FREE Chicken Food! 'Weeds' are superfoods
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 3 พ.ค. 2023
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How much does this reduce your feed bill? Do you feed commercial feed?
Done, least i can do. One love
Never having heard of a hori hori before now, my tool of choice is serrated steak knives. I worked many years in restaurants. They must be removed from the restaurant if the handle is damaged. I volunteered to remove them.
Words can't express how grateful I am for all the info you've shared with the world over the years. I can only hope to help others as much as you have in my life. Thank you 🤘
Looks like a good time. My girls were hard a work making me a new garden bed today. They are going to sleep well tonight!
Great permaculture wisdom ! Makes weeding a satisfying experience
It’s Amazing how chickens can help in the garden and make eggs
Our hens are kept in their pen right now because they make a mess of the annual garden. I do let them out for the last couple hours of the day to forage, so I have to keep an eye on them to keep them away from our seedlings. Watching them, I notice they love eating plantain and scratching up worms and bugs. The rooster keeps an eye on the girls as well and makes sure they all come back to the pen at night.
Wise words - I had the same evolution of thinking behind me. When I started out gardening I "hated" dandelion because it was overgrowing everything. Now after some years I had been able to clear the spots from dandelion where I dont want it to grow and the rest is welcome food for my hens.
Thanks for what you do, you inspire and give food for thought with every new video!
What I always say WRT weeding. I'm either collecting hens feed or compost material. Sometimes I'm collecting a wild salad for myself! 😁
Love it, been gathering weeds everyday for our chickens and ducks. I have my neighbor on board as well who loves bringing the girls fresh weeds every few days. Been gathering leaf bags as well for the runs and compost heaps which the girls love. Yesterday my clothes line was full of leaf bags drying out to save.
In the 1950s I raised chickens in dry, West Texas. To save money, I would drive to a location near a small lake where Johnson grass grew in ditches on the side of the road and I would cut large amounts of this grass to feed mi chickens. While performing that function, I saw a rattlesnake trying to escape from a King Snake. It failed and was devoured.
Garlic mustard spreads prolifically, but is also very tasty and healthy for both humans and chickens.
Awesome, I do the same thing with my rabbits. They always eat the best, dandelion, dead nettle, plantain, etc.
After following the Edible Acres journey since last summer, it feels extra good to watch this video knowing I've now been able to implement some of these practices. The chicken yard is taking shape. Can't wait to start on some water catchment.
So great Ashley!
Was just doing this with my chickens yesterday! We’re introducing two flocks together and there was no fighting or pecking because everyone was so interested in the greens. Good nutrients and also apparently a social ice breaker. 😄
Growing up we had rabbits and were blessed with several different kinds of Plantago (plantain), chickweeds, and pigweed and we would also cut fresh clover & alfalfa from the hay field to feed to them. We loved all those "weeds" cause we would weed the garden and feed the rabbits on that all spring, summer and fall giving fresh living nutrition. Rabbits also ate maple, apple, mulberry, willow cuttings and all of that fresh fodder and forage produced lovely meat and new bunnies, and reduced the feed bill.
There is a reason why the bible doesn't recommend eating certain types of animal flesh. You have touched on the reasons for rabbits to be avoided some here.
@Soil food web warrior You're not understanding the Bible when you think it's referring to you about certain meats you can't eat. There are scriptures about not eating certain foods, but it was for a certain group of people during that period of time. It doesn't apply to you and me
I just dump it in a big pile and by the end of the day it's all been spread out and flattened. (I'm a big fan of letting the hens do the work so I can save my energy for other projects!) I dig out the roots and all in a clump so there's usually bugs and worms in the mix too, which is even more exciting for them. There are always plenty more dandelions anyway without leaving them to re-sprout. 😅
One of my girls loves the flowers of garlic mustard. You sort of see her head pop up and down in a sea of green as she grabs the little white flowers.
Ours too!
I fed a bunch of garlic mustard to my friends’ chickens this spring. It’s such a destructive plant in our context (spreads uncontrolled, smothers spring ephemerals, bad for biodiversity and resilience), and it felt good to simultaneously get the garlic mustard out of the woods and give the hens a snack.
Thanks for highlighting these plants! I have been ripping out garlic mustard the past few years, exactly for the reason you mentioned: our neighbor (a master gardener!) was on a crusade against them, he even asked if he could pull them out in the shoulder along our property. Now I'll definitely add them to the chicken-compost. I've been wanting to ask your opinion on the ban on currants and gooseberries, still active in some states and towns. This year, I tried to order both from a nursery in my state, 28 miles away, that legally can grow both, yet is not allowed to sell them to my location! I then found out that this ban exists in my town (but not in all towns in Massachusetts). Apparently, about a hundred years ago it was discovered that a White Pine-killing fungus (white pine blister rust) also uses currants and gooseberries. Since then, resistant plants have been developed, and so the ban is now lifted in many states. Do you think continuing a ban in places like my Western Massachusetts town is justified?
