Looking ahead to 2013 chicken experiments
Despite
spending two weeks regaling you with the highlights of the 2012 chicken
season, there's still plenty to experiment with in 2013. I'm not
sure if we'll get to it next year, but Mark and I both feel our
coops are due for an upgrade
to match our specific needs. (This is really more for the sake of
the chicken-keepers --- our flock is extremely flexible and the birds
are quite happy as-is.)
Similarly, we want to
lick the Lucy-cutting-through-the-pasture problem. As Mark
mentioned, our dog
door in the pasture
had growing
pains and needs an
upgrade to keep me from having to chase chickens out of the garden in
the summer.
Of course, the most
interesting experiments (in my opinion) always have to do with
plants. Mark had the great idea of pollarding
our mulberry
so it stays bush-like, and using the 
cuttings to add a lot more
mulberries to our pasture. Meanwhile, I've got a bunch of
seedling American persimmons I also want to add to the pasture, and
I hope to graft Asian persimmons onto the American rootstocks in
2014. (I've read that in cold climates, it's best to let the
American persimmon rootstock grow three or four feet tall before
grafting on the scionwood so that cold snaps close to the ground are
less likely to nip the tender Asian persimmon twigs.)
Meanwhile, I'm itching
to terrace
the steepest pasture,
plant comfrey as a soil-holder on the vertical faces, and seed cover
crops to start improving that problematic soil. The idea is to
prevent what's bound to be an erosion problem when chickens repeatedly
scratch bare spots on the sloped ground, and also pave the way for some
more trees and shrubs in the future.
I'll be posting on our
chicken blog as these new experiments go into place, and will be sure
to sum up here again in fall 2013. Thanks for reading!
| This post is part of our 2012 Chicken Experiments lunchtime series.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Ever thought of a combination of nut trees and black locusts for holding the soil in place? The nut trees, with their deep tap roots, would act as nails pinning the soil down, whereas the black locusts with their fairly flat roots would act as a fabric to hold the top of the soil in place. You will need two black locusts per nut tree, for fertility reasons. Mulberries would work nicely with this combination as well, in case you wanted to feed chickens along the way.
It's just a thought--in case you are looking for a more forested way to deal with a slope.
Dan --- This particular spot is a bit tricky in terms of trees since the powerline is above it, so I'm sticking to shrub-sized plants. Hazels are one of the ones I'm considering, but they aren't tap-rooted like the other nuts. Unfortunately, the only other short nut is almonds, which can't handle our Japanese beetles (and can barely handle our cold). Even black locusts are really too tall.
Chris and Brian --- I've got an interesting pair of guest posts coming up next week about comfrey, so hold off on making any orders until then! There are a lot more intricacies than even I was aware of, and seeds aren't likely to provide what you're looking for.