Can chickens eat June bugs?

The last few weeks here in Pennsylvania we have been dealing with a massive amount of June bugs. My chicken's couldn't be happier. I started noticing it when I left a bucket outside overnight. It had a bit of water in it and it just happened to be on the ground under the garage door light. In the morning it was full of June bugs!

I decided to pour the whole thing into my chickens water bowl to see if they'd eat the bugs and they gobbled up every single one!

That's how I found out that chickens can eat June bugs!
But I started thinking if they are okay for chickens to eat? Is there any harm chickens eating june bugs? Are they too big? Will chickens choke on a bug that big?

How to raise chickens cheaply

Lots of people get chickens for eggs and then realize how much money they spent on those precious eggs! It's not uncommon to be over $1,000 dollars in before the first egg, especially if you raise your hens from chicks! I've made it my mission to find as many ways to save money on chickens as possible. 

I  have various ways to cut money off my chicken keeping expenses. I grow some of my own feed, I find cheaper alternatives to use for coop bedding, we've built our own coops and bought others off craigslist and I try to do everything pretty much myself. 

While I still have some chickens expenses, I've managed to cut my costs an incredible amount saving half off my feed bill alone, in just one year!

Here are my top 20 ways to save money raising backyard chickens.

Homemade flock block recipe

A few days ago I was replying to comments on my posts and somebody asked me what homemade flock block recipe I use. I realized I had never written about it and promised to post it this week...so here it is! I make my flock block with my chickens health and my pocketbook in mind. It's sort of a throw it together recipe that ends up producing flock blocks that are much cheaper than the store bought ones!

Yeay for frugal chicken keeping!

My flock block recipe has seeds, a little bit of layer feed, oats, some fresh carrots, mealworms, eggs, molasses and coconut oil. That is it! I do not add any type of vitamin supplement to the recipe because it's just a treat and as such does not have to fill any nutritional requirements. Super easy to make!

How to grow sunflowers for chicken feed

Feeding chickens can get really expensive! Many chicken keepers like to cut their feed costs by growing some feed or treats for their chickens. Sunflowers are an easy to grow feed source for chickens that blend in perfectly in any yard or garden.

Since black oil sunflower seeds are a favorite treat of most chickens it just makes sense to grow your own!

There are several types of sunflowers you can grow for chicken feed.

I've grown everything from the black oil sunflower seeds that you commonly buy for chicken treats and the common mammoth sunflower, to ornamental Teddy Bear sunflowers. 

The larger sunflowers obviously produce more sunflower seeds. They also produce larger seeds. Each sunflower head produces between 1000-2000 seeds!

Smaller ornamental varieties don't produce as many seeds but the seeds they do produce are still edible.

Many of the sunflower varieties have been developed more for the flower than the seeds, so you might have to try a few varieties and see what produces the most seed for the type you want to grow. 

Ornamental varieties are usually small enough to fit into flower gardens or even containers. Which is great because no matter what the size of the garden spot you have you can find a sunflower to fit!

Even most ornamental varieties it will still produce feed for your chickens. Every bit of feed that you can grow makes the feed bill cheaper!

Raising mealworms for free chicken feed

Over the years I've raised mealworms for chicken feed many many times. In fact, I do it almost every spring/summer. It's when winter hits that I never wanted to bring them into the house so I'd give them all to the chickens. My chickens love the mealworms, and raising them is much more frugal than buying them...so last year I finally started raising them in the house during the winter. It's not so bad.

Mealworms are small, quiet, don't smell, don't take up much room and require only a few minutes of time every few days once established. A mealworm farm can be kept in an aquarium or plastic tote. 

You don't have to worry about them getting out since mealworms cannot climb up the sides of glass or plastic containers. 

Cost of raising mealworms

But lets talks about the free feed aspect which is one of my favorite topics! A container of mealworms is around $5 to get your mealworm farm started. You'll need oats (dollar store) or wheat bran for bedding and some fruit or vegetable scraps for food. 

They get all the moisture they need from their food so you won't need to give them water. 

I use plastic bins from the dollar store, but an old aquarium or rubbermaid tote works fine too. As you can see it's pretty cheap to set this up. I spent around $10 to start my current mealworm farm and it's been producing treats for my chickens and ducks for almost 18 months! 

