Maybe it’s not a great ideal but those acorns I would toss in the hammer mill still in the shell. My chickens always needed a little oyster shell as well to keep the shells hard. That’s likely easier to come buy where you are. When I grew corn I hammered it corn cob ear and all for pigs and chickens. With all that extra fruit and things you don’t likely have to feed much.
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ive read that mulberry is a great tree to grow near a chic run. the berries are good but the foliage makes a great chop and drop for them also. poorer countries use mulberry as a supplemental forage for goats, sheep, pigs and cattle because it puts out so much greenery in a short time. id imagine mulberry would grow like a weed year-round in your area.
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Just so happens I have two Red Mulberry and a Big nice IEB within 30 feet of their pen. Also 4 pomegranate plants that should produce this year. @clarkinks , I did miss saying that. I’m giving them Oyster shell as well.
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I have purchased an electric grain grinder. It wasn’t very expensive and will do the job. After a reading day today I’m going to collect acorns. I’ve read all different opinions on acorn. It’s good enough for every wild animal here so I’m going with you and grinding and adding a bit to the pen. The ones I hand crushed they loved.
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Acorns are just poor peoples corn and you get the benefit of the eggs. The funny part is the poor people are always healthier. I would eat acorns myself after I boiled out the tannins so definately would feed them to chickens. Oak are pulling those nutrients from deep in the soil it’s the best chicken feed you could have and it’s the best price. My grandpa just used a rake to pick them up for his hogs. Grandma and grandpa picked up bushels of acorns it’s all the feed they had at first.
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You sure? If prices fall, more foreigners buy up more businesses and land…but consumable goods are NOT likely to return to prices of a year ago.
A friend once said his Dad raised hogs like his neighbors did. His Dads name was Dick. Keeping in mind my friend was nearly 90 when he told me the story. A neighbor stopped by enticing him to sell all his hogs as prices were soaring. In those days farmers had big issues which were related to getting their crop to market. You had 100 acres of corn and an 8 foot wagon. There were no semis. Part of the crop was used to make moonshine typically which could then be hauled in a wagon. Trains hauled things like livestock cross country. Pigs get hot quickly so you cant drive them to fast or it over heats them. They drove the pigs to the railroad. The neighbor said “Dick we will never see nickle hogs again” and his Dad jokingly said many times afterwards and we never did they never got that low again! In America there really are no foreign buyers we are all Americans Irish, French, English , Asian, spanish, African, German it don’t matter and even being part native American I’m told the land belonged to large red haired people before. I think the land owns us we don’t own it to a degree. It’s a form of wealth but it works my family very hard while we have it. We realize we are fortunate to have anything and I certainly don’t want more what I have has been a lot of work already! My grandfather had a 700 acre farm but his farming methods were different. 35 acres is plenty for me.
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The Siberian Pea Shrub (Caragana Arborescens) is a pea family tree and nitrogen fixer useful for interplanting and supposed to be great for feeding chickens. It produces a lot of pods with ~35% protein seeds (peas?) that chickens are supposed to love and can be used at a high ratio in their feed. Also a viable famine food apparently speaking of shortages. Very popular shrub with permies.
Mine is a few years from bearing though. I’ve been keeping 3 chickens for a year and constantly surprised how much tasty protein you get from so little grain and effort input if they’re given enough space.
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It does say Siberian in the name. I may be wrong but knowing that my guess is Florida heat would prohibit me from growing that here?
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You could be right there, sorry I need to check profiles 
I found this -
USDA Hardiness Zone:
- Siberian Pea Tree/Shrub (Caragana arborescens): Zone 2-7
- Caragana boisii (Caragana boisii): Zone 2
- Caragana brevispina (Caragana brevispina): Zone 6
- Caragana decorticans (Caragana decorticans): Zone 6
- Russian Pea Shrub (Caragana frutex): Zone 2-7
- Pygmy Pea Shrub (Caragana pygmeae): Zone 2-7
AHS Heat Zone:
- Siberian Pea Tree/Shrub (Caragana arborescens): Zone 8-1
Chill Requirement: No reliable information is available, but it is likely considering its origination location.
