When we had the chicken farm, we sold the eggs on a commercial basis, so we had to be very careful what we fed them. As a result, we had a barn stacked with big bags of food – both pellets and mash – that we would feed to the hens morning and afternoon.
As we’re not selling the eggs from our home flock – we only have three hens, after all – we can supplement this food with cuttings from the kitchen. They eat almost anything, so long as you’ve prepared it the way they like.
Those beaks may be capable of meting out a fairly fierce nip, you see, but they don’t like pecking away at big chunks of hard vegetables. Tomatoes, yes. Broccoli stalks, no way. We hung one up in the run and it’s been there two weeks now, completely untouched.
They probably think it’s part of the fabric of their home by now.
So this morning I cut up last night’s broccoli stalk and cauliflower leaves into smaller pieces, mixed them in with some carrot peelings and an apple that had gone brown and pulpy, and threw them into the run as I topped up the feeder with their regular layers pellets.
What a difference. They leapt down from the top run of the ladder and landed in the middle of the offcuts on which they gorged for the next 15 minutes, completely ignoring the pellets.
We’re coming to the end of a 20kg bag of those pellets now, and we’ll be buying another one at the weekend, by which time we’ll have had them 10 weeks.
So each of them has eaten just over 600g of food a week. That’s less than most an adult humans would eat in a single evening meal, but it’s still good to know that by recycling our offcuts this way we’ve effectively swapped what would otherwise have been put in the bin for fresh eggs to make another meal.
That’s true recycling.
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