I would have fed my chickens at least 2 bags of mealworms by now, and at about $25 a bag....that's a big savings!

200 Free chicken feed sources, the ultimate list!

Saving money while raising chickens is one of my favorite topics with feeding my chickens for free being my ultimate goal. (I know, talk about this a lot!) Of course cheap chicken feed ranks pretty high on my list of favorite things too! Everyone wants to feed chickens without buying commercial chicken feed, right? But what do chickens eat besides chicken feed?

I went in search of every free and cheap chicken feed source I could find and I found a lot of common advice and several outside the box amazing ideas for feeding the chickens for free, or cheap!

Many of us have the same free chicken feed ideas and some of the advice I saw often was: 

• allow the chickens to free range
• give them scraps and leftovers from the kitchen
• cook extra eggs for the chickens
• grow fodder for the chickens
• ferment layer feed

These were the methods that everybody had tried and had great success with. Of course I already use those ideas, so I was looking for new substitutes for chicken feed.

How I saved $450 on chicken feed last year (you can too!)

A few years back I wrote a post about my farm expenses for the year. In those expenses I had spent a whopping $1140 for chicken feed! That is a lot of money for chicken feed! Of course you can't have chickens without feeding them so it is a necessary expense. That is a lot of money to spend on chicken feed though, don't you agree?

I love to save money and I knew I could do better so I set out to save at least half of my feed bill. Unfortunately, I failed. I only managed to save about $450. However I did learn a lot in the last 2 years and by using these methods, I'm on track to save over half of my feed bill for this year!

Planting a chicken feed garden

As you know I'm a huge fan of feeding chickens for free or on the cheap. I realized a few years back that if I make a small effort to plant some extra vegetable plants when I'm planting my garden, I can use those for feed for the chickens and make a dent in my feed bill. 

What started as an extra zucchini and some tomato plants is now a cute little chicken garden.

I choose the plants based on how much they produce in a small area and how easy it is to feed it to the chickens. Things that need chopped up or cooked before being fed to the chickens do not make it to the chicken garden (I'm looking at you kohlrabi) 

I don't usually buy plants for this garden. Well, except for last year when I thought I picked up 4 cucumber plants and they were actually zucchini. I had already started zucchini seeds. *sigh* Into the chicken garden they went! 

But otherwise, I either start from seed (preferably seeds that I get on sale!) or dig out the volunteers that always pop up in my garden and move them over to the chicken garden. 

Sadly, as much as I would love to say I can let the chickens in their garden, they absolutely destroy it. I need to fence them out and instead I have to take the veggies to them. 

It's a simple step though that saves tons of cash off my feed bill plus it helps keep them at a healthy weight! Here's what I usually plant in the chicken garden.

Why I finally started fermenting chicken feed.

I have heard about fermenting chicken feed for quite some time now but was hesitant to try it. I had a fermented foods issue years back that left my kitchen smelling horrible for a week!

I did not want to repeat that again, so even though I had heard about the health benefits of feeding fermented feed to chickens, I just couldn't take that leap to get started! I had completely avoided the idea until about 2 months ago.

I had bought my usual stack of bags of layer pellets from the feed store and one of them was about half feed dust.

This chicken feed dust was accumulating in the bottom of the feeders, largely getting ignored, and basically being wasted. I started looking for ways to feed it to the chickens since I'm frugal and I didn't want to throw it out.

What started out as looking for chicken feed mash recipes, ended up being a fermented feed experiment!

Feeding chickens your holiday leftovers

As the holidays pass any of us that  have hosted a party or gathering will soon find ourselves staring into the refrigerator wondering "what am I going to do with all these leftovers?" As chicken keepers, most of us like to give leftover food to the chickens. They love the treat and it's a frugal way to lighten up the feed bill a little. 

In the winter I even warm the leftovers up for them since it's so cold outside. (I know I'm not the only one!) Holiday dishes though, can contain ingredients we don't use the rest of the year. This can bring up the question of whether it's safe to let the chickens eat it, or not? 

I've talked about feeding chickens for free many times in the past as saving money on my feed bill is something I'm always thinking about. 

Have you seen my feed expenses? Take a look, you'll understand!

I hate to waste anything that I can give to the chickens and today I wanted to talk about what kinds of holiday leftovers you can and cannot feed your chickens and guinea fowl.