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@nosummer where did you get yours from? I keep 6 chickens, I would love to supplement their diet more. I took a quick look on Google and found some seed sources but they are few and far in between!
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If you want a plant this is as easy way as any Siberian Pea Shrub Tree seedling flowering and edible pea pods & poultry feed | eBay
Seeds ofcourse are cheaper SIBERIAN PEA TREE Caragana Arborescens 20,30 SEEDS | eBay
@nosummer may have a better idea but this is what I would do.
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Didn’t think of ebay – thanks!
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It’s in just about every nursery here as 1 or 2 year old seedlings due to the permaculture popularity. Not sure about in the US but it’s usually americans talking about it online so I’m sure it must be around.
In the permaculture orchard side of the internet they’re big into interplanting their fruit trees with nitrogen fixers like honey locust, pea shrubs, goumi and autumn olive, and sea buckthorn to increase soil fertility.
I’m not sure how effective they really are at feeding surrounding fruit trees, but goumi is yummy and productive, pea shrubs are good for the chickens and an easily storable famine food, so what the hey I’m trying those two out at the center of each grid of trees.
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We do the same as mentioned with nitrogen fixers which works very well. @dutch-s these are serious late season chicken food Planning on a big autumn olive harvest
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I have tons of beauty berries that grow here wild. Maybe I could transplant some to near my pen?
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Would definately do that to give them shade and for fruit. Another trick I did when I kept chickens is I kept wheat growing in the winter to feed the chickens the greens. They stay very healthy on wheat but for whatever reason wheat causes chickens to lose feathers. The grain is a perfect food for chickens. The way I buy wheat is drive my truck to fields or the coop during harvest and fill the bed with wheat. Took it home shoveling the wheat into trash cans as inexpensive food. The yearly food supply set me back around $100 for 35 chickens. Here is part of my old flock Clarkinks older fruit and vegetable growing Projects in Kansas
You can also see a patch of open pollinated rye growing there I raised for their feed. I would just set up a mobile chicken wire pen between garden rows and they kept things cleaned out for me. @dutch-s that little one in the top picture is a rescue I flew back as an egg from key west Florida. Most of the eggs were an omelet by the time i got them. His family was apparently apprehended assaulting tourists for their sandwiches. He’s small and looks innocent but he was far from it. A wilder chicken I never owned he made pheasants look tame. He’s standing in front of that barred rock. Barred rock are predator chickens with a hooked beak like you posted earlier. They kill mice with that beak just like a hawk.
Black Sex Links are derived from crossing a male Rhode Island Red with a Barred Rock Hen . Thats why you see so many barred rocks around. They call them sex links because they are easy to sex as the males all look barred rock and the females are all black with red flecks in the feathers. If your planning to eat chickens a sex link makes things easy. Then you know the roosters from hens quickly.
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Lovely girls. Mine are Blackrock which I think is also Rhode Island Red x Barred Rock or maybe the other way round. They’re hardy, healthy, forage all day, don’t try to escape, smart enough to handle 3 buzzards nesting 100m away, and love to stand around in the bucketing rain all day like it’s nothing (more slugs to hunt). Their black feathers have a sheen like an oil slick. They went off laying every single day for maybe a month in the winter. One of them was laying double yolks every time for her first 6 months, and her eggs are still huge.
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Have not kept chickens in a few years but @39thparallel drops me by some farm eggs from time to time still. If I was raising chickens that’s who I would get eggs from to incubate them. His are a wild bunch and they are similar to the ones in the photos above.
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A few chickens is a great way to get along with the neighbours as well, since I always have too many eggs now. I was a blow-in last year, now I’ve met everyone and I’ve got some great potatoes flowing back at me in return. One neighbour promised to teach me to fish which would be great, supposed to be great salmon and pike around here!
I think this community sharing aspect is also a big buffer against shortages, and used to be so much stronger. The concept of self-sufficiency kind of misses the point for me when it comes to resilience and food stability.
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