MULTIPLE USE PLANT FOR YOU,THE BEES AND YOUR CHICKENS

Birdsonghill said:

I have never grown tamarillo plants. I will have to add that to my list of plants from the nightshade family, I have grown. Some are favorites and some may be toxic, but all I have grown were interesting, tasty or beautiful with blooms. I would add some of the grain or forage plants to my list of useful chicken plants. My chickens love sorghum seed heads and I like sipping the juices from the cane. Hull less oats and milo have been a hit here with my garden as a cover crop and as forage for my free range bachelor flock and I can eat some too. My chickens all love too snack on handfuls of tender young white clover , thrown into the runs. The clover is my go to for garden cover and soil improvement and often grown between the rows as living mulch that makes nitrogen in the soil. Finally, I turn my chickens out into the spent field crops like crowder peas, field corn, melons/pumpkin patches, sweet potatoes, etc. and they party on the insect feast from the vines, dead or alive, weed seeds, shattered peas and etc. The plants that provide shade are very important, especially around a fixed covered run. We all usually benefit together, me and my chickens from careful integration of the two(gardens and chickens). The chicken litter and droppings are a vital part of my organic fertilization/compost program. (Sorry about the photo being an old picture that does not show how well the hops and gourds will cover the run, it being the first season for the hops on that coop back then and early season at the time. The hops are on the left side)I will download some updated photos of the hops vines from more recently, when my grandson helps me. the vines get about fifteen feet long now growing over the top and cover most of twenty five feet of the southern exposure from the Original three hops plants

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