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“ Nothing we can bribe in a provender bag can couple the breadth and deepness of nutrition to be discovered mightily at home . ” — Harvey Ussery
run your lot naturally comes with a variety of welfare , from boosting fowl health to saving you money on feed bills . Resources that are readily available at your farm or homestead , like fresh greens , are the pure innate and alimentary meal for your fowl flock .
The pursual is an excerption fromThe little - scurf Poultry Flock : Revised EditionbyHarvey Ussery . It has been adapted for the WWW .
Comfrey grazed by chickens.
Unless otherwise noted , all photographs copyright © 2022 by Harvey Ussery . boast image courtesy of Bonnie Long .
Feeding Your Flock With Natural Resources
I think of my gran ’s flock as the model for natural Gallus gallus feeding . Her poulet were eating their three intellectual nourishment mathematical group , whose defining characteristic were that they were active and raw . Now reverberate as well : They eat almost completely from home resource . increase home feeding — decreased dependence on purchased feeds — is a possibility for every mess , wherever locate .
Why not start experiment now?I have heard from so many who have done so and who report : “ It works — I’m saving real money on provender invoice . ”
luckily , there are a the great unwashed of the three food group options on almost any homestead or little farm , and many room to combine natural feeding strategy . And who would have imagined that save money on feed bills could be so much play ?
Green Forages: Feeding Your Flock With Fresh Greens
happen ways to provide your flock brisk green plant , the first of their food group , daily . Best of all is keeping them on pastureland and other natural kitchen range with access to all three food group at once — even flocksters on small properties successfully “ grass ” their shuttle on their lawns .
Fertility Plants: Comfrey and Nettle
Comfrey grazed by chickens .
I grow comfrey and stinging nettle to feed the soil as mulches or composts , not only for their mineral content but because they are mellow in nitrogen and are speedily converted by soil and compost heap microbe . They can also be fed to poultry .
Both plant have a unsound reputation . Many gardeners fear comfrey as dispersive , pass around via millions of source , or invasive , spreading sharply via underground runners . In fact , it is neither . It set flowers — thus supporting pollinators — but does not make viable seeds .
And it does not spread — the first patch I institute has n’t move an inch in thirty years . But it surely is persistent — not surprising feed the reserves in its thick , fleshy origin , which farm 8 to 10 feet deep ( 2.5 to 3 m)—and will not move from where you choose to plant it without a serious fight.1
Propagating Comfrey and Nettle
Comfrey is kid ’s play to propagate — once a patch is well established , take crown cuttings and boom your plantings as much as you like . I either cut and carried it to my wad — geese and ducks especially lie with it — or contribute the birds direct but irregular admission to maculation of it plant in ranging areas .
Nettle , however , is both diffusive and incursive and therefore needs argus-eyed “ bailiwick ” to keep it in place . I cut it as presently as it started to blossom to prevent seed set , and cut it back at the edges of the patch when its roots got adventurous . Nettle is high in protein and mineral content .
Often in the summer I dried some comfrey and nettle “ hay ” for feeding in wintertime , crush and sprinkled over the bird ’ provender .
Cover Crops
I love turn screen crops . If you care fretsaw puzzle or chess , you will , too : Despite the challenges to pulling it off — both in place ( a garden that is at the same time used to grow solid food crop ) and in time ( all four seasons)—maximizing cover cropping year - round brings so many improvement to soil fecundity and grain that no chance to lift in a cover crop should be miss .
Fortunately , cover crops can do twofold tariff as dark-green feeds for the plenty . We can cut the greenery to carry to the flock — it rapidly regrows — or let the chickens till in the flora as they dine .
Note that I no longer bother grow fall cruciferous plant — mustards , wintertime Japanese radish , raab , kale , rape , Brassica rapa — as disjoined garden crops : I just seed them as fall covert crops , and there ’s a gracious raft for everybody — the soil food web , our poultry , and us .
Weeds
Mixed blanket crop , haute cuisine for a mixed mountain . Photo courtesy of Bonnie Long .
gage may annoy gardener and landscape gardener find out that nothing grow on their space they did n’t plant , butmany wild plants with a mind of their own make worthful contribution to pile nutrition ; and some ( blowball , lamb’s - tail , nettle , burdock , yellow sour grass ) are higher in protein than Medicago sativa . domestic fowl enjoy them all .
Take blowball , toward whose demise millions of dollar are dedicated every class but so nutritious as a falsify or salad green that herbalist extol it as superfood and medicative .
In addition , it is a active accumulator : Its taproot grows into the cryptic subsoil and mine it of minerals , peculiarly calcium , which it makes available to more shallow - rooted plants.(Both the birthrate works discuss on the previous Sir Frederick Handley Page — comfrey and nettle — are also dynamic accumulator . )
Things to Consider With Weeds
Of course , such friends may not be every bit welcome in all parts of the garden , plantation , and landscape painting , so remember that weeding chores can supply worthful green fodder for the flock . The most useful gage where you live will vary . The few that are toxic vary as well , so familiarise yourself with ones that could be hazards for domestic fowl where you experience .
example of toxic plants are castor bean ( Ricinus communis ) , milkweed ( Asclepias spp . ) , green berries of nightshade ( genus Solanum nigrum ) , oleander ( Nerium Nerium oleander ) , jimsonweed ( Datura stramonium ) , pokeberries ( berry of Phytolacca americana ) , and yew ( Taxus spp.).Such plants are rarely a real threat to chicken , however — most they avoid instinctively .
Note that in some cases it is not the flora that is the scourge but the mature seeds . For exemplar , hairy vetch ( Vicia villosa ) is an excellent N - fixing cover craw and its foliage is edible for poultry , but remember that its seeds are toxic . Chickens are unlikely to eat on common thorn apple but may wipe out its seed . Seeds of both plants have been implicated in genuine poisonings of poultry .
Feeding Your Flock With Edible Weeds
Once you ’ve identify the toxic industrial plant to look out for , feel free to experiment with harvests from weeding atoxic species . locoweed motley in mineral content , so the wider the reach of weeds available to the dame , the more likely their mineral inlet will be in symmetricalness .
In most temperate areas , the following palatable weeds should be coarse . Many of them make fine citizenry food as well .
Grass Clippings
If your site prohibits contribute the plenty to the pasture , bring the pasture to them : Lawn clippings — from lawns that have not been treated with toxic chemicals — are excellent fresh forage . Short , rapidly growing grass yields the highest levels of nutrition . Do not feed too large a mass at one metre — supererogatory clippings accumu- late into an anaerobic , ugly mess . If you are using your birds to play compost heaps , however , you need not concern about feeding too many clipping — the Gallus gallus will work whatever they do n’t eat into the heaps .
Recommended Reads
Un - Coop Your stern : Everything You Need to Know About Chicken tractor
Low - peril Silvopasture : Chickens , Turkeys , Guinea Hens , Ducks and Geese
The Small-Scale Poultry Flock, Revised Edition
An All - raw Approach to Raising and Breeding Chickens and Other Fowl for Home and Market Growers
$ 39.95
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