Feeding hungry chickens

[Wormhunter]

Does anyone have any ideas for additional scraps my 7 large brown hens can eat, we are a retired couple so not too many meal scraps but happy to raid the pantry and freezer, of course corn/ layer pellets are a daily food source for them, they have access to soil for worm hunting but any other ideas ?

 

[humblehillsfarm]

Generally speaking they can eat anything we can except avocado pits and peels, green/raw potatoes and peels, tomato leaves/stems, sugar/candy/chocolate, citrus (affects calcium absorption but not actually poisonous), dry beans, junk food (white bread, chips, fatty foods, etc), or anything moldy or rotten. You just don't want to go too overboard with treats because it is essentially adding or removing too much protein and calcium from their die. Most times I have a bowl of leftovers (like one time was meatballs and mashed potatoes) I throw it out for my birds. I throw them my carrot peels, celery scraps, apple tidbits. When the weather is hot I give them 1/4 of a cold watermelon, iceberg lettuce, a whole apple that's gone a bit soft, or things like that. Just like with people, all good things in moderation!

 

[Wormhunter]

Generally speaking they can eat anything we can except avocado pits and peels, green/raw potatoes and peels, tomato leaves/stems, sugar/candy/chocolate, citrus (affects calcium absorption but not actually poisonous), dry beans, junk food (white bread, chips, fatty foods, etc), or anything moldy or rotten. You just don't want to go too overboard with treats because it is essentially adding or removing too much protein and calcium from their die. Most times I have a bowl of leftovers (like one time was meatballs and mashed potatoes) I throw it out for my birds. I throw them my carrot peels, celery scraps, apple tidbits. When the weather is hot I give them 1/4 of a cold watermelon, iceberg lettuce, a whole apple that's gone a bit soft, or things like that. Just like with people, all good things in moderation!

Thanks for the ideas, like the watermelon idea, we’re online shopping at the moment so will add a couple of veg choices for the girls , is broccoli or green leaf veg okay, also what about frozen veg, I have an unwanted bag of Brussels sprouts? A few a day?

 

[humblehillsfarm]

For really hard foods, like brussels sprouts, I'd try shredding them, BUT my girls won't touch kale or broccoli leaves. They eat spinach. I've seen other people who feed broccoli leaves to their birds and love them. Yes those foods are safe, but my girls had always shied away from them. I'd never given the broccoli florets just cause we eat them I think frozen veg are okay if they are in bite sized pieces. I had also heard someone say they had a hen crack her beak on a frozen block of corn? Not sure how plausible that really is.

 

[Wormhunter]

For really hard foods, like brussels sprouts, I'd try shredding them, BUT my girls won't touch kale or broccoli leaves. They eat spinach. I've seen other people who feed broccoli leaves to their birds and love them. Yes those foods are safe, but my girls had always shied away from them. I'd never given the broccoli florets just cause we eat them

Thanks for the advice

 

[Acre4Me]

FWIW, any treats potentially dilute their needed nutrients their feed provides, such as protein. A layer feed is often 16%, about what they need when only eating feed. So, throw them too many low protein snacks, etc, and then they are lacking in that area, as an example.

for us, we feed a 20% mixed flock feed. We throw them grass or let them free range a bit now and again. We toss them fruit or veg on occasion. But, we keep treats to a minor portion of their eating. Often, a “treat” here is wet feed with the special bits sprinkled on top, such as seeds, scrambled eggs, chopped fruit. They think wet feed is amazing!

It is fun to feed treats. Personally, I find it entertaining to watch them chase a tossed grape or blueberry or cherry tomato, and to attack the Brussel sprout plant uprooted from the garden (by me) and eat it clean down to the hard stalk in under an hour. Neighbor has a treat ball (hanging wire cage) for his chickens that he puts a head of cabbage inside so they eat it over the course of a couple of days.

 

[3KillerBs]

Does your yard or garden produce weeds?

My former chickens almost obliterated the beggar ticks and ragweed that infested our yard. If I gave them a nice, big, leafy beggar tick uprooted from the area by the shed where we couldn't mow and a handful of scratch at the same time they'd eat that weed first.

I couldn't let them range on the in-town property, so I brought their forage to them -- every kind of weed I could pull except the pokeberry. What they didn't eat became one with the deep litter.