Chickens are easy to feed, and a small backyard flock can be sustained from homegrown feed sources with good success. Many garden vegetables and produce are suitable for chicken feed, and having a home garden can create additional foraging ground for a backyard laying flock.
Letting Chickens Graze Garden Spaces
Many garden vegetables and winter cover crops are fantastic chicken feed, including clovers, winter wheat, oats, grasses and more. Place chickens into a fenced in garden area to scratch and dig for grubs, eat weeds and grass and clean up any leftover plant material from the previous season. If you don’t have a fenced garden, use a portable chicken tractor to house the chickens over a specific area of the garden.
Pests will be eliminated, the garden overturned and fertilized, and your food bill reduced. Not to mention that your chicken flock will be healthier and your eggs more nutritious! Some homesteaders also allow their flocks to roam through a fruit orchard and berry patches where they help clean up pests like weevils, grubs, cicadas and Japanese beetles.
Growing Crops for Additional Feed
If you have some garden space, homesteaders and backyard flock owners can grow some of their own chicken feed to get through the winter when less is available through free-range. If you have a cold-box, green house or ability to grow indoors, chicken owners can grow many of their own winter forage materials. Sprouting seeds are high in protein and other easy to grow crops like kale, rape, potatoes and winter squash (which store well over the winter) can provide supplementation for chickens.
Mulching Chicken Runs for Increased Forage Material
Another way to provide feed for chickens through the winter is to provide them with deep layers of mulch in their chicken coop, runs and other areas. While dormant grass would be destroyed by winter foraging, a chicken will find lots of organic material to eat by scratching through deep layers of straw, bark chips, shredded leaves and grass clippings.
In our family, we use mowed grass clippings and raked leaves to create a deep layer of mulch in the garden bed and chicken coop areas. Releasing the chickens into these areas during a sunnier winter day means a bustle of activity, squawking, scratching and fun with full crops to be enjoyed by all. A bit of chicken supplement feed scattered in the middle of the afternoon allows us to fill in any gaps, but our chickens are thriving in this type of situation.
Having the deep liter scattered about allows insects, earthworms and other yummies to have a place to live, giving your chickens something to dig for. In the spring, we just clean it up and throw it into the compost pile!
As a homesteader with a flock of layers, I’m still laughing at this post. growing some feed to “get them through the Winter”? If you want eggs from your layers, they need care and proper nutrients (and additional lighting) or you are putting your hens into a holding position when they could be a food source.
Grass clippings that have been bagged or set aside during warm weather are always moldy. Feeding chickens anything that is molded will present problems, illness, and even death.
You also said, “insects, earthworms and other yummies” in the Winter?? In most states, they have died or gone into Winter hibernation.
Did a bot write this post?!
I agree, I’ve been raising chickens for 20 years and this article is just silly….
That’s awesome you’ve been raising chickens so long! My in-laws have been raising chickens forever, but my husband and I are just starting out our family. And our tiny backyard garden/chicken flock and milk goats.
If you’d like to contribute some articles based on your experiences, we’d love to have your input! Especially since you’ve been doing it so long – the more the merrier. See the link at the top of the site for information about writing articles with Untrained Housewife.
So sorry, didn’t mean to offend. I agree that it sounded harsh. I should have explained myself instead of calling the article silly. Apologies.
No worries – I wear steel-toes.
@Cluck…apparently reading comprehension is not one of your best attributes. ‘Some’ implies just that. I grow beds or buckets of oat and rye grass that is clipped and added TO my chickens rations, it supplements ‘some’ of their food intake. And she didn’t advocate feeding them bagged, moldy grass. She said to mulch it and let the chickens scratch under it for forage. If you weren’t so close-minded and ignorant you’d know that decomposition produces heat, or did you never see a steaming pile of compost in the middle of winter before? Did you not know that in many countries including the UK, food stuffs like potatoes, etc. are kept in piles of straw and hay exactly to save them from freezing over the winter? And cold weather does not kill off worms and insects or we wouldn’t have any after winter is over. They simply move to warmer environments(deeper in the ground or where freezing doesn’t take place) and this includes up INTO composted material that is warm and toasty due to decomposition. And that is another source of high protein for chickens and why I raise worms year-round to add to their forage. In the majority of this country the ground is actually covered by snow for a period of time measured in days/weeks, not months. This isn’t Siberia. And even frozen ground reveals seeds and grains left over from prior plantings or have you not figured out how your average bird survives in cold climates, not all migrate you know. You sound like you feed your layers nothing BUT store bought feed which makes you ignorant of the fact that your eggs are no better than the ones from the stores and therefore not as healthy. And having egg production slow down due to conservation of energy for keeping warm is NOT harmful to the birds, it’s a preservation tactic borne of evolution. Get a clue Cluck…
This is exactly what we do – We have a deep layer of hay and cut grass – about 2 feet deep – which provides enough scratch to help supplement them. We still feed them, obviously, but they aren’t solely on pre-packaged feed through the winter. As much as possible I like to provide a wide-variety of feed stuffs for our tiny flock.
My kids are pros at digging them out from under our compost pile even in many of the winter months. We live in Southern OK – typically listed as zone 7 although our area’s micro-climate has winters that are zone-6-ish.
Many homesteaders in this area keep earthworm bins for compost. My kids like to raise them in the back mudroom in a rubbermaid bin. It’s free, easy compost and in our case, supplements for the other animals.
I should also add that in this area people usually dry their grass clippings for hay? The only thing I’ve seen people bag around the ranch is if they don’t want leaves for their compost pile.
