The chickens have proved to be a great addition to our self-sufficiency drive. They provide us with eggs, most obviously, but also help at both ends of the chain when it comes to growing veg.
For one thing, they eat all of our off-cuts. The peelings from our carrots, which they particularly enjoy, the skin of our beetroot, the ends of our beans, the feathery tops of our carrots and so on all go into the run and are gobbled up right away. The only thing we don’t give them is potato skin, as it’s poisonous.
This week, though, we’ve started digging in their manure to help with growing the veg they so love. It’s their little contribution to the food cycle, although they don’t know it.
It felt good to be digging it in. It’s been building up on the top of the plot for the last few weeks, but with the ground so hard it’s been impossible to turn over. So it’s been sitting there, looking ugly but at least scaring off the neighbourhood cats, which have always had a thing for scratching around in the plot and fertilising it themselves.
If it does what it should, we could have a bumper crop this summer.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
If you boil the skins for half an hour or so then the Chickens can eat them. Ours love it. Especially on a cold morning. It makes a nice warm treat for them.
Yeah, we did this too and our girls love it.
We just got our first batch of manure (horse) and it’s been sitting out in the cold waiting for the day we get around to spreading it.
It’s pretty fresh. Any ideas on how we can rot it quicker?
when you have baked potato if you dont eat the skins feed them to the chickens,also as they love worms i give them any fat off of meat which they like.also the odd bird fatball as a treat,and dried worms which are cheap to by.
You could put the manure on your compost heap. When it’s all mixed around with the busy bacteria in there is might rot down more quickly. To be honest, though, we put ours straight onto the plot, leave it there for a couple of days and then dig it into the ground. We are adding Bokashi bran to the chickens’ food to make it less acidic.