People
seem to have such an easy time turning their chicken run into a
moonscape, but it's been a struggle around here. We started our
chickens out on an 800
square foot pasture full of weeds, planning to have the birds
denude the ground so that I could plant some grains while moving the
flock to another paddock. Over a month later, the pasture was
still quite green, so we chopped off two-thirds of the area and let the
chickens continue to graze on the small portion remaining.
Three more weeks passed,
in which our cockerels did a little work on the pasture, but mostly
entertained themselves eating up the wheelbarrow loads of garden weeds
I tossed into their enclosure nearly daily. So Mark and I took
some time to root out the perennials 
with
a shovel --- goldenrod, deertongue (a native grass), young trees, and
poison ivy all bit the dust. Finally, the ground is beginning to
look bare.
I want the chickens to
continue to eat up any new sprouts for another week or so, then we'll
rotate them into the other two-thirds of their original pasture.
The mother
hen and her chick
have been having so much fun in there that they barely eat any
storebought feed.
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