Chickens in the ragweed forest

The photos above and below show what chicken pasture 2 currently looks like --- a nearly impenetrable thicket of five to eight foot tall ragweed.  This is what you get when chickens eat the pasture bare over a long, cold winter, and none of your spring plantings take.

Honeybees love ragweed pollen, but can chickens get anything out of the weeds?  Our six week old golden comet cross and cuckoo marans have just about eaten the ground bare underneath the towering ragweed.  Here's what the pasture looked like at the beginning of June:

...and here's the same patch of earth a month later:

The whole pasture isn't this barren --- this is the area right outside the coop door where the flock hangs out the most.  But the flaws of the ragweed forest are all too apparent.  The woody ragweed stems are useless for chickens, and the flock can't reach the leaves more than a foot off the ground.  Meanwhile, ragweed's shade keeps most other plants from growing, but doesn't produce the leaf litter full of bugs that makes the real forest so appealing to chickens.

The only really definitive way of telling the quality of the ragweed pasture compared to our other pastures is to look at how much feed it takes to keep the flock growing.  Unfortunately, this is our only flock of cuckoo marans, and these heavier birds are likely to just eat more than our australorps in general, so it would be an apples to oranges comparison.  Still, my gut says the ragweed isn't really helping, so I'll probably let some of it bloom and then cut it all down before the ragweed goes to seed.

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