I raked up this pile of dead grass yesterday. It is really just the thatch that most people spend a nice early spring weekend tearing up out of their lawn so they can over-seed. Thatching your grass is either hard work or, if you have a thatching attachment for your mower, a noisy and still time consuming process. It really is good for your lawn but why spend all that time and energy? We just let the chickens do it. They are great thatchers, it's kinda what they are designed to do. If we have a really bad spot in the grass, we throw down some feed and the chickens with scratch at it and peck around for about an hour. When they're done we just rake up what they pulled out of the grass. Their claws are better at thatching than any hand or power tool you can buy. Plus they are basically automatic.
Not only do they thatch it up well, they add a bit of natural fertilizer, and eat any grubs and bug eggs they find so in the summer we have almost no "bad" insects. And any that do survive don't last long. Since we've had chickens I haven seen a grass hopper that was more than half an inch long.
-dale
No comments:
Post a Comment