House Scraps???

[J&D Chickens]

Does anyone feed their chickens house scraps? We have our chickens in a house and run. Within a month all vegetation in the run was gone. Their house and run is next to the garden so anything I pull out I give to them. But what about house scraps? Thoughts?

 

[muddyhorse]

yep mine LOVE house scraps. Do not give them potato peels ( something to do with a chemical in green potato peels) but everything else is Good. mine love tuna

on hot days I save up waermwellon rinds and freeze them for the birds. It is to the point that hubby asks if these are people groceries or chicken groceries

 

[mgw]

Our girls love table scraps. They really like mac&cheese today We gave them corn on the cob they were leary at first but once one of them pecked it it was devoured in minutes.

 

[PortageGirl]

Always! Farm wives have been feeding table scraps and vegetable trimmings to their flocks for centuries. There are some exceptions, no raw onions, it can make the eggs taste funky. (don't worry if there are some in something that is cooked) ... true, no potato peels, but cooked ones seem fine. they love all kinds of meat and fish, there are all kinds of threads about feeding them meat so I won't start this one into it.

Not too much salt, they can't eliminate it easily and they are really small compared to us so too much is, well, too much!

There's a list of yummy stuff and bad stuff up in the help/learning pages, here's the link to that, but keep cruising in that area because there's a lot of good things in all those pages. https://www.backyardchickens.com/web/viewblog.php?id=2593-Treats_Chart

 

[J&D Chickens]

Thanks everyone. We have been giving them just about everything left over and its still edible to humans. I give them a lot of veggies from the waste of preparing them for canning (I.e. tops of tomatos, ends of green beans). We also give them the watermellons that bust open (seems to be a lot) lol. I didn't know about the potatoes though, good to know. I have been giving them raw onions tops and so forth but they aren't of age yet for producing eggs so if I stop now they will be ok.

 

[shopchicks]

A nice surprise for me has been finding out what effective little garbage disposals my girls are. I have always composted what I can, but that leaves out meat, dairy, and cooked foods with oils in them. I haven't fed mine any meat yet, but they adore yogurt and cottage cheese, and will eat up things like leftover rice and macaroni. With only two of us in the house, things tend to go to waste even though I try to recycle leftovers, so the hens seem to be filling in a void in our household food cycle that was missing before with just the garden and the compost heap.

 

[hadzimak]

In our kitchen the big decision is who gets which scraps. The black lab still has first right of refusal, then the chickens, then the compost pile. But since the dog and and chickens have access to the compost pile everything is pretty well picked through.

 

[JetBlack]

Quote:
+1 !!! Mine see me heading out with a pot of something, they know it's either rice or old mac-n-cheese. "YAY!" They gobble.

 

[burquechick]

J&D Chickens :

... left over and its still edible to humans....

Glad you said that. I've seen people feed their chickens mouldy bread! Just terrible. Also, if you feed them their own egg shells (which I don't recommend), at least boil them first! They can catch diseases from each other's egg shells.​