Chickens In The Raspberry Patch - So Far So Good

I am started a raspberry patch last year from canes that I dug up at my old house before I moved. The rows have not filled in yet so I have a huge amount of grass that can get 6' tall in with the canes. The previous location for the chickens had them for far two long (a month or more) due to my discovering that the coop I had built was too heave to lift and built wrong to drag. One think I noticed is the chickens did not eat the wild raspberry plant, even though they obliterated all the grass. So I decided to try them in the raspberry patch as it has a lot of good grass and the soil could use some fertilizer. So far it is working good. I've got a little video clip of it up on YouTube.

FYI - They destroyed my rhubarb plants. The plants were not doing that well this year but now they are gone down to the ground. Hopefully there is enough root-stock left in the ground for them to come back next year. I'm going to mulch them and of course the chickens fertilized the area

Jerry Ward wrote:FYI - They destroyed my rhubarb plants.  The plants were not doing that well this year but now they are gone down to the ground.  Hopefully there is enough root-stock left in the ground for them to come back next year.  I'm going to mulch them and of course the chickens fertilized the area

Did the rhubarb plants return, because I'm looking at getting chickens in an establishing food forest next year?

Yes they did

Can you tell me how much food you need to supplement the chickens with in the raspberry patch?  The bugs they catch are not enough are they?

It really depends on how big the space is, how densely vegetated it is and how many chickens there are. I have a small flock of 5 1/2 (the half is a new chick) completely free range chickens that I haven't fed at all in 2 years, besides a couples times in the winter when the snow was really deep and they didn't come out of their coop. They forage over about an acre or two of woods, yard and garden area and show no signs of sickness or malnutrition, still laying plenty of eggs in secret places we don't find until they are way too old to eat!