FREE Chicken Food! Sprouts for Days… A number of ways

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Happy growing!

it’s been a while since we’ve looked at the chicken yard and there’s a lot of neat new things happening like these particular new little friends there’s two moms two very very differently sized moms co-parenting a whole bunch of differently sized and colored babies they’ve been broody for a while and so we got them some baby chicks and now they’re all growing up together in a nice group there’s around 11 or 12 little ones and two moms sharing and they just bop around the yard and I’m mentioning them well I’m mentioning them because they’re really super sweet and cute but also we’ve been trying to focus some energy towards maximizing good quality feed for these little ones in a complex chicken system with a compost operation and lots and lots of hens let me share some ideas we want to maximize the amount of greens that these little ones can eat along with their moms of course and we’ve talked over the years about soaking seed and sprouting it we’ve talked about duckweed so here’s a little pond you can see what’s going on in there there’s 2×4 welded wire rings that keep the little ones safe they can grab onto it if they need to that one just demonstrated that whole process but they can free choice get in uh along these edges and pick duckweed out of the pond that’s a lovely source of green but we also love providing them sprouts come on little babies go find your mamas and I’ll link here if you’re interested in watching a video where we talked in greater detail about our sprouting process where we take whole viable seed that we get that’s actually lower cost than buying commercial feed whole seed that we soak overnight and then introduce into the system if the hens eat it all it doesn’t sprout but if it has a chance to sprout it turns really green in this video I want to show a couple very simple ways to get way more of the greens for your hens and way more uh total food out of a chicken composting system see out here in the wetness the crazy crazy wetness of the spring we’re still trying to move things forward i’ve been taking somewhat aged compost and creating it up to leave and as we sift our compost as we move through these food scraps and there’s sticks and there’s bones and things like that we make these compost rings on the margin of our composting system and I’ve mentioned this before but the idea of corn cobs and bones and debris that the chickens can’t really easily scratch through that mixed with some compost doesn’t have to be perfect doesn’t have to be a seed starting mix or anything like that but just somewhat aged composty soil is a great place to throw soaked seeds so in this case there’s wheat that’s coming up there might be a little bit of sunflower but we just basically threw seed that had soaked one night you don’t even have to do that if it’s good and moist out but in these compost rings with lots of woody debris and material the seeds have a chance to really sprout they can browse this periodically but they can’t kick it all apart here’s an additional layer to that idea where this is 2×4 welded wire the same stuff we made the compost rings out of and we took a 4ft section and just folded over one side folded over the other and where it was cut folded over folded it over and simply put that over a section of the compost that had been seated to the soaked grain that we put out for the hens you can see the greens are getting chewed on quite a bit but they’re not getting scratched apart so this is a way to have a continual flow of greens through the system what’s really nice with this is you can fluff it up periodically or put bricks underneath it especially if you’ve got little ones you’ve got little chicks in the system they can be underneath all this so if I put some logs or bricks they could fit through the the welded wire up to about a month or 2 months old month old and have the most choice to the fresh greens and exclude the other hens from kicking it apart could also take this and now simply move it over a little bit smooth this out and now this becomes green pasture and everybody gets to have an immense amount of fun within that one spot two ways within any chicken system to really add a ton of green is look for whole seed whole viable seed wheat does very well sunflowers work pretty darn well you know use what’s available to you and think about normal compost rings but seated with soaked seed on the top or just straight seed after or before a good rain and things like this this could also be pallets that go across here could be chicken wire with all sorts of other material very very simple and you can just see in a moment how effective that actually is let’s go even simpler for a moment and this isn’t necessarily about getting sprouts for your chickens but just having backup of tons of food now this isn’t stage this is just a board that’s been sitting near the coupe for a while maybe a week and that’s what’s happening underneath there now granted we’ve got a lot of fertility there’s many many hens in this system uh so the soil is basically teeming with worms at this point and having a board on the ground makes a really safe space for them to come up pill bugs will go under there as well if