what table scraps should i give and not give to my chickens?

[jmbwholesale]

my hens will eat anything I eat plus some. I let them free rage in my garden after the first hard frost and they will pick it clean! Sure makes it nice come spring, I will let them in the garden before I till and they do a fantastic job of cleaning any weeds and new growth so tilling and planting are a breeze! They also clear out any poison ivy but be warned, if you pick a chicken up after they have been into the poison ivy, the oils can get on your skin and cause you to get poison ivy. My girls are great, they follow me and all I need to do is repeat "come on" and they do. I was raised in an environment where we kept laying hens. My grandparents also had chickens that always free ranged. I remember my grandmother tossing scraps onto a gravel road and calling "chick, chick, chick" and they all ran to her side. In the evenings, she always had a few hens that wouldn't go into the coop, so after closing the coop, she would cover the defiant birds with wooden boxes and lay a big rock on top. A rule of thumb is, chickens know what to eat in the wild, it's genetics. Grandma's hens always gave her lots of eggs, as do mine. Happy chickens!

 

[bradnjulieplus4]

Grapes they can eat ? I hope so we usually have graps but many go bad and id like to put them out as well as apples

 

[tazler]

what do u do with all those chicken shells and chicken bones? can you feed them back to chickens?

 

[tazler]

Can you feed then eggs shells and cooked chicken bones to pick?

 

[tazler]

when chickens are free range; how do you find the eggs?

 

[Beekissed]

when chickens are free range; how do you find the eggs?

You train your flock to the coop nest boxes by penning them up until they get used to laying there instead of outdoors. Then, when you let them range, you have to keep an eye on egg counts, on hens coming from other areas of the property singing an egg song, etc. Sometimes you'll find a nest outdoors that you can either leave in place and collect eggs from or destroy and then retrain the flock to the nests. As you get to know your flock, you get a feel for those who lay in the nests and which ones like to lay wild and can adjust your flock accordingly.

Sometimes a hen that insists on laying out will just disappear one day....sometimes that means she's sitting on a nest of eggs to hatch them and sometimes that means her wild habits have resulted in her early demise via predator.

Mostly, if you keep an eye on things and know when you should be getting eggs and how many you should be getting, you can pretty much keep all your eggs laid in the coop. Some will be laid out regardless of what you do and those you can just count as the price of free ranging. Around here those are mostly hoovered up by the dogs that are guarding the chickens, so I consider it pay for a job well done.