Spring planting in the grain paddock

As soon as the chickens moved on to their new, sunny pasture, I got to work improving their old pasture.  The flock had scratched the ground relatively bare over the winter, and I had also used it as a spot to toss compostables, weeds from the garden, and tree prunings, so it needed a bit of work.  The chickens ate everything tasty out of my compost piles and spread the rest out over the ground (adding in some droppings to expedite composting), so I raked the remaining debris up into two woody compost piles (for long-term composting) and two normal compost piles.

Several large branches had fallen out of the wild cherry in the middle of the pasture, and I used these to shore up the sloped part of the pasture.  Chicken scratching plus hillsides equals erosion, and I wanted to be sure to hold all that soil into place.  I spread a healthy dose of white clover seeds across bare patches on the sloping land in hopes of creating a solid groundcover that can stand up to later chicken abuse, adding in a bit of oat seeds on a whim.

The flat part of the pasture will be a new grain/legume paddock this year, so I planted about a third of it in oats and another third in field peas.  The last third is going to be bare until the frost-free date, at which time I plan to plant it (and probably the field pea section if the plants are mature by then) with amaranth, millet, field corn, cowpeas, and sunflowers.  Come fall, I'll seed the paddock once again with winter wheat.

Meanwhile, our first pasture has been home to wheat since November, and the grass-like leaves are finally starting to grow again.  A heavy covering of snow over the pasture for half of the winter tempted moles to come in and dig around, uprooting wheat in several areas.  I'll be excited to see how the remaining wheat pans out over this summer, and will replace it with rye in the fall.

These two pastures are our grain paddocks, meant to grow some of the chickens' feed for the winter months when insects are hibernating.  But I may still run the chickens through the pastures in August or September when the grains have grown up over their heads and the chickens can do little damage.