This blog starts and ends calmly and peaceful as we consider lush grass growing. In the middle there’s some horrifying interspecies violence – I’ll tell you before it happens so you can look away if you need to.
When we first into our place nearly a decade ago, there was plenty of grass in the backyard. Note, I don’t say lawn. Which is fine by me, since an array of weeds offer much better nutritional resources for chickens than a monocultural sward.
So a sequence of domestic fowl have enjoyed the delicious mix of trad, ehrharta, buffalo grass, couch, and a plethora of other greens as a supplement to their laying mash and scratch mix. The trad went first. Chickens absolutely love this horrid weed and have scratched out every shred, producing the fabulously golden yolk that are a definitive feature of your happy free-range egg. For a while the other grasses held on, but, over a few dry winters, as our flock grew to six chooks and an apparently infinite number of semi-resident brush turkeys, the greenery eventually lost the fight.
Peak brush turkey
Perhaps not surprisingly, I don’t have a lot of pictures of the muddy home farm during this “trench warfare” period. And I have absolutely no pictures of the traumatic events that followed. It’s taken me nearly a year to get up the gumption to write about it.
Very cute baby brush turkey hanging out with our chicks a couple of years back
Until November last year, the many brush turkeys hanging around the backyard were an annoyance but nothing more: scratching up seedlings, stealing eggs and making free with the chickens’ dinner. The baby brush turkeys liked to huddle up to our newly hatched little chicks. The older turkeys also seemed to like hanging out with the flock but were easily spooked by them. It only took boss chook Treasure giving a funny look to have the brush turkeys scatter or even flap away. But that all changed last spring.
A large male brush turkey started hanging around, pursuing and doing his best to mount the chickens. One day we noticed that several of the girls’ combs were bloodied, and concluded it was the work of this nasty animal. The neighbours had spotted the sex predator too. There were rumours of pet birds being attacked all up and down the street.
Concerned, we decided to keep the girls in Colditz, the steel-framed predator-proof cage for a day or two, rather than letting them roam the yard as usual. The next day I was working from home, and by the afternoon, seeing no signs of the turkey and feeling sorry for the poor chooks pacing up and down in their constrained night quarters, like Steve McQueen in the Great Escape, I decided to let them out for a few hours. I went back to my computer.
If you are easily upset, now is the time to look away.
Male brush turkey extreme closeup
Late that afternoon I heard a pitiful squawking and rushing down to the yard. All of the chooks were bleeding copiously from their scalps and two of our poor girls were mortally wounded, with huge slashes through their backs and terrible gouges to their heads. Then we heard pitiful sounds from the last of our neighbour’s free-range chooks. We jumped across the fence to rescue it, but too late – its eye had been pecked out. All three birds died soon after.
Needless to say I was inconsolable.
The only way I could atone my guilt was to make the surviving chickens a safe place to stay. So that Saturday, in a frenzy, I pulled together an implausible collection of wire, wood from futon bases, half an aviary, parts of a picket fence, innumerable pieces of bamboo and that old standby, trampoline netting, to make a 8 square metre covered run adjacent to Colditz. The run featured Palm Beach as an elevated hangout zone and egg laying area, perches at a range of heights and diameters and its own personal orange tree.
The chooks were safe, and over the next few weeks slowly recovered from their head wounds. But they weren’t happy.
So over the festive season, I had another crack, making an extension the same size again, which admittedly did involved purchasing a couple of steel droppers and a box of screws. Otherwise, I was extraordinarily pleased I was able to make the “outdoor room” entirely from rubbish I scrounged from the side of the road.
The outdoor room, featuring cot railing and an indoor clothes hanger feeding hatch
Now the chooks were secure in their generous run, an unworthy thought came to me. The scorched earth of the backyard, without a single blade of grass and denuded of every remaining seed, was now perfectly prepared for something I’d long aspired to have – a backyard full of native grass. The kids had started expressing a longing for a little bit of soft lawn to walk on, and I was keen to take on the challenge. Buffalo, kikuyu and ehrharta outcompete native grasses, but thanks to the chooks, I doubted there was a single weed seed left on the premises.
It was time.
I decided to mostly use microlaena stipoides, weeping grass, a fine bladed grass that tolerates shade and enriched soils and, once established, copes with minimal watering. I ordered a couple of hundred grams of a hybrid microlaena called Griffin weeping grass, a low growing variety bred by the Department of Botany at the University of New England.
My first sowing was in early summer – the best time for this variety – warm enough for a speedy germination and not so hot it’s impossible to keep the seed bed moist. I raked in the seeds – they shouldn’t be buried more than 1 and a half centimetres deep – and covered them with the veggie nets that I usually use to protect seedlings from bowerbirds, chickens and possums that aren’t trying too hard.
The Great Berowra Storm of Christmas 2018 treated us relatively kindly ( two broken skylights is a pretty good outcome from golf ball sized hail) but did significantly undermine my efforts to even distribute those rather expensive grass seeds. But I guess the torrent saved me watering for a few days, as well as reminding me why we needed grasses and their root systems to stop our topsoil flowing away on those occasions when our yard becomes a tributary to Berowra Creek. On hot days when we didn’t experience a climatic apocalypse, I did get out the hose for the first month or two – microlaena needs to be kept moist until its root system is sorted.
In the light of its inpropitious beginnings, the microlaena has done pretty well, coping with the chooks snacking on it a couple of days a week. That brutish brush turkey has never returned (I suspect foul play given his cruel behaviour to most of the hens in the street) but we like to let them roam when we can keep an eye on them. And the native grass has remained beautifully green through yet another very dry winter. In the picture above, alongside the weeping grass, you can see my low-skill terracing with fallen wood and another native grass, poa labillardiere. The aim is to redirect any storm water into our new pond (more on that another day)
So after two days of drenching rain, I decided this afternoon to sow another packet of griffin weeping grass, filling the gaps scoured by last December’s floods. Yet more trampoline netting has been hauled out of the shed to protect the newly spread seed from the chooks on their weekend perambulations.
Even if I’m slightly nervous of what they might do to my baby grasses, I’m grateful to our girls. Without their commitment to scratching and salad, we would never have got this far, and certainly not without reaching for roundup or something equally scary. I hope I can return the favour by keeping them safe (if not always happy) and feeding them plenty of greens.
More stories of life, death and gardening from our backyard
Night of the living mulch: cover crops for the zombie apocalypse
Chicken TV: the make-over show