Best ground cover to maintain a green yard?

[Burkholderchickens]

Hi there everyone!
We have 9 hens. Our fenced in back yard is about 3600 sq feet, with half being concrete and about 1800 sq ft of it being previously green, and now dirt. We allow our hens to free range almost all day every day. We plan to keep them cooped up for a period to attempt to regrow some ground cover, but we need some advice to choose a plant. After some google searching it seems like there are better options than grass. We want strong roots of course and lots of regular growth to try to maintain it during the half of the year when it’s possible. We live in Colorado, so it’s fairly dry but we will water. Thank you for any suggestions.

 

[aggiemae]

I'm stumped but i know that my hens, who have been known to eat bamboo offshoots down to the ground, don't like most broad leaf grasses. We have a huge patch of some grass like weed, it stays green most of the year and they never touch it. Most of the things that would work are also toxic to chickens. They aren't very smart and will eat toxic plants if that's all they can find. We have 2 chicken yards and rotate them every few weeks. Worker's ok except in August and September when both areas are pretty much dirt.

 

[Life is Good!]

Only way to have some grass is to rotate the chickens away from an area for several days.

The other thing which has worked is that I made 'chicken planters' - 2'x8' raised planters that I put hardware cloth over, filled with dirt and planted grass in it - so the hens cannot reach the grass roots, but still eat the tips growing up. Hint: have the level of the dirt about 2" down from the hardware cloth, as then the grass might survive. This seems to help, but if they poop on it, that area gets burned and the grass died underneath that spot - so I replant grass seed often in these two beds and water daily to diminish the ammonia on it. It did help having some green that stayed all the time, but of course, the hens still ate their entire yard barren.

Maybe something like that would work for your hens?