reading so many different ads in water&food , what should I do ?

[strangeanimal]

I think I have read now like a 20 different things that people give as an add on water or / and food but I had so many questions coming up in my head and still , every flock and area is so different , especially if one lives in a quite ' exotic' country / state and one lives like us , in weather we either have too cold or too dry , too cold so I'm not sure what to use .

The reason why I only come up with that now is first of all that i have been reading ( TONS ) and secondly .... those who replied on the thread I started about the mixing up of peckingorder I would like to mention the following :
1. that a chicken can get sick was no newsflash
2. that almost my entire flock was sick was very tricky in the way that the chickens could hide it for so long , with only ONE warningsign (the behavior bescribed on that thread : why the breed x suddenly attacked breed y , z , a , b and it had to come so far the sick ones were not allowed to get near the coop , feed , etc , well : because they were ALL sick and most of them had to be culled due too weak and some is really a lotteryticket right now )
That is the main reason I like to know some about nutritions added to waterers and feeders simply for one thing :
read and mark my words : NEVER AGAIN !!!!!!! As the owner I'm the one the chickens rely on , being depending on what I do and do I understand only fully they're my responsibility and they have the right to live a long healthy and happy life .

What do I feed them ?
They get a mixed grain of the store , daily once each morning before they lay their eggs , with some extra eggshels crushed and sometimes if I need new feed they get oystershells , the second time of the day is the early afternoon when they get the scraps from food that is made clean , during the day they can eat tons of insects and vegetables that didn't grow so well , when we are finished eating they get some scraps again and again they get grain , but it is more to get them into the coop because I close it manually .

I make a lot of recipes especially for them once I'm in the kitchen busy (when I'm making something to bake they get some cooked eggs with some garlic or other herbs ) in summer or very hot weather they get daily some chickenicecream ( frozen berries or other fruits with applejuice , orangejuice or whatever I have in the garden and ow they love it !!!) .
I use a lot of herbs as extra to the bedding of the nestingboxes , especially lavender due the very various functions of herbs and I dry them to have it in stock during the winter period .

Now I just started to make my own apple cider vinegar that should be vinegar about a week or two to add to their water , while I do not have that I give them some applejuice ( one small cup on a Liter of water ) , perhaps it also adds something good , they anyway like it and have their normal fresh water too , if no good no harm I guess ?

Now what can I add to my chickens feed / waterer to get them having a better immune system / keep them healthier / happier ?
I live in Belgium where at this point the entire week its been quite warm outside and at night the temp goes down quite drastic ...it is verrrry dry ( so my tomatoes tell me ) and there are only a few hens still healthy , the rest is quarantained and their lives are very close to the end , the vet took the ones that were way too weak ( snotty , coughs , respitoryprobs , etc ) to get any treatment and culled them , there are now a few with a weak body getting treatment but still high risk of dying even when they are injected now and get cure still ... plus croptubing for the most of them .

I'm very much interested in ' homemade ' additional things I could add to their waterer and / or feeder , especially to get a good immunity

 

[JaeG]

Some people add apple cider vinegar once or twice a week to water but it can affect their ability to absorb calcium so it's best to keep it as a winter boost.

Some people ferment their feed which makes it more digestable and the birds eat less because they are getting more nutrients from less food. Here's a great article that tells you everything you need to know:
https://tikktok.wordpress.com/2014/04/13/fermented-feed-faq/

Oyster shell grit is a better source of calcium than egg shells. You can put some in a separate bowl and your birds will eat what they need.

I'm sorry you lost so many of your flock.

 

[strangeanimal]

Some people add apple cider vinegar once or twice a week to water but it can affect their ability to absorb calcium so it's best to keep it as a winter boost.

Some people ferment their feed which makes it more digestable and the birds eat less because they are getting more nutrients from less food. Here's a great article that tells you everything you need to know:
https://tikktok.wordpress.com/2014/04/13/fermented-feed-faq/

Oyster shell grit is a better source of calcium than egg shells. You can put some in a separate bowl and your birds will eat what they need.

I'm sorry you lost so many of your flock.

Hi ! Thanks for the reply and for sure the article ! I do sometimes add some garlic into their food but not always is it in their taste so I only do it when I'm giving them cooked eggs which happens a lot in fact ... You know , sometimes you just don't know what you are going to do with the eggs and you do not always have sellers if you live in a small town close to the supermarket ... so that is something they experience quite good , and about the fermented feed , now that is interesting , altough I do want to add something : it is not proven about for example that apple cider vinegar has its good effects yet the opposite is also not proven and since I also notice that those who add it are indeed having (or letting us know ;-) ) less healthissues than those who do not add it ... I'm curious about my fermententation from apple and water ( without a mother that shows up anyway ) into what it results for my feathered friends , thx again !

 

[strangeanimal]

LOL they love this !
I've done this about a few weeks ago ( it was already on the list of what I wanted to try , just wish I tried it sooner but yhea ) : water in a jar , lots of berries ( quite a mixture ) , some big chunks of apples , left it and it began to do all kinds of stinky odd stuf BUT it looked JUST the same like how I saw it online as being ' the mother ' , first it had bubbles and some kind of foam on it , I didn't trust it and each time I opened it up I swore it was gonna make me sick ( gave a heavy odor that made me quite notious in fact ew but but but ! ) , I read your article here and read that when it had that white foamy thing on top it was good , so I just kept stirring daily ( needed to do it three times a day and not only once , don't know how comes ) , at the beginning I didn't stir it at all , also the temperature inside the house was far from 35° C. , temp back then was about 12-16 so it clearly has something to do with it , odd , looks as if the warmer temperature made it go faster and at the beginning the foamy bubbly stuff did occur but totally not as much as how it got when the temperature was driven up , so it looked like some kind of bad thing ( I wouldn't have tried it ) with what i read is ' yeast ' but I didn't immediately use it , just left it on the shelf and it now looks just like clear with a jellyfish and has the odor of some kind of vinegar ? I gave a little bit of it into the water of the chickens and she kept going as if she out of the blue was more thursty than usually !! the other chickens wanted to drink too but they were in a waitingline as if they were old ladies that had to go to the toilet in the waitingline LOL , that one kept going ! Now I'm just not sure how much of it I have to put into the water ?? They have smaller waterers and one big one from :
5x 5 liter , only 2 from 20 liters ( the ones from 5 liters are the plastic ones I purposly bought that small because you have to refresh the water anyway and with more of them they find water all the time , everywhere without waiting for one that is either higher in ranking or just slow / very thirsty but the ones from 20 L still have to get installed IF I am going to install them ( old coop was on bigger area , this area is in my opinion not suited for such big thing as it takes up more space ) , so now I just would like to know the following :
how much a waterer do I need to give ? And certainly how often since those waterers are small and either empty or anyway refreshed with new fresh water ?
secondly I did keep that ' mother ' in the yar to get some more out of it , is it OK to just use a piece of it on each jar I'm gonna use to create more of this ? or do I need to wait untill each jar created its own ?
I'm btw not always going to use berries in it but I found that recipe on " the chickenchick" and that one was with blueberries only , i've done a mixture , especially red fruits ...
P.s. Isn't yoghurt fermented feed I can give them ???