You can’t get chickens before you’ve bought them some food and supplies. But before you get your chickens you don’t really know what they eat, and talk of mash, pellets, grit, spice and vinegar, can be somewhat boggling.
Fortunately the breeder from whom we bought our hens also kitted us out with everything they needed to eat and thrive, saving us a lot of head-scratching. So, in the absence of any no-nonsense guides to starting with chickens, here’s a shopping list for wannabe home-flock keepers.
The bulk of your chickens’ diet will be layers pellets or layers mash. This is a complete food, like the biscuits you can feed a cat, containing all of the nutrients they need to survive. The pellets are small, compacted rolls of their food, each one a little smaller than a Tic Tac. The mash, meanwhile, is a powder that you mix with water to form a kind of porridge. As you can imagine, pellets are by far the easiest to work with, as you can just full the feeder direct from the bag without any mixing up.
You should be paying about £1 per kilo for layers pellets or mash, and there seems to be no saving to be made by buying one in preference to the other. We’re using pellets.
You’ll want to keep your chickens happy, so add some poultry spice to their feed. Because they have no taste buds, they have no idea what the pellets or mash taste like, but they do have a good sense of smell and so will be tempted to eat more and stay healthy by the liquorice aroma of poultry spice.
Not only do they not have taste buds, but they also don’t have teeth, so they can’t break up their food in their mouths. Instead they swallow it whole into their crop, which is a cavity in their chest at the bottom of their neck. The crop is a mass of strong muscles used to grind the food with help of some small pieces of grit. You therefore need to give them a ready supply of grit, and can buy pieces broken down to the optimum size of around 3 – 5mm.
Hens are hard-working animals, popping out an average of six eggs a week once they get up to speed. Each egg has a shell, of course, which requires a great deal of calcium to make. This draws on their body’s natural resources and must be replenished, either by feeding them oyster shell or by baking the shells of used eggs to sterilise them, crushing them up and feeding them back to the hens. Be careful not to feed them too much calcium, though, and don’t start giving it to them until they are laying.
That’s the basics. Give them plenty of water and feed them what we’ve outlined above and you should have a happy, healthy little flock. You can also optionally give them some apple cider vinegar to keep their plumage healthy.
However, like the rest of us they do enjoy a treat. We feed ours a handful of corn every evening, and give them offcuts from our vegetables (you’re not allowed to do this if you’re planning on selling your eggs). They particularly enjoy the green feathery tops off the carrots that we pluck out of the vegetable plot, and when they see us walking across the garden with one in our hands they race around the edge of the run in an effort to get to the bars first and so enjoy the choice pickings.
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{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
Garlic powder firms up their poo apparently and helps with it smelling less.
Bokashi is also useful if you want to use chicken poo on your vegetable plot. The poo itself is a very good fertiliser but over time it can make your soil very acidic. You can add lime to the earth to counter this, but if you would rather not be digging that into your patch then mixing this into their feed should help neutralise it.
I caught 5 wild hens and put them in a fenced area and a hen house, as an experiment to get them for eggs. After about 6 weeks, I have gotten merely 7 eggs.
They will hardly touch the Layers Crumbles (Mash?) and are frightfully shy of humans. I try to get them alternate foods, like worms, kitchen scraps, which they love to scratch, as the run area is devoid of bugs and plants.
Do you know any crops I could grow that they would really love to eat?
Wild hens? Where did you manage to catch them. Are you sure they aren’t someone else’s hens out for a wander?
If they really are wild hens then perhaps they aren’t hybrids bred specifically for their egg-laying abilities. In nature, hens will only lay about four eggs a year in total. It’s only because we have cross-bred them to lay an egg most days that we get so many eggs from them in a domestic environment.
Chickens will eat most green crops and will pull apart your vegetable plot if you let them stray into it, which is why we keep ours well away from our vegetables. However, we do feed them the green feathery tops from our carrot plants, which they love with a passion.
Just don’t give them potatoes or potato peelings as they are poisonous to chickens.
Hi, Curious about the potatoes. My chickens seem to like french fries. Does the cooking perhaps break down the poisons? My chickens wandered into my yard around christmas and have set up house under an old trailer. The 2 hens are each sitting on about 9 eggs I expect will hatch next week sometime. The rooster is very protective. They seem to be living a more ‘wild’ lifestyle but I imagine they were part of someones more domestic flock at some point. They do very will scratching around the yard for food. I do supplement it with grains from the feed store. I am thinking about growing a garden of food just for them. I see carrots are very appealing. Are there other vegetables they might like?
Re: potatoes. Yes, they can eat them cooked. A favourite of the ones my Dad keeps is the potato peelings (with whatever other veg leftovers from the kitchen) microwaved up in a little water and mixed into their mash in the morning. Particularly nice on a cold winter’s morning! Gets them all out of bed and off to a good start
Hi. Im new to keeping chickens. I mean there not here yet but will be arriving in a few weeks. I’ve read above you dont feed vegetable scraps if you intend selling the eggs. Why is this and is it for UK folk as alot is American stuff on internet. Any other “dislikes” in veggies, scraps etc? Look forward to reply.
how much feed should you give a laying hen as a days minimum?
Milly
P.S. regular size chicken
We put out enough food for each chicken to eat 150g of layers pellets per day… assuming, that is, they all share it out equally.
Is it OK to feed chickens Parsnip Tops and Runner Bean Tops from the garden?
It shouldn’t do them any harm. We feel parsnip tops and peelings to ours but they don’t pay them much attention if there is anything more colourful on offer.