Feeding fodder for chickens and poultry

Over the winter I started researching other ways to feed my chickens, I hated giving them brown crumbles  that looked like bleached Grape-nuts Cereal, and wanted to feed them something healthier and more natural.

 Bagged feed is popular for several reasons, it's a balanced diet with all the things your chickens need, it's convenient to buy, and it's easy to feed.  It can become a problem if you have a mixed flock,  age, breed, and purpose, all affect what bagged feed you should be feeding. Layers need more calcium that young chickens shouldn't have. Growing chicks need more protein, and turkeys need even more protein than them. Ducks also need niacin, which most chicken feeds don't have enough of for ducks. I was finding I had 4 different types of bagged feed to feed my mixed flock, it was ridiculous. 

This post will be broken into two posts. One on the fodder system and the other of fermenting grains, both of which I use to keep all my poultry healthy and happy.

What is fodder? Well it's the process of sprouting a grain so you have both the seed you started with and the beginning of a plant (usually a grass). This process unlocks a powerhouse of nutrients that feeding the gain alone cannot give. 

When I started growing fodder it was February and snowing outside, so I grew the fodder in my kitchen nook. I started out with little tubs I found at the dollar store and a plastic shelving system. A lot of the systems out there have automatic waters on timers and fancy drip systems. I started the old fashion way, by hand.

My system was next to my sliding glass door, though it will grow perfectly fine without day light. I would soak and drain each tray morning and night for a round 10 minutes (sometimes less).

All I could find was a bag of Wheat feed at my local feed store so I filled up my mason jar, poured the measured wheat into a white tub, filled it with water to cover and put in a drop of bleach. Soaking the grain 12-14 hours helps get the growing process kicked in and the bleach helps kill any mold or fungus that could grow on the grain and ruin your fodder.

When buying grain for fodder make sure it is 'feed' grain because otherwise it is usually sprayed with chemicals to preserve it and you don't want that in your fodder (or your chickens!).

Day 1 of wheat. You can see a tiny piece of white coming out of some of the grain.

Wheat day 2. That little bit of white from yesterday has grown a bit more.

Wheat day 3. The white now looks like a tail!

Wheat day 4. The tails are getting longer and thicker.

Wheat day 5. It's starting to turn green and it's making a root mat on the underside.

Wheat day 6. It's beginning to look like grass!

Wheat day 7. It's just a little longer than day 6.

Wheat day 8. It's done!

You can see that not all the grain sprouted and is sitting in the bottom of the tub, It's not waste, the chickens love to eat it as well. The root systems with this method are  thick and the 1 Lb of grain turned into roughly 4 1/2 Lbs Fodder.

This is a comparison of day 7 (left) and day 8 (right) to show you the growth difference of just one day.

Fodder reaches it's maximum nutrition between day 6-9 depending on the grain. After I used my bag of feed wheat I found a better deal on a bag of feed barley. Barley has slightly higher nutritional value than wheat and I noticed that it grew faster, allowing me to feed on day 6.

My fodder soaking on the kitchen counter. I used this method for 4 months before deciding I needed not only a bigger system, but one that was outdoors.

Here is  some Barley fodder I cut into pieces before feeding it to my week old chicks. They loved it and would gobble it up in minutes, ignoring their store bought feed.

Feeding fodder cut my feed bill in half. I also noticed a difference in the sheen of my birds feathers and I just felt better feeding it to them, they LOVE it.

I needed a bigger system, but I couldn't afford even the home systems for $300+.

I searched several stores and finally found the black garden trays at  Fred Meyers garden center (everywhere else sold them in kits, but not individually).

I got enough to make fodder and a few extras as back up.

I took a small drill bit and drilled holes into the shallow strips of the trays, around  1" or more apart.

                  

Not super uniformed but they will work, they don't have to be perfect.

Here's the new system set up in the green house, I just watered the top trays and let it fall to the trays below. At the bottom of the shelving unit I have my old white tubs to catch most of the water, which I used to water the plants in the green house.

Once summer started I moved this set up outside, away from the sun, and continued growing fodder until my schedule got so busy that I could water it enough in the day to keep mold/mildew away (I was down to one watering a day, which is not good for the fodder, especially in the heat). 

I have sense taken the system down and bleached everything thoroughly. Now that the weather is cooling, I'm planning on setting this up in the green house again and keeping it heated in the winter. I'll keep you updated of how that works out.

Baby Poultry update

Fast forward a few weeks. The chicks are getting big and need to be moved into a bigger brooder. After I set up the new brooder, I grabbed the camera, a friend (Mandy) and together we photographed each chick before moving it  into the new brooder.
I still didn't know all the breeds I had and wanted to compare the photos with the hatchery website and a really cool site I found that has a plethora of poultry pictures (say that ten times fast!).

This one is a white crested black polish. I have two of these little guys.Their head fluff hasn't changed much sense the last time you saw them\ but they are feathering out nicely.

This photogenic guy is a golden laced polish, I have 3 of these cuties and all of them pose for the camera.