Every year I grow a garden for my chickens, but it didn't start out that way! Let me explain. I learned a long time ago that when I plant my garden every year I need to plant what we will eat, not just what I want to grow. It sounds so logical, but all those pretty plants and seed packets tend to suck me in and next thing I know I have things planted that look great and grow great but I just can't use them all! Luckily I can feed any garden extras to the chickens and they absolutely love fresh fruits and veggies. 

It started out quite by accident. I had way overplanted a certain vegetable. So, the first garden plant that went to the chickens was kohlrabi. Yes, it actually is good and we do like it, but we cant eat more than a little bit so when I bought a few packs of 4 seedlings it was way too many. Especially since they were all the same age and therefore all ready for harvest at the same time. It's just so much kohlrabi! (read the summer of kohlrabi story here) Same with pumpkins, hot peppers and a few other things that tend to be ready to harvest all at once. 

Gardening for chickens

Some of these vegetables I can pass on to the chickens which is great for cutting the feed bill. I talk about that in the post Free Feed: Garden Rejects. I also grow many plants just for the chickens. Some of it we don't use like Amaranth (though we could eat the leaves). Others are just an overabundance of something we like. Here are a list of easy to grow, high producing crops that I grow just for the chickens...

Free Feed: Weeds! Yes...really!

I’m back, with more ideas on cutting your flock’s feed bill by using free chicken feed sources. Layer feed can get expensive so I try to cut costs as much as possible by finding various ways to feed my chickens, ducks and guinea fowl. We've talked about Garden Rejects and cooking damaged or dirty eggs as frugal feed sources for your chickens. This time we’re looking at weeds. Yes, really!

Not only are many weeds highly nutritious and completely edible, but it’s an awesome motivation to start weeding that garden! There are literally dozens of weeds that you could be feeding your chickens and they will love you for it. Here are a few that I feed to my chickens on a regular basis and they grow just about everywhere.

Weeds chickens can eat:

Smartweed: This one is pretty easy to spot because of it’s pretty pink seed like flowers. I’ve always called it Lady’s thumb, but its actually called smartweed and the chickens go nuts for it. This is another one that is extremely easy to pull, it comes out by the handfuls with very little effort. (upper left corner)

Free feed, garden rejects

This is the time of year when the chickens just get to go crazy eating fresh produce. The ones that can't free range especially love it! They get to 'help' me garden by eating up all the produce that I deem not fit for human consumption. 

This can include a tomato that split, some cucumbers that something or other crawled all over and ate trails into, corn that the corn worms found, zucchini that hid under a leaf until it grew too big and seedy or even peppers that got knocked off the plant too soon. Everything gets chopped up and fed to the chickens.

I cut off any moldy spots, but if I find some corn worms or cabbage worms...I just leave them. That's extra protein! I chop the whole bunch of veggies up and add in any weekly leftovers, stale bread etc. The chickens and Guineas love it and as I've said before: the more free feed I can give them, the more the feed bill goes down. 

I also grow a few plants just for them. Mostly 'volunteer' tomato plants that just sorta pop up on their own. I'm sure it's from tomatoes dropping the year before, but the seedlings grow wherever they want and I tend to just leave them if I can and then harvest the veggies for the chickens. This year I forgot that I started green pepper plants from seed and bought some seedlings at the nursery. I planted the extra seedlings and fed the extra peppers to the chickens. 

Cheap seeds for growing feed plants

At Walmart this week I found a bunch of seed packets on sale. They were $.10 each so I bought some for my chicken feed garden. The downside is that they are last years seeds. However, many seeds are viable for at least 2 years. After that they don't all just die...but your germination rate will drop. The upside is that whatever seeds do germinate and grow, produces plants just as healthy as their non-expired counterparts which the chickens then eat. 

I picked up several packets when I was there. The flowers are just mainly to replace some that the flock have dug up. The pumpkins, tomatoes, squash, lettuce and cucumbers are for feed plants. The herbs and marigolds are to use for the chickens. 

Related reading: How to hack a chicken egg, learn how to use marigolds to make your chickens lay eggs with orange yolks!

Growing fodder for chicken feed (cheaply)

I'm sure by now you've seen all the posts about growing fodder for chicken feed. You've probably also read (or participated) in the countless forum threads happening on various chicken sites. I'm not going to bore you with the details you've probably already read. Instead, since I'm frugal I'm going to show you how to do it CHEAPLY.