You should probably let your neighbor pull the garlic mustard. Hand pulling is extremely low impact for the rest of the environment, and your land will be a richer and more diverse ecosystem for local species. Making use of them (eating them, feeding them to chickens, etc.) is smart, but protecting and/or propagating garlic mustard degrades habitat over time.
We don't have chickens, so most of our weeding, thinning, and such, goes into the pathways of our front yard garden, and if there is too much for that at one time, into the compost pile.
Nice to see you make videos again on a regular basis
Recently I threw some box elder boughs to the hens.
They usually shred or eat any green thing, but these have been ignored.
There might just be too much other stuff for them to deal with, between spring comfrey and lots of Aldi dumpster produce.
I’ve found that my hens are very smart about their approach to novel foods. Often when they are offered something new, they will peck at it a bit, but mostly leave it. Then when it is offered again, they may eat more, or ignore it completely. I think they taste just enough to determine if it sets well the first time, and decide whether they want to eat it or not. So I don’t assume that they don’t like something because they don’t eat it the first time or two they’re exposed to it.
@@anna9072 I think they are just looking for real nutrition from Bugs and worms. Left to free-range chickens won't eat a lot of dandelion. Often they'll Miss entire sunflowers, letting them grow above their heads.
@@msb8013 I’m certainly not going to argue that chickens don’t love bugs and worms, but mine, who are 100% free range, also go for greens, fruits, and seeds with enthusiasm. But it’s a learning curve, especially for hens who grew to adulthood only getting commercial feed. Just because they didn’t find box elder particularly attractive (it has kind of tough leaves, doesn’t it?), it doesn’t mean they aren’t interested in greens in general.
@@anna9072 my mine are free-range as well and they've always gotten lots of protein. I'm just saying that they prefer seeds to cracked corn. And they prefer a lot of other leaves to dandelion, of which I have some fine specimens which are untouched. All I'm saying is that when they're out there nibbling the grass they're real happy to find a cricket. You can tell which foods they like the best by giving them the food's all at once and seeing which ones they choose to eat first. They will always choose fat and protein first.
Can’t say I’m a fan of dandelions, my chickens don’t seem to really eat them either that I have noticed anyway? But we have thousands of dandelions on our property and the chickens do get to free range from sun up to sun down everyday as the chickens want to go out and free range. Naturally when weather bad the chickens don’t go far from the coop usually and stay under cover. Either inside the coop or under the coop since their coop is 3 feet off the ground. I planned it that way so the chickens would have a 12’X 12’ covering under the coop to stay out of the rain. Which the chickens agreed it’s a good place to hide from getting wet! Anyway, I’m fairly new to raising chickens, kind of learning as I go along. A lot of what I do is trial and error and hopefully have more success than errors? Which that in mind, I’m planning on plowing up a considerable amount of property in my front field where my chickens live at majority of the time. Even though they do roam all over our 5 acres too! But I’m hoping to encourage the chickens to spend more time on the front field by giving them basically their own chickens garden growing anything from clovers to other vegetables chickens like to eat. Let the chickens have their own way with their garden growing and see how it goes? Depending how it works, may have to keep the chickens out for a while till some plants grow more? Again it’s an experiment for me to see how well it works feeding the chickens and keeping feed costs down hopefully? Of course always glad to listen to others ideas too! I’m always open minded to learning other ideas. Especially the better ideas then what I have! 😂
I think you're on the right track. Digging a bunch of holes will give them a chance at the nutrition they prefer from other animals as well as a place to dust bathe. I recommend planting the area with sunflower, protect the little sunflowers with a tomato trellis or something until it's taller than they are at which point they will not eat the leaves. They do prefer seeds to leaves. I've seen chickens walk over cantaloupe Vines until they produce cantaloupes. I'm currently experimenting with all vegetables to notice how much and at what point the chickens will disturb the veggies. So far eggplants are safe but tomatoes are not. Corn is like sunflower once it's taller than they are it's safe from them. Don't forget about brush piles and logs which you can roll every couple of days and provide the chickens with the worms and bugs they prefer. Doing things on the Fly the way you're doing them is likely to teach you more then you can learn from 100 TH-cam videos.
Very cool, thanks you guys.
Hey Sean, love all the great information in this video and everything you’ve taught us over the years have incorporated so many of your methods to help boost our chickens, health, and nutrient intake, while lowering our cost at the same time, you are a wealth of knowledge, not only to your fellow New Yorkers, like me but also the entire world thanks for what you do the hops, hazelnuts and pawpaw’s we purchased last year have come back and are healthy and happy and so are we looking to purchase more trees to add in in the future. thanks for what you do
SO glad to have you as a part of our extended community, thanks kindly!!
Absolutely wonderful as always Sean. Thank you so much! 😍💚🙏🌱🍄🪱
Natural Grocers by Vitamin Cottage organic grocery chain saves their produce scraps in a giant bag and you can get them for free if there is one in your local area.
