more chicken feed: buckwheat

Of all the animals on the farm, chickens can be the hardest to feed entirely from one's own land.

Not a few chickens -- if you have no more than two chickens per person living in the house, you can go pretty far to feed your birds on kitchen scraps alone, so long as you're not Carmelites.

But if you really like eggs, you're going to want more chickens, and they'll take some feeding. They're not herbivores like cows, sheep, and goats -- 'pastured', in chicken terms, tells you more about where the birds live than what they eat. Omnivores, like pigs and people, chickens want a diet with plenty of carbs and protein.

Buckwheat makes a good staple food, and during the warm months chickens will even harvest it themselves -- and start a second crop growing in its place. This picture shows new young buckwheat seedlings growing up through the stems of the first crop, which were flattened when the chickens' tractor was pulled up. We get three crops this way, before the first frost kills everything (and, incidentally, prevents a last crop of seed from becoming a weed problem in the spring).

And the way buckwheat and chicken pressure mend a clay soil is little short of unbelievable.