Lately I've come to appreciate the chickens for a whole new reason! But first, a confession. Even though we have ten acres of land, our chickens aren't free-range. Between the coyotes that prowl at night and our chickens natural desire to scratch the ground in my flower/vegetable/herb beds (destroying young shoots and displacing yards of garden soil), we've chosen to keep them penned. The pen is very large and gives them all the wandering space they could want. The one thing they miss, in late summer and fall, is green stuff to eat and scratch. You see, despite the enormity of their pen, they manage to eat/kill anything green by mid-summer. So this year, I'm using that to my advantage!
I'm a busy person, and I hate gardening in the heat of summer, so by late-summer and early-fall, there are weeds in my garden beds. Lots of weeds. Tall weeds. Weeds with seed-heads just waiting to burst. And quackgrass...seemingly everywhere! Quackgrass and seedy-weeds are not things that one should compost or till back into the soil! Quackgrass, they say, will re-grow from a piece of root less than 2 inches long. Weed seed-heads each have close to a bazillion seeds in them, just waiting to spend the winter under a blanket of snow and then populate my beds in the spring! My solution? Feed the weeds to the chickens!