we put more wood chips and then a board on top it would be more pill bugs and millipedes and if it’s just in straight ground contact with really rich soil it’s worms so pretty wonderful amount of free food just by laying a board on the ground and you can see where some of these seeds landed they’re sprouting as well so I will let this be a little bonus moment for that red lady and others and repeat this very high-te system right there if you wanted to be real metal about it you could take an old skull that you found in the compost one time and move that after a while and where there was a hole in the skull the grasses are coming up and there’s red wiglers that were occupying the space that the teeth were is that macob or exquisite i don’t know but it is what it is there’s carbon there’s silica there’s raw ingredients all throughout the landscape in the world we just rearrange them to positive effect and pleasure when we can nothing like putting a skull on the ground in order to get sprouts and worms you can see where that little mom is very actively encouraging her kids to kick and explore about 20 minutes ago that was a pile of milk crates and bulb crates that have been sitting here for a week or two i wanted to tidy up and organize so I put them back but it’s a reminder that when you have piles of stuff you have an old bucket upside down you’ve got a tire laying there you got pile of cinder blocks in the chicken yard when you move them there is a bonus and the before you can imagine was just a pile of plastic and now it’s cleaned up and a nice snack for the two moms and their little kiddos outside of our chicken yard closer to our home is where we have another compost pile where we manage waste materials from different manure streams and food scraps that aren’t great for the hens there’s a two bay system here an eastern and a western we’re currently adding to that bay and we’re letting this bay rest and the day that I finished um smoothing out the compost this is all completely raw decomposing materials in uh that are isolated from the hens uh I just basically threw the same wheat that’s in their system so soft winter wheat it could be uh red winter wheat whatever sort of seed you have around and even though it’s by no means finished compost very clearly it’s growing lots of greens the soil the compost down below is probably about 90 or 100° F it needs a ways before it gets finished but I can just every few days grab a clump like this and take that clump and bring it in and put it on the ground and let the chickens completely rip this apart if I’m open to that they’ll get lots and lots of greens and then they can kick apart the root system and get the worms and the sugars and the roots as well and this will go right into the composting flow now of course I could reed right in there and that’s fine but maybe I want to clear out a whole area and seed something else or clear it and reset it so there’s different ages of wheat i can keep dragging this into the chicken yard or give them more total value by taking something like old pots maybe you’ve got 5gallon buckets with holes or cracks in them these happen to be nursery pots that aren’t in use for other things right now i just put some sawdust in the bottom of that one and then some sprouted seed in the bottom of this one and I can simply plant the top with these greens maybe leave it on the driveway or near uh the fence so they can pick through it or simply put it in the chicken yard and let them pick at it but not get everything and dump it later maybe this one I’ll just put a nice wad on top [Applause] we toyed with the idea of having a subscription service where once a week people could come and pick these up and bring their empties and have um fresh sprouts for their hens i wonder if there are people out there where that would be a neat little side project you have people pay a deposit for the container and then they get a thing loaded with wine cap strafaria and red wiglers and really verdant sprouts to feed their hens i mean heck you could even snip this and make juice out of it if you wanted so a compost pile that’s months away from being ready for the garden can still be a source of generating immense amount of food value those same seeds just exploded in total food value and vitamin C and E there’s all sorts of extra proteins the sugars get converted into more useful forms there’s lots of moisture there’s soil life there’s shading of the compost to help it finish there’s root exudates from the wheat that draw red wiglers to help uh nourish their situation and it just looks a little bit nicer so that’s a way to take a compost pile that’s nowhere near finished and have a continual wave of greens to feed your hands too that’s enough from me on this subject i’d love to hear from you in the comments share how you add extra green snacks or high value lowcost ethically generated treats for your hens do you have a really neat trick for red wiggler production or black soldierfly or maggots or something else that you want to share write in the comments let me know what I missed and hopefully for some of you out there that have a random board or an old skull or piles of scrap fencing or old buckets and hens this might have landed as a useful way to intersect some things [Applause] [Laughter]