We quit mowing our chicken yard, and boy, has that been hard for me to get used to! It looks like crap!
I’m trying to get used to the new look, because there’s a reason we quit mowing.
Ever since reading “Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard,” we have both of us been working on being okay with messy. By messy, I mean grass that’s not mowed or weed whacked.
And that goes against how most of us were raised: with the idea that grass must be mowed and neat.
But not mowing our chicken yard means native trees and shrubs have started to grow. We now have about a dozen Oregon ash trees, a few Pacific crabapples, what might be a hawthorn (?), and a couple of native roses all happily growing without being planted.
If we had kept mowing our chicken yard, we wouldn’t have any of that. We would have the one sickly looking non-native tree we planted before we learned differently. (Full disclosure: We planted three and two died. Duh. Of course they died. They weren’t native.)
Seeing the native trees and plants growing tells me we are doing the right thing by letting this quarter acre be wild and messy. But it is taking a while to get used to, I admit. To me, it looks like we don’t care, when the opposite is true: It looks like this because we DO care!
Plus I posted about this on TikTok and people made comments that helped me realize other benefits: more bugs for the chickens to eat and more predator protection for the chickens. Definitely two more good reasons to not mow our chicken yard!
Still…it is taking me a while to get used to.