Those are some beautiful, healthy looking chickens, great video, and great job too.❤
Hey! Purple dead nettle...didn't know what it was but have it newly growing in the yard this year😂.😊
Do you notice the color of the egg yolks change as the hens have more access to greens in the spring?
Yes! They improve quite a bit. We are always trying to bring more nourishment to them to help boost their vitality and therefore the eggs too!
So glad spring has arrived for you upstate! ❤ Hope you have the most abundant year yet!
I can’t trust my neighbors... they love to spray roundup. They refuse to listen to reason. I am finding bees dead. I am just so sad about how willfully ignorant these people are.
I'm really sorry to hear this. It seems like a very common picture folks are dealing with. Hoping something can shift there :(
Another fantastic video!
Can you give us a update on your PawPaw and are you selling any paw paw??
Paw Paws are growing wonderfully, at our larger site they are really coming into bearing age. We plan to sell seedlings again next spring
Great content, thanks for posting. In Thailand, I strip leaves off of our numerous banana plants and the hens devour them in no time. Cheers Roger
Neat!
@@edibleacres Yep, and plant 0ne and in a year there's 5-10 new plants. Great bio mass as well. Cheers All the best. Roger
Excellent idea on chicken weeder thought! Goats are used for broadscale, why not chicken on the lot scale? Cool!
We work with who we can!
I just love watching your chicken videos. Your channel is my favourite by far. Question... I really want to add tons of fruit and veggie scraps and grains to my chicken run but am sure to attract rats. Have you ever had rats attack your chickens? That is one of my concerns.
We've never had rats attack our chickens. We've seen them in there once in a while but never as an issue for the hens
@@edibleacres Thank you very much.
My chickens LOVE purple dead nettle and dandelion!
Thats awesome to know!
Learning a lot, & starting my 3rd summer trying to do the same with my duck “family”😉 just a bit different
From 🇷🇺 with ❤️!
happy chicken sounds :)
The hens i work with are soooo picky, not a fan of dandelion plantain cleavers...veg scraps only !
Healthy vegetables
For chicken
Ahh chicken TV.
I've heard that garlic mustard (and alliums too, onion and actual garlic) will affect the flavor of eggs. Is this true? or not something to worry about
We haven't noticed it, but we also love garlic and onions and mustard so maybe we don't notice?!
Can I please ask when you grow cuttings straight in the ground, do you leave them for rest of year, or do you transplant at some point in season to a shady area of yard? If so, what point in the season do you do so? Thanks!
Some cuttings we put straight in to where they are to grow for the long run, some we do in a series or a line and then transplant in the fall or early spring after one season of growth. Depends on the goals we have in a given scenario...
@@edibleacres thanks!
The chickens love the weeds. I need to get some chickens.
They really love weeds
👍
If I could find a chicken that likes bind weed, they would never go hungry!!
Ah yes, that would be helpful!
I just managed to get my hands on some Azolla. Apparently full of vitamins a mineral for practically all animals. It apparently doubles and triples itself within days. Very nutritious from horses and cows right down to chickens and rabbits. I’m assuming you have your own variety of Azolla there. We have 2 natives here in Australia. Most farms end up with it growing on there dams.
Are you growing the azolla?
Is it ok to feed wild lettuce to chicken,? I have a ton of it
of course, if you wanted you could eat it. it is just wild lettuce as opposed to cultivated lettuce.
Seems very reasonable. In my opinion, if something is technically edible or medicinal for us, I am open to offering it to the hens
dang just paint the handle or tie a red ribbons on it...
Like that idea mine is wooden handle and I misplace it sometimes
Just because a chicken can eat something without it being acutely toxic don't mean you should feed it to them. The random scrap feeding with make your meat and eggs contain higher levels of toxins. It will also negatively effect the quality of their manure. It is cool if you don't want to listen, I understand believe me. However if you want to create better chicken and eggs you will feed your chickens less high carotenoid containing plants and plants with less overall chemical defenses. Weeds have lots of these, there are less than 25 essential minerals for humans the others are toxic.
Don't you think that chicken know which plants to eat and which not to? If they are free range, they make their own eating decisions, and as long as you aren't starving them, they will leave what they don't need and eat what they do.
Your words are written like a true atheist. Infuriating.
Sean, I’ve read that garlic mustard spreads so intensely because there aren’t the natural limitations that it has in its original habitat (makes sense). I’ve also read that it has allelopathic (sp) qualities and should be put in the trash like poison ivy, not added to the compost pile! The latter seems a little hysterical to me (there are loads of other plants growing around and among it), but I haven’t found any research on the subject. Do you know?
I've heard about how horrible it is that you need to burn it or put it in a dumpster, on and on... It is a high quality human food and certainly therefor a good chicken food and to my mind it is reasonable to say it is good soil food then, too!
Paint the handle of you old hori hori.