Forest pasture experiment, phase 1

Our forest pasture experiment has finally begun!  Mark finished up the first pasture on Friday and let out our cockerels to poke around.  We plan to let them eat this pasture down to bare earth, then rotate them into a pasture on the hillside.  Once the chickens have moved on, we'll sow a combination of clover and buckwheat in the first pasture to prepare the ground for a do-nothing grain rotation.  When the buckwheat is ripe in the fall, we'll rotate the broilers back into the grain pasture to fatten them up for slaughter.

Although they're not built yet, we plan to have two additional pastures on the hillside.  We'll rotate the chickens between these two pastures at intervals, making sure that they never stay in one paddock long enough to kill all the plants.  We're not quite sure how big these two pastures will have to be, yet --- hopefully, we'll figure that out over the next few weeks as we see how long it takes the cockerels to scratch up their first pasture.

Rotation will be pretty simple since the coop is at the junction of the three pastures and has a door opening into each one.  At night, we can close the chickens in the coop, then open up whichever door we please to let them into a new pasture the next morning.

Meanwhile, we're putting in some perennials so that the pasture will provide even more chicken feed in the years to come.  An Illinois everbearing mulberry is supposed to provide all of the food a flock of chickens needs for two or three months in the summer; ours should start bearing in a couple of years.  We also planted two Nanking cherries and an unidentified bush cherry to provide more summer fruit.

We'll continue to feed our chickens while they're on pasture until I work the kinks out of our plan --- I certainly don't want them to be malnourished.  But hopefully the access to greenery and bugs will start cutting back on our feed costs.