HI! I wanted to mention that you can lay out a tarp on your driveway (be it asphalt or gravel) and dump your raked or mowed/vaccumed grass clippings on it. Let it dry out and voila! good for chickens.
Also, by doing your clippings this way it keeps your compost from molding as you have a brown layer instead of a wet green layer. Anyone who composts knows you always have plenty of green and not enough brown.
We had chickens as children and after raking our lawns we’d shake them out on tarps to dry and be bagged for winter as a supplement and we’d toss half of the clippings into the chicken yard for those who actually stayed in!
Also, by having deep layers to scratch in you’ll insulate the ground. That means that you’ll have bug/insect/worm activity that the girls will scratch up and gooble excitedly. I can’t remember the number of times watching the girls scratching and fighting over some juicy, buggy tidbit during the winter when we had 2-3 feet of snow on the ground. So…yep…you can have buggies in the deep litter.
Oh…deep litter also provides B vitamins which is good for your girls and boys. So, deep litter provides vitamins, fresh protein, heat (due to composting), keeps birds sane and happy and you too as you’re not muckin’ out the coop and freezin’ your tookus off.
Honey
I tend to agree with the author, but think a few things need to be elaborated on…and I have some other suggestions also.
First, what is DEEP mulch. Its about 2ft deep. Its not cheap to keep hens in a pen during the winter…unless, as was mentioned, you consider the cost of turning them out to wander far and wide full-time. Our chicken hawk population is to large for that kind of thinking though. Most of the time *I* use hay out of the goat shed for a bottom layer (complete with fly larvae much of the year and cover it with fresh horse quality hay to insulate and encourage microbials. My litmus test is what does the henhouse smell like. If it smells sour or like dirty litter, something needs to change. I COMPLETELY rake out out hen house on the first of each month and start over. It NEVER smells that way. Oh and make sure you keep fresh hay in the nest boxes too. Thats a daily check & change sometimes….esp if they dont have enough roosting space otherwise.
Additionally, my chickens & hogs split the daily compost bucket. I feed a family of SIX 2-3 times daily. Always have scraps of leftover milk, kefir, yogurt, fruits, veggies, eggshells, etc that they LOVE. I think its what keeps them from wandering too much personally.
I have even been known to incubate, hatch & brood chicks toward the end of winter, to get a jump on the new season. We use a floor model heat lamp brooder that will accommodate up to 100 chicks at a time. I feed them a souped up homemade cornbread (extra bran & eggs in the mix), softened w/ sour milk twice a day. It generally gets them thru that last part of winter nicely.
I appreciate the author trying to encourage folks to consider keeping a backyard flock…its indespensible in my opinion AND to think outside the commercial feed box. They havent started requiring we register what animal feeds we use yet, but they will soon enough. Folks need to remember, our grandmothers kept flocks without commercial feed.
Thank you so much for your input! Our flock is relatively small – two roosters and twenty hens max although right now we are (thanks to a stray dog who dug into the backyard) roosterless. We have 12 hens. We generally let them out every day that isn’t raining but live far enough near town that chicken hawks aren’t USUALLY an issue. We’ve lost one in three years.
Our hen house hasn’t smelled at all since the very first winter BEFORE we started adding deep mulch – like you we knew with the smell that something needed to change. We also have goats!! The two types of animals get on great together – anything the goats don’t eat our chickens will and visa versa. We’ve never thought to use goat compost in the hen house, we usually keep compost pile in the back corner and the chickens scratch through it even in winter.
I raise chickens and a couple pigs side by side. They enjoy each other’s company and the pigs let the chickens peck in their trough. I have read that it isn’t good to raise the two together, but have had absolutely no problems doing so. It is cute to see the hens warming their toes in winter–they sit on the sleeping pigs sides/backs.
Each evening I send the hens back to their own roost and lock them in. The only reason I do is because of the coyotes, which do not enter the pig’s house, but we lost a rooster and some hens to coyotes because they begin free-ranging at the crack of dawn while the coyotes are still hunting. So, I pen safely in the coop–separate area within the pig shed–each night and let them loose when I feed in the AM.
We free-range all day. Hawks, eagles, turkey vultures and other predators are in area, but we have had very few problems. Predator birds tend to stay away on a “busy” farm. We have 20-acres, but find the chickens stick to only the acre surrounding their coop. They hide under vehicles when they hear the hawks. Pretty smart. Roosters warn them and help protect too. I have heard, but not tried, that adding a turkey or goose to your flock is great for predators. They are more aware and warn the hens is the theory.
We are switching over to all natural, home grown chicken feed. I currently supplement their free-range diet with commercial feed. Organic feed is hard to find and expensive, so we are looking for alternative feeds we can grow ourselves.
So far, I’ve learned you can grow greens, kale, swiss chard, turnips, rape, comfrey, pumpkins/squashes, potatoes & sweet potatoes (slightly cooked & mashed), mangel or fodder beets (whole), Jerusalem artichokes and sunflowers for chicken feed.
You can also grow grains so you can thresh and store the seeds for year-round feed. Corn, wheat, oats, buckwheat, rye, barley, amaranth (“pig weed”), cowpeas and others. Hulless grains are easiest to thresh.
I am also a writer. I will be posting an article about the alternative organic chicken feeds at my website later today, so check in there for more information.
I have learned it is best to slowly wean from commercial feeds to other feeds or methods. Inheriting 4 hens from my brother that had never been free-ranged was comical. They had no clue what to do, but learned from the other hens in just a month or so. I provided more feed during that time to help them adjust without starving.
Thanks for the info. on the layer compost method in your article. My hens do scratch a lot in the compost pile for insects and other small seeds, etc.