They must be crippled sheep, not able to walk out into the
amaranth, eh?
Well, yesterday I had an intermediate situation, where I had a stack
of sabal palm fronds and petioles (some attached, some not) "curing" to go
through the shredder and become chicken littler. This palm is very tough,
and will strangle my little home shredder in short order when green. As I
unpacked an shredded dried palms, I disturbed hordes of palmetto bugs. Right
away I called the chickens. They were a little hesitant because the
shredder makes an awful noise and the plam frond with petiole looks something
like the net I use tocatch them sometimes. They hate that. But a few of the
hens really trust me (probably the ones I'll stew next :-) ), and they came
over to check out what was happening. After one experience, they came running
when I started the shredder in a new place. Chickens aren't stupid. They
are just focussed on food.
Well, Mister Big (our head rooster) wasn't going to hold back and let
a couple of hens show him up so he edged over and spotted the bugs and called
over the rest of the hens who were hanging around with him that day. They
ate at least hundreds, if not thousands of the giant cockroaches. Yum! Some
of them (the palmetto bugs) were so big the chickens hand to peck them to
pieces to eat them. (These are chickens that routinely eat frogs and lizards
and sometimes small snakes. No going barefoot around them!)
This reminded me o after harvest. The chickens seem to eat hardly
any grain in deep mulch and they really excavate. I never did have enough to
have a whole chicken yard of deep mulch, but I think that the invertebrates
that would be produced would keep the chickens well supplied with animal
protein.
And that brings to mind the chicken yard where I kept one particular
flock when I wanted vegetables, not chickens, in the mulched garden. I used
the old trick of planting comfrey around the edge of the poultry netting,
about six inches from the edge or more. The chickens ate about 1/2 of each
plant in a semicircle, leaving the center bud and the leaves they couldn't
reach. I can't say how much of this they ate, but the part they didn't eat
got pretty big. People say chickens won't eat comfrey unless you cut it for
them--that's nonsense.
Another thing that that era brings to mind is chickens eating blood.
When I slaughtered a steer, I didn't have time and patience to save the blood
for sausage, though I dearly love blood sausange. I did the entire job and
the rest of the homestead alone and for most of those years had my kids
living with me 5 days a week too. However the blood tended to coagulate on
top of the ground and the chickens ate every speck of it. they even ate
some of the blood-soaked dirt. Pretty fast turn around, I think, backinto
the food chain as eggs. I tried to lure my present flock over to where I
slaughted my steer this winter, but they were "flighty" and didn't come over.
It iwas a period of heavy predator activity and the tree I strung hung him
on was a ways from their usual area. This has to be a factor of where the
tree that is the right shape and size grows, of course.
I' ve often fed chickens fish -- large ones smashed up a bit to give
them the idea to rip them apart and small ones caught in a minnow trap. It
helps to have a few ducks as a chicken only has to see a duck hold a fish by
the head and swallow once to get the idea. Otherwise, they peck it to death
first and bust it up into pieces when they could just toss their heads back
and let it slide down. I've fed chickens rabbit and squirrel guts, too, and
cooked racoons for them, getting that river to run uphill. I've slit open
snakes that drowned in minnow traps so the chickens could eat them. They
leave the skin entire and just eat the guts and flesh, so it is one wayi to
clean a snake skin. I cut the heads off poisonous snakes first.
Chickens eat palm hearts, of course, and freshly cut palm logs
attract certain beetles to the cut surface. The chickens eat those. I use
the chickens to make planters out of the top of the palm. I cut a section
out maybe 6 inches below the bud and six inches above. They peck out every
bit of the heart and leave a flower pot with a weighted base. There is
something about sabal palm that stimulates plant growth and this makes a
great flower pot that you can set right in the ground when it starts to break
up after a year or two and the plants grow right through it.
Associated with forage, I use the chicken kick-down phenomenon, so
named by Bill M., to mulch my bamboo windbreak plantings. These happen to
run more or less on contour. Our oak trees forever drop dead branches and I
pile these and their brush up on the downhillside of the bamboo planting.
The chickens kick the natural mulch from the oaks down and the brush and
branches trap it. I also put brush around the bamboo on all sides to
minimize scratching there. I don't want the chickens to knock off my shoots
before they get tough. We have just had the bamboo in for a few years and we
are keeping phenological records, including shooting dates. So before too
many years, I'll know when to put fresh protection around the bamboo to
protect it from chickens. Chickens don't eat bamboo leaves (at least on the
three genera we have), but I think it will be all over if they learn to eat
the shoots.
Ok, one silly one and that will have to do. Our chicken coop door
is hollow. The ubiquitous palmetto bugs like to live in the door during the
day and come out at night to feast on undigested bits in the chicken litter.
I have learned that if I whack the door, the present crop of bugs falls out
the bottom. The chickens now line up when I open that door and wait for me
to whack it to feed them. If they happen to be at the far end of their yard
(They have a HUGE yard, sort of a private jungle), they come running when
they hear the whacking noise. They seem to be able to hear the sound of
cracked corn in a tin can for about a quarter mile,too.

For Mother Earth, Dan Hemenway, Yankee Permaculture Publications (since
1982), Elfin Permaculture workshops, lectures, Permaculture Design Courses,
consulting and permaculture designs (since 1981), and annual correspondence
courses via email. Copyright, 1998, Dan & Cynthia Hemenway, P.O. Box 52,
Sparr FL 32192 USA Internships. YankeePerm@aol.com

We don't have time to rush.

A list by topic of all Yankee Permaculture titles may be found at
http://csf.colorado.edu/perma/ypc_catalog.html
Elfin Permaculture programs are listed at the Eastern Permaculture Teachers
assn home page: http://home.ptd.net/~artrod/epta/eptahmp.html



  • Re: Fowl forage more recollections, Permacltur, 06/04/1999

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