The peculiar behavior of chickens

I’ve been letting the chickens out into the winter garden to weed and fertilize. I cover or fence off the few crops I don’t want them to eat. But the chickens are curious and persistent. Yesterday, they managed to peel back the ground cover over the last cauliflower and strip it:

This seemed odd to me, because earlier that day, I’d given them some collard leaves, and the chickens just left them on the ground uneaten.

I wondered if maybe they only like to eat greens that are standing up, so I stood some of the collard leaves up, weaving them into the chicken wire. As it turns out, as peculiar as it seems, they like to eat greens that stand up. Soon the collard leaves looked just as spiny as the cauliflower.  And there’s that hose again!

And in case you missed it the first time around, here’s a poem about the wonderful irrepressible curiosity of chickens.

 

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