The chickens have now been here for a week. They’ve had their feed and water topped up every day, their poo tray emptied and cleaned, and had a little chat and a few handfulls of corn tossed into their coop every night, for which they’ve gone quite mad. Over that time they’ve come to know and trust us, and are far better about being picked up. Indeed, Gerry seems to positively enjoy it, and as we walk around the edge of their run she follows our feet.
So yesterday we moved the run to a new spot on the lawn. Within a couple of days they had stripped down their original location to a very neat crew cut, but by the end of the week they had almost killed it off. Big earthy patches had appeared between the bits of grass, and they had hollowed out a little dust bowl in which to ruffle their feathers in the back corner. But we didn’t realise quite how bad it had become in just seven days until we rolled the coop away.
After and before
That picture above is just a single frame; the left-hand half is where the coop was sitting, and the right is what the grass was like before they arrived. That’s where we’ve relocated the coop and, needless to say, we expect that to end up like the grass on the left within another seven days.
Which leaves us with a quandary: do you just leave them in the same place all the time so they only destroy one patch of lawn, or do you move them around the garden on an almost daily basis, in which case you’re going to get the grass mown for free and they (hopefully) won’t have time to reduce it to a dust bowl.
Neither of us can quite decide.
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I was led to believe you need to move them no less frequently than every two days to avoid ending up with a bald lawn. Three days at a mega-pinch. Aside from that, Wickes have three big bags of bark chippings for a tenner at the moment – the option I’ve plumped for. Have you joined the forum at omlet.co.uk? It’s under the ‘club’ section. You will find many lovely helpful chicken fans there who are happy to share their experiences and advise if necessary.
We keep ours on bark chips – they have plenty to scratch around in, and it does a good job of soaking up the poo, but they can’t destroy it. We top the chips up a couple of times a year. We do let them out to roam around the garden most days, though, and give them extra greens to make up for not having much grass.
The grass is actually recovering surprisingly well. We have now mown the rest of the lawn and the difference is no longer so stark. As a bonus, we put a few bundles of the mown grass into the chickens’ run and they had a wild time scratching at it and eating it. I guess it’s their version of fast food. A chicken-friendly KFC.