How long should I keep them contained?

[miss_thenorth]

yesterday, we harrowed, fertilized and overseeded our pastures. It rained today, and is supposed to for the next few days. We have the chickens and ducks contained right now, so they dont get into he pastures where the fertilizer and seeds are. how long should I have to keep them contained?

 

[Wildsky]

yesterday, we harrowed, fertilized and overseeded our pastures. It rained today, and is supposed to for the next few days. We have the chickens and ducks contained right now, so they dont get into he pastures where the fertilizer and seeds are. how long should I have to keep them contained?

perhaps until you can't see the seeds and fertilizer bits.

I threw out grass seeds to try cover holes in the lawn, and the chickens seemed to think it was FOOD.

 

[rebecca100]

I want to say the time for commercial fertilizer is 3 weeks, or something close to that before you can run horses or cows on a pasture.( I could be wrong). I would wait at least a month or two though so your seeds can get some roots before being plucked by chickens and ducks. JMO Hope that helps.

 

[ksalvagno]

You are really going to want that grass seed to germinate and grow before letting the chickens and ducks out there. I would say at least 3 weeks.

 

[patandchickens]

There are sort of three different issues at work:

1) you don't want your critters eating the actual fertilizer granules.

To avoid this, all you generally need is one good rain. I expect that this morning has probably taken care of it for you, LOL (unless you were in a 'hole' in the front like we fortunately were).

2) you want the grass to get some reasonable, lasting growth down, including *roots*, rather than having it all immediately chomped away by grazers. (Otherwise there wasn't a huge amount of point in fertilizing).

If you have heavy stocking rates this may take several weeks or more of rest for the pasture; if you have very light stocking rates it may not be much of an issue at all; or anything in between.

and 3) fertilizer spurs the pasture into lush growth (especially this time of year!) during which it can sometimes produce toxic amounts of nitrates/nitrites in the plant tissues.

This is more often an issue for ruminants than for other things (though not *totally* negligable for horses or poultry), is trickier, the usual advice is a month or more but it depends on what your particular pasture actually does.

With overseeding, there is the additional issue that you want the seeds to sprout (i.e. "not get eaten by poultry or buried in mud under hooves") and get some reasonable growth going before unleashing big critters on them.

Personally, I'd wait til the grass seed sprouts til letting the chickens and ducks loose, unless they have enough other things to do (and the overseeding is thin enough, and into reasonable turf already) that you don't think they're likely to do much harm.

Good luck, have fun,

Pat