Chickens and the clover patch

My small back yard lawn/pasture has taken hold. It is a mix of grass and clover, with a few various weeds. It took a while for the clover and the grass to get going and I kept the chickens out of the area until it was well enough established to bounce back from their foraging. The area is a small island of green in a mostly bare spot that used to hold a big pile of dead ivy that I'd pulled from the huge amounts of ivy growing in the back yard. Once the ivy pile was truly dead, I used it as a cover for cardboard and newspaper that I used to cover other areas of ivy. The newspaper and cardboard over ivy approached worked quite well. Cutting, pulling, and digging ivy is quite a chore. And with that area bare I decided a small, green meadow/pasture/lawn type space would be nice. And it is nice.
I moved the chicken fencing to allow them access to a portion of the clover lawn/pasture. They moved in to explore and have been eating the clover and grass. I bring them treats from the garden, fallen peaches, seed spikes from salvias - which they peck and scratch at to get to the black seeds, and sometimes a tomato hornworm or a cricket. Egg production has slowed some with the onset of hotter weather.

Rooster in the clover lawn/pasture

The clover has begun flowering and attracts bees and even hummingbirds. The clover takes well to mowing and grows very quickly after. It is fixing nitrogen in a spot that seemed depleted when we got the place, and it is serving wildlife, livestock, and the humans in this system well.

Foxtail millet

In late May I planted the seeds of German Foxtail Millet I'd ordered from Owen at Annapolis Seeds in Nictaux, NS. He keeps a nice blog about things going on at his farm. I am growing the millet so that I can feed it to the chickens once it matures. I'd previously grown pearl millet, which the chickens seemed to enjoy eating right off the plants. Millet is an easy crop to grow, it does not need as much water as maize, and it requires less processing than maize for it to be fed to chickens. The dent corn I've grown and used for chicken scratch has to be put through the grain mill before the chickens can eat it. 

The plants in the foxtail millet stand in the front yard have just started to send out their foxtails, which will eventually extend out of the tops of the plants and hang like fluffy foxtails.

German Foxtail Millet

The stand of millet grows along with some pole and bush beans, which I harvest for dry beans, a few decorative flowers, some soybean plants, several squash plants (which are finally starting their march across the lawn), basil, thyme, melons, cucumbers, and a young almond tree. They all grow together. The pole beans climb the millet stalks.

Seeds forming in bursting patterns.

Hot weather and chickens

The weather has finally warmed up and it is now officially hot. We've had a few days above 100 F and several in the high 90s (that's approx 36+ Centigrade).  The chickens do not appreciate the heat. They have feather coats on year-round, and since they are Polish chickens, they also wear rather fancy feather headdresses. So I put the mister on in their yard to help lower the air temperature, and I replenish their water dishes frequently. Still, they pant from the heat. When they go into the coop to roost they're still pretty hot, the coop has been around 80 F at around 8 p.m., when they go in.
I'll leave the door open for an hour or so, and close them up when darkness falls, still they are hot.
Since their coop is off the grid, putting a fan in there is not an easy solution. I wonder if the coop temperature would lower enough if I hang a block of ice from the ceiling. I will try it out.

At any rate, here's a super close-up view of chicken #2, with her mouth open in a pant.

Chicken #2