Unleashing the Chickens!

The chickens have just spent most of the spring and summer cooped up so to speak.  They live in an enclosed pen with an attached hen house.  I cover the top in the summer to provide shade, but the lower section is open to the elements.  The idea with this pen was that it would be mobile, but it takes two people to move it, so it has become a stationary pen which is not ideal.  I would have liked to pasture them, but unfortunately my yard looked like anything but a pasture when I moved in.  I have attempted to plant some dry land pasture mix but it has come up patchy.  Maybe I can try again next year to see if I can make my yard more pasture like.

The rest of my yard has become garden space which is kinda like a chicken smorgasbord.  This is the other reason I kept the chickens in a pen during the growing season.  It would have been nice for them to do bug patrol duty in the summer, but they would have eaten everything they could get their little beaks on which includes my veggie supply.  Instead they got the gleanings from my harvests: the giant zucchinis and cucumbers that got away, the blemished tomatoes, the ends of beans and peas that were destined for the freezer.  Just because I didn't want the chickens to run amok in the garden didn't mean that they didn't get a fair share of it's produce.

Now that the garden has died back for the winter the time has come to let the chickens do their part to fertilize and till the surface of my garden beds.  The days that I am home and available to "supervise" I open the door to their pen and let them roam around the house and garden.  They mostly stay in the yard for now, but as I continue to clean up the yard, they will have less to scratch and peck at, so I imagine their boundaries will change by the end of winter.  There are still some crops out in the garden that I don't want them to get into, so a simple barrier like a plastic sheet protects my potatoes until I can harvest them.  After I plant my garlic I will cover that bed with a chicken wire hoop to keep the chickens out of it.  I will probably also plant a bed of spinach that will get covered with a low plastic hoop tunnel which should be a nice supply of winter greens for me and the chickens.

The chickens are loving their new found freedom and have been busily cleaning up the yard in their own way.  Since the season is new for them there is plenty of things for them to graze on in the yard and my feeding costs have decreased a bit while their diet has improved.  I have noticed that the yolks of their eggs are a richer orange since they have been doing more foraging, so moving towards pasturing them is definitely on my list.  Having happy chickens is the best way to get tasty healthy eggs for my own diet.