This morning I had an idea for bonus chicken feed. We have many types of grass here, but there is one that grows in shady spots on the forest edge, and lately it has been shedding a lot of seed as you pass it, so much that you can hear it scatter.
I know that the chickens forage keenly for grass seeds, so thought I’d see how well collecting it for them works. Ideally they would forage themselves, but the grass is outside the chickens’ range. I took down a big bag and my handy hand sickle, and in short time had a good half bag of stems.
The chooks were busy with that load for a while, and quiet for the rest of the day, so I’m supposing it was a good feed. I felt the crops (where they store seed they’ve eaten to grind it down) of a few of them later, all very full.
Following on that success, I tried another collection, this time without the sickle, just pulling the seeds off in handfuls. This is probably quicker work; a quarter hour gave me a couple of kilos of seed, which I’ve hung up to dry for later. Stems cut with the sickle may be more work, but has the advantage of leaving hay for the pen floor when the chickens have picked it over.
I’m not sure whether this is good use of resources. It seemed a bit hard-scrabble to be gathering grass seeds as chicken food, rather than just spreading bought pellet food, but it does improve the diversity of their diet, and seed should be nutritious. It works because this seed is large (comparable with amaranth) and the grass is very dense and easy to harvest. Ideally I would have a chicken tractor that I could just push over select areas. There’s another project for the list.