Guess what season it is in the Northern Hemisphere?! - Its FODDER Season! 🍀

[WannaBeHillBilly]

I have 29 birds 23 chickens and 6 ducks.

One fodder tower and at least 50lbs of grain, better buy 100lbs, and you will have 29 happy birbs.

 

[WannaBeHillBilly]

Update on my BOSS Fodder:

Short: It was a total disaster! I noticed a strange smell in the bathroom after a few days and that smell became worse by the day. Only a few of the Sunflower seeds germinated and the rest started to rot almost immediately. I wonder if the content of those 40lbs bags that i buy for my ducks has been (heat?) treated to render the kernels unusable as seeds.
After 2 weeks i had enough and dumped the content of all five bins into the duck-yard. They looked at it, tried and then looked at me like they caught me in the attempt to poison them.
Something ate the stuff over night, maybe some desperate squirrels…

Last year BOSS fodder was a great success, no idea why this year it doesn't work. Similar to your experience with Barley, @gtaus.

 

[WannaBeHillBilly]

Before Christmas i bought three new seeds from the local seed store:

• Soybeans
• Field Rape
• Purple Top Turnips

I will write up my experiences with these in separate messages later.

 

[WannaBeHillBilly]

OK, let's start with the soybeans: Not very impressive, maybe it was too cold in the bathroom but only ½ of them actually sprouted. Here are the fresh Soybeans in the bin:

After one week, there are some sprouts:

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Finally after 11 days i will try to feed this to the ducks this evening:

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As said, not very impressive, but maybe i did something wrong?
What is the best way to sprout beans?

 

[Nifty-Chicken]

Before Christmas i bought three new seeds from the local seed store:

• Soybeans
• Field Rape
• Purple Top Turnips

I will write up my experiences with these in separate messages later.

Wow, and at Ace Hardware!?!?

 

[WannaBeHillBilly]

Wow, and at Ace Hardware!?!?

Well ACE is not a chain-store like for example HopeDepot! ACE is a hardware retailers' cooperative, meaning if you have a store, you can join the cooperative and sell the stuff from the cooperative in addition to your products. We have some ACE stores around here that were founded as farm-stores and later added ACE products.

 

[gtaus]

Would you recommend one grain over the other. Currently, I can only get wheat, rye or oats.

I had really good luck growing fodder with barley seed last year. I also tried oats and wheat but they did not grow as well. This year I got some bad barley seed and it is not growing well. It must have been old seed because it is not germinating. So, big disappointment at present. I called my local feed mill supply and they just got in a new batch of barley seed from a different source, so I will be getting a 50# bag of the new barley in a week or two.

Normally, I would recommend barley seed over all other seed, but after my experience with bad barley seed this year, I guess I have to say the quality of the fodder is really dependent on the seed you are able to buy. If one type of seed does not work for you, I'd try a different seed. The seed not used for fodder can always to mixed in as chicken scratch - so nothing wasted. Good luck.

 

[WannaBeHillBilly]

Update on the Soybean Sprouts: Ducks don't like them!​

So far for the Soybean sprouts in yesterday's supper bowl: The ducks didn't like them and left them in the bowl. Leftovers here will be eaten by the wild birds, mostly by the Crows and Cardinals:

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Soybean Sprouts: from the Duckies

 

[WannaBeHillBilly]

Update on Purple Top Turnip Fodder:
The Duckies love it even though it stinks miserable!​

The Turnip seeds turned out to be great! I had soaked them for about four hours before dumping them into the Mini Fodder-Tower:

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And only one week later there was a green mattress in the bin:

In the evening Blanca Duck tried it, jumped right into the supper-bowl and began to stuff herself!
The two disadvantages of turnip seeds are the high price of $30/lbs and the Turnip smell that does emerge from the turnip-seed bins once the seeds have started to sprout.

Turnip-Sprouts: from the Duckies!

 

[WannaBeHillBilly]

Update on Purple Top Field Rape Fodder:
The Duckies kind of liked it as something else than Winter Wheat.
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Field Rape seeds need to be soaked in water for about four hours during which they significantly bulge up. Below are the Rape-seeds in their bin, even after soaking they are somewhat smaller than the turnip seeds and clog the drainage holes in the bin:

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After one week even more greenery has grown than with the Turnip seeds:

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And rape-sprouts are completely odorless! However that might be the reason why the Duckies were not jumping at them. They ate all of it, but in the same way as they eat their Winter-Wheat sprouts. Greedy but no jumping into the bowl.

Field-rape-sprouts: from the Duckies.