Our Light Sussex chicks are voracious.  They're currently in our tiniest pasture, but I thought for sure it would last them multiple weeks since the chicks aren't even fully feathered.  Instead, it looks like they'll need fresh forage in less than a week.

My original plan had been to let Mark finish up the pasture running up the hill behind the coop, but I really don't want to turn the chicks in there until they're at least four or five weeks old --- that pasture lacks tender, chick-friendly food and has too much predator pressure.  The other pasture attached to our chicks' coop was overgrazed by the Cuckoo Marans and has been seeded with pasture plants that need some time to get established.  What will our Sussex chicks eat in the meantime?

My eyes turn to the semi-frequently mowed berry and fruit tree areas that bracket our vegetable gardens.  There's lots of chick-friendly forage available on the ground and the chicks aren't big enough to do too much damage (especially since the mulch in these areas has rotted into the ground and needs to be refreshed.)  I've been wishing I could run chickens in there to deal with some insect problems, and we're sick of mowing.  The problem is fencing and housing.

We could use chicken tractors, but I think our chicks need a tighter coop for at least a few more weeks, and they're already too big to fit all fourteen in a yard-size tractor.  Instead, I'm pondering several options:

• Temporary fencing using the existing coop.  I figure it would take me and Mark less than an hour to toss up some fencing around the berries adjacent to the chicks' current pasture.  We have extra pea trellis material on hand to use if the deer come calling and can rustle up enough of the lightweight fence posts that we use for trellis posts and tomato stakes.  After the chicks eat up the groundcover between the berry bushes, we could move the fencing to make an avenue across the driveway and then surround parts of the forest garden.  By the time the chicks eat all that, surely they'll be big enough to run up on the hill.
• Permanent fencing and one or more new coops.  On the other hand, this time of year is a lull in our pasture productivity, and we'll often want to have extra pasture areas.  So maybe it would be a good idea to fence these areas in permanently?  The problem there is that we'd have to build gates (time consuming) and perhaps add one or more coops (even more time consuming) since we wouldn't want permanent fencing crossing our driveway.  Plus, the area where the driveway ends in front of the trailer is already pretty tight, and I'm not sure permanent fencing along both sides of the driveway would be a good idea.  On the other hand, putting in the time to build permanent fences now would save time in later years, and I suspect deer would be afraid to walk up the driveway if it had fences on both sides.
  
• Portable coop with temporary fencing.  Another option would be to combine a portable coop with temporary fencing, which would allow us to run the chicks all the way over to the berry and tree area on the west side of the back garden.  The major bonus with pasturing this area is that we could finally deal with some of the insects that hit our peach trees while grazing more land that we're sick of mowing.  The downside is that a portable coop big enough for fourteen chickens would be heavy (and harder to build than permanent coops.)  Mark had an idea of making a portable coop with two handles so it could be carried since dragging definitely wouldn't be good enough in the tight spaces of our yard.  It almost seems simpler to just build an extra coop over there if I want our chickens to graze that area.
  

Any other ideas?  Additional pros and cons for the ideas above?  At this instant, I'm leaning toward temporary fencing around the berries to give us some breathing space which we'd use to build permanent fencing around the forest garden.  Our butternuts need another week or so to finish ripening anyway before we can take them off their dying vines.  But I'm always looking for better ideas.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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