Experimenting with Ranging

Today we allowed (okay - forced) one of our hens out of the "hundred pen" to roam around for the day. She's not one of the purebreds that I can sell as such, so she was chosen for her unmarketability. It's not that we don't love her though.

Anyway, she did great all day long pecking and roaming about, and generally staying close to the pen. We put her back in around 7pm with the evening feeding.

We have only 6 Americauna hens left, and now I can distinguish between them so well that we named a few of them. The black headed with a golden body is Cleopatra. The black headed with red body is Pocahontas. The black headed with grey body is Jemima. The all white one (we think she's Americauna - there are a few tan colored spots on her) is Marilyn. The white one with lots of tan on her is Martha. The all grey one is Phyllis Diller. I was going to name one Farrah as a tribute, but she got purchased Sunday afternoon.

Back to ranging, I decided to close the garden gate and allow the ducks out of their cage for the first time ever. They were SO cute. We'd just mown the grass in the walkways and I'd pulled lots of plants, so we mowed there, too. There were just dozens of crickets hopping around. The ducks began their systematic search of the garden floor, meandering in every area I led them to. They tasted mown grass, weed leaves, purple hull peas (they did NOT like), and lots of crickets! When the time came for me to house them for the night, I simply filled their waterer and they went right back into the cage. I'm SO looking forward to them ranging all the time! They are getting SO big!

The garden is ready to finish tilling and begin the August planting of carrots, more rattlesnake pole beans, purple hull cowpeas, squash, potatoes, leeks, and lots of other goodies. It's going to be interesting to record all this and make decisions about the garden next year based on this year's data.