I have 4 chicks that are smaller than all the others, now I know the hatchery didn't give me any bantams (miniature chickens, like silkies) but they do have some smaller chickens in their Rare Breed category (which I got 10 of). 2 of the 4 look like the little one pictured above. After looking through the possible breeds, I narrowed it down to 2, the Silver Spangled Hamburg or the Lakenvelder, leaning towards the former.  Only time will tell as they grow up and feather out more.

This is one of the other 2 smaller chicks, these 2 are the smallest of them all and reminded me of the silkie chicks next to the Maran chicks. Both of these guys are identical  with the dramatic markings.

These guys are a little harder to narrow down and I have 4 possible breeds. The Black Breasted Red Aseel, the Silver Duckwing Standard Phoenix, the Red Jungle Fowl, or the Silver Ducking Yokohama, all of which are beautiful but not very big.

There are 4 little ones that look similar to the chick above. 

I doubt all of them are the same breed, and I should be able to figure out the differences once they are older and their feathers are more developed . I have 3 breeds that they could be, the Cuckoo Maran, the Dominique, and the Barred Plymouth Rock. All of which have different barred (stripe) patterns once full grown.

Mystery chick, there are a few of these... There are so many breeds that this little gal could be, I have to wait until she's more feathered out to decide what she is, though it does look like shes getting red/brown feathers, it still doesn't help narrow down what she or the others are.

I have 5 of these girls, they are my Welsummers. When they first arrived I noticed that they had a golden cast to all their baby fuzz (the dark gold on her chest) and it was easy to identify them in the crowed of chicks.

I have two of these babies and  I know exactly what they are at this age, they are Golden Laced Cochin! The cute feathers on their legs give them away :)

Above is one of my beautiful Easter Eggers girls. I got 10 of these lovely ladies and I couldn't be more happy with them. In the past I've only had Easter Egger hens that were shades of dark brown (similar to a full grown Welsummer), none of these girls are turning out that color. Some have black with gold, some have a blue with gold, and a few are like the chick above with a gray/gold/cream look.  These girls might end up being prettier than my Copper Maran hens!

I don't want to bog down the post with pictures of all 37 chicks so we'll move on to up-dates on the other babies.

Here are the turkeys! We are down to two now. One became sickly and died after a few days, I don't know what was wrong, but it doesn't seem to be effecting the other two.

I did tell you they were friendly :)

Someone decided to nap on mom.

Ducklings and goslings! The ducklings are growing so fast, the yellow guys are almost as big as the goslings.

Along with their crumble feed I also clip the tops off of my fodder system (which the big birds get) and give it to the babies, so far the ducks LOVE it and the chicks kinda eat it.

Posing! 

ok one more photo before I go. The cuteness that is ducklings.

Hatchery Babies!

Last fall I became determined to get ducks. My mother was raised eating duck eggs and boasted about their awesome flavor. Most hatchery's stop selling ducklings in the beginning of summer, I thought about getting full grown ducks instead but I really wanted to start with ducklings, so that meant waiting  a few months. I spent those months looking into different Hatcheries and birds, trying to find the right breeds and the right Hatchery for what I wanted. I decided Cackle Hatchery was the best for my order.

As the months passed, I realized the list of birds I wanted was getting longer.  I needed a few new pullets  to replace my old laying hens, I wanted more boiler chickens this year, and oh, why not get a turkey to raise for thanksgiving dinner? And hey, they have a special where I can get geese too!

What started out as a few ducks turned into 10 Easter Egger pullets, 5 Welsummer pullets, 6 Khaki Campbell females, 1 Khaki Campbell Male and a Happy Cackle Special. I was definitely going to have my hands full.
I should mention that the most amount of chickens I've ever owned at one time was 26 and if I added my current layers, the month old chickens form Wilco and the hatchery order, it would put me over 70 birds. What can I say? I got a little excited.

While I waited for my Hatchery chicks to arrive I finished reading my poultry raising books and started setting up brooders and outdoor pens for all of them, I had a lot to get done. I have raised chicks before but never this many at once and I had never raised ducks and geese, let alone a turkey!

The 3rd week of May came, I warned the post office early in the week that I was expecting chicks. Bright and early on Friday the 23rd I got the call, they had arrived!

 I hadn't yet had my morning coffee when I rushed to our little post office. As soon as I entered the building I could hear them cheeping through the wall dividing us.

I couldn't believe all of them fit in this box and when I opened it to inspect them, I was reminded how small they all were.

The amount of cute inside this box was undeniable, the gosling and turkeys were the most curious, while the rest tried to hide in corners, often piling onto one another. I quickly took them home to their awaiting brooders.

The chicks brooder was made with pallets cut in half, nailed together in a box shape and lined with cardboard before getting filled with pine shavings. The size of this brooder would hold them for a few weeks while I finished with the other enclosure. All but one little chick survived the trip, he/she was a little black with white top polish. The hatchery had planned ahead though and given me two extra chicks from what I ordered.

This is one of the black with white top polish (I like to call them top hats), I got three of these guys (including the one that didn't make it). They were the easy ones to identify with their puff of down on their heads.

