4.23.2008

Things chickens will eat


What goes in one end, Comes out the other.

In the garden, thrift is everything. I hate to waste anything with organic content. Chickens help me repackage organic materials, like table scraps, into a form my garden can use: manure. I have to compost it with their straw (which I use as a bedding material), but it's worth the wait.

Here are just a few things chickens will eat.


Slightly spoiled produce, Cutworm Salad,
Old Easter Eggs, slugs in their native environment.

If you're interested in keeping chickens in an urban setting, check out the listing of cities which allow chickens that contributor Emily pointed to in a recent Gardenaut comment, or draw some inspiration from either of the chicken posts I wrote for ZRecs a while back:
Contributing blogger MissoulaChick (Gardenaut's Montana correspondent and Intermountain West representative) also runs a website with information and resources for chicken-raising.

3 comments:

Brian and Dianne said...

I often wonder if there is anything they won't eat. My wife is a homebrewer and the chickens love the grains left over from the brewing process.

RugbugRedfern said...

That stuff is high in protein. I hear most of the sugars get washed away in the brewing process leaving something heavy in protein.

MissoulaChick said...

I read that chickens should not be fed raw potato peelings. So we never feed those to our "girls".

I like to think that this is because the peelings will ferment into vodka inside the chicken, and the chicken will get really drunk. Whether or not this is the case remains unknown.

Although it could make for a fascinatingly morbid recipe... "Feed 2lbs potato peelings to chicken. Once the chicken passes out, pluck, bake, and serve with fresh asparagus."