Chicken Breakfasts - Part 1

Nearly every morning, I prepare a breakfast for my chickens. It's partly a treat and partly to say sorry for leaving them alone all day, while I go to work. I try to give them variety with their breakfasts and there are also days when I have absolutely no time to feed them (more on that later).

So here's a run down of some breakfasts I make for them. The one above is rice, sardines and chopped spinach. One of their absolute favourites. Anything with meat or fish, goes in about 2 seconds!

This one a relatively new trial. You know those soup mixes you can get from the supermarket? I had gotten a few for myself for these cold, cold winters. Well I soaked a cup of those beans overnight and offered it to the chickens. I didn't expect it to be popular, but I noticed that it was mainly the barley that they ate. I have heard that some chicken owners don't feed barley to their chickens in summer as it warms them up too much. Not exactly sure what that means, but sounds like the Chinese "heaty" and "cooling" foods.

This was actually one of my leftover dinners, lentil curry with brown rice. Well, they liked it, except the lentils. Actually, I noticed that they didn't like the lentils when I fed them the soup mix.

NO TO LENTILS!

This again is another new trial. Laucke Mills had brought out a new product called RedHen 17. We had previously bought RedHen free range (green bag) which was just grains and coated with oils and vitamins which made the grains smell sooo yummy. Seriously smelt good enough to eat. Anyway, the chickens liked it, but being chickens, they only ate the grains that they wanted. Then the formula changed and pellets were added to the mix. Our chickens HATE pellets and would flick it out of their feeder for it to rot on the ground. Considering that they now had another component of their feed to waste, we stopped buying it.

RedHen 17 is slightly different. It's crumbled up pellets and grains. Our chicks love crumble and as adults, they LOVE chick crumble. By the way, they shouldn't be eating it since most chick crumbles contain medication. So we tried RedHen 17 and we've had a mix reaction to it. Some if the chickens eat it, some leave it, some pick through it. The above picture is me trying to entice them to eat it with the addition of some canned corn (another chicken love). Sad to say, they picked out the corn and mainly left the crumble.


My second try, sardines with RedHen 17. The sardine flavour must have masked any crumble dislike! This was a hit.

I eat lots of rice, so the chickens get lots of rice too! Rice, with yoghurt and spinach. A bit of a miss with them.

This was a big hit. I made vegetable biriyani with cauliflower. On a cold winter day, I had warmed up the rice and the chickens were eating so fast that they sounded like they were slurping. Houdini is also a fan of cauliflower, especially since this was nice and soft. 

Then of course, there are those days when all I have is bread. Still a massive hit with the chickens, but another favourite is raisin bread, with the raisins being picked out first. Both Penguin and Buffy prefer soft white bread and definitely NOT the crust. Effie will eat any part of the bread, the same goes for the Leghorns and the Marans. The Aracaunas are a bit more restrained with bread, but they still like it.

Anyway, that enough breakfasts for now. Still more to come, but for another post.

Cuddle a chicken!!