I've seen some beautiful fodder systems, but many of them seem to be either very expensive to build (yes, I said build) or they happen to have access to a lot of raw materials that most of us don't have. I have to say I am mighty impressed with the automatic watering systems some have set up, but I can't wire a darn thing to save my life! 

So let's start with the easy-peasy cheap way to do it.

Free feed, restaurant produce

Do you have any idea how much food a restaurant throws away every day? Let me rephrase that.....do you have any idea how much "good" food a restaurant throws away every day? How about half a garbage bag full of brand new salad? That's right. 

Health code rules read something like this: (their phrasing is less easy to understand though) If food sits out for more than an hour, it cannot be refrigerated again. I'm seriously paraphrasing there, but the idea is that when they fill those huge salad hoppers in the kitchen everything that isn't sold must be pitched at the end of the day. It can't be re-refrigerated overnight for the next day. 

That is a serious waste of good food! Since I'm a frugal chicken keeper, I opened my big mouth at a local restaurant and asked if my critters could have it. This is what I came home with:

Free feed for chickens: ask for restaurant excess!

That is ONE day's salad waste. That is a 30 gallon garbage bag! Now of course, some days more salads sell and there is less left over. Other days there is more. There is not a darn thing wrong with it other then the fact that it was closing time at the restaurant.

This isn't limited to just restaurants. I know a goat farm that gets all the pre-made fruit and veggie trays that don't sell from their local grocery store. I know another person that picks up old produce from a grocery store every week. Point is, it doesn't hurt to ask. Make sure you mention 'animal feed' as there are regulations about giving this stuff out for people to eat! Just make sure to cut away any moldy spots (though bruised spots are ok) before you feed the fruit or veggies to your flock.

It's winter here now and most of the greenery has died off. It makes me feel a whole lot better about the flocks diet when I can fill their bowls with fresh greens! Plus, it really cuts down on my feed bill by adding this and other sources of free or cheap feed to their diets!

~L  

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Can chickens eat scrambled eggs?

Confession time, my chickens are spoiled. It's true. I really pamper them, in fact....I cook for my chickens. No no, I don't cook my chickens, silly! I cook them breakfast! Usually it's what I call scrambled yukky eggs. Bear with me here because its not quite as gross as it sounds!

I have a few hens that like to hang out in the nest boxes longer then they should. I also have a few banty hens that like to sleep in the nest boxes. It's only makes sense that sometimes a bit of chicken poo winds up in the nest boxes. I clean them out in the mornings, but if someone already laid an egg by the time I get there....yuck! 

That one goes straight to the 'yukky egg basket'. Now, I know that many people just scrape or wipe off the eggs and use them, and for eating that is usually fine. However, I hatch most of my eggs and I have a fear of introducing bacteria into my incubators. It could ruin a whole hatch if an egg would spoil and explode during incubation.

There's a reason they're called stink bombs! Anyway, since I incubate most of our eggs, this leaves me with an often full 'yukky egg basket'. Also in winter if an egg freezes and splits it's not safe for humans to eat, so those get cooked too. 

If I get a particularly bloody eggs (as far as blood spots go) I'll cook that one for the chickens too. Basically they get everything we won't eat!

Feeding pumpkin to chickens

Carving Pumpkins into jack-o-lanterns is the sure sign that Halloween is almost here! I had great fun carving a chicken into mine this year. (ok, I do that every year! lol)

We cleaned and roasted the seeds for snacking, but what to do with all that orange goo that's left over? Feed it to the chickens of course! 

The best part about feeding fresh pumpkin to chickens is that you don't have to cook it or even carve it really.

In fact, if you use real pumpkins for Halloween decorations your chickens may have already taken a few bites out of them! 

If you want though you can cut the pumpkin up for the chickens. You can also puree it, but that takes more work.

Why feed chickens pumpkin?

Well, why let it go to waste, right? Besides, pumpkin is one of the healthiest treats you can give chickens! 

Pumpkin is high in Vitamin A which is an essential vitamin for chickens. Vitamin A deficiency in chickens can cause pale combs and wattles, nasal discharge, poor growth and poor feathering among other problems.

Pumpkin also contains vitamins B, C and zinc which can benefit chickens. Pumpkin seeds contain vitamin E.