There has been a bit of dialogue going around about how we feed our chickens. For the record, this is what we do.
They have a morning feed made up of a mixture of 3 yogurt pots full of layers' pellets to ensure they get all the nutrients they need to keep their egg-laying bits working in good order - they eat these but find it perhaps the least exciting bit of their diet. The rest of the feed is a half yogurt pot of cracked maize, a half yogurt pot of grain and a half a baby feeding spoon of poultry spice. This last was due to the fact that Black has taken a long time to get into lay from whatever bad experience she had before us.
Their water is changed every morning as well - it is a bottle drinker so keeps quite well - and that is tap water with a half a teaspoon of cider vinegar in it. They have bird grit available at all times, but generally seem to ignore it.
In addition they get fresh vegetable waste (tomato innards, melon innards, cucumber, lettuce, spinach), some cooked vegetable waste from time to time (potato peelings, carrot peelings, courgette, mashed potato but only if they are very good), and very occasional treats of other cooked waste - spaghetti is a particular favourite, and most chickens like the odd crust of baguette, but not our current three.
As well, when we are working in the garden, they get non-poisonous weeds to work through, including grasses but not lawn mowings, spent bits of plants (broad bean stems and leaves, cabbages, Swiss chard), slugs and small snails from the beer traps or that we find when we lift anything up, worms, over-ripe cherries and strawberries that are past their best.
They eat anything they can catch too. Don't be surprised to see your chickens eating flies and butterflies for example. Perhaps the most disgusting things they eat are baby birds and any mice that they can get their beaks on, but as hens have no teeth, you can imagine that this is a pretty disgusting process. We don't give them those, but if they catch something, we don't stand a chance of getting it back off them.
We never give them meat scraps (beef, lamb, pork, poultry, etc) or eggs.
In return, the eggs we get have yolks the colour of Sunny Delight, but are much nicer tasting to my mind.
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