This is another top hat, its a golden laced polish. They were the cutest to interact with,  always posing for the camera.

Part of the fun of having the Cackle Special was guessing what breeds of chickens I got. In this photo a little top hat is drinking while a yellow chick watches the camera (I believe this yellow chick is one of my light Brahmas)

I spent hours watching these guys, trying to narrow down breeds they could be. In the special it gives you 10 brown laying pullets, 1 rooster, and 10 assorted chicks from their Rare chicken breeds. I'll let you see if you can figure out what breeds I have.

All of these photos are from the first week of there arrival, so in some photos they are more feathered then others.

My goslings are also a mystery as to what breed they are, but the hatchery only has 4 kinds, and based on their coloring they are either the Toulouse or African Grey geese. I'm hoping to make these guys people friendly so I can keep them for flock protection, but if they get aggressive they will become dinner. The little one pictured is the male, the hatchery color coded the male ducklings and gosling so that's why he has an orange stripe on his head.

Here's a mystery breed duck from the special. I think he's a Peaking because of his coloring. Him and his female buddy are going to be meat ducks. It's hard to think about it when they are so small and fluffy like this, it's a good thing they don't stay this cute forever.

The ducklings and goslings checking out their new home. I thought I would fawn over those ducklings,  they where the reason I got this order int he first place, but those gosling stole my heart. I take them out everyday for special attention so they get used to people.

The Turkeys! Also a surprise on what breed but  I'm thinking they are the Blue slate turkeys. The hatchery sent me an extra one, so this trio settling in. I was amazed at how calm and nice the turkeys were, they would take turns curling up onto my hand when I came to visit them and were always wondering what I was doing.

The chickens brooder was set up in out pump house while the ducklings and turkeys were set up in the upstairs of my house. I could here their happy chips while watching TV downstairs. It will be exciting watching these guys grow up!

First babies of the year!

This year I was taking a big step and ordering birds from a hatchery. I wanted more variety  than my usual feed stores had, and I wanted a lot more birds. I spent the winter researching and deciding on the birds  I wanted and the best hatchery  for my order. Never having ordered from a hatchery before I order a little later in the spring and had to wait a month and a half for my babies to arrive (stupid Easter messed up my order)... I couldn't wait till the end of May, I had chick fever now!

 As always our local Wilco store had baby chicks. I planned on getting a few silkie chicks, not only to tide me over until my big order of chicks arrived but I also hadn't ordered any from the hatchery and wanted some for their broody qualities (they make great mamas). I didn't order them through the hatchery because they had a 5 chick minimum per breed/color,  and I didn't want 5 slikies, let alone all the same color.

What I planned  to do and what happened  weren't the same thing... I think my brain goes crazy when presented with something cute and fluffy.

I ended up with 3 silkies, and 6 Copper Marans.

Copper Marans are a French breed of chicken that lay some of the darkest brown eggs. The hatchery I ordered chicks from bred Black Copper Marans, but had sold out before I made my order (another side effect of ordering late). I was super excited that Wilco had some, not only did they have the more common Black Copper Marans but they also had Blue, Splash, and Wheaton Marans. The difference is their plumage color, they all should lay dark eggs. Both the Marans and the Silkies were sold as a straight run, so some of them could be boys, it was to be a waiting game, I had never gotten a straight run of chicks before, though I have gotten and rooster or two when ordered  just pullets!

The little fluff balls soon after bringing them home.

The tiny golden one (is a silkie, you see his/her butt in the photo) soon earned the name nugget, and became a favorite. These guys stayed in a small cardboard brooder in my office for a week before moving into a bigger brooder in the upstairs of the little house. I loved hearing them chirp and each of them took turns napping on my lap while I worked.

Starting to feather out! That's little ruby upfront. All but the small white one in the back are the Marans. Their colors were fun to watch grow out.

Some of the babies enjoying some freshly cut barley fodder, it was their favorite, and they would often hop onto my hand in anticipation to get the first bite.

Just before my hatchery chicks came, I moved these guys to another brooding area by my chicken coop, so I could clean up and make room for the new babies coming and get these guys used to being outside.

Before getting put in the moving box, each chick had a photo shoot. They are almost 4 weeks in these next photos.

Little Nugget is a gold silkie, still the tiniest but getting bigger by his/her own standards. Silkies are very hard to sex, even after all of my research it's pretty much if it lays an eggs its a girl, so my silkies are still a mystery, but I'm hoping that at least one is a hen!

This silkie is named badger, he/she is just a little bigger than nugget and is a blue silkie. Badger is also the shyest of the Silkies, preferring to watch me from a distance.

This white silkie is Valkyrie, Mr. beam named him/her and has deemed that Valkyrie is his, even taking him/her downstairs and watching TV. Valkyrie also likes to untie peoples shoe laces when they walk into the coop

Here's  Ruby all feathered out, she looks to be a Blue Maran. The lady at Wilco put her in my box because she was an unusual color for the chicks, she was a red brown color, and she wanted to know how she would turn out (and I liked giving her updates when I went shopping).

This one is Rita, she's also blue, but isn't as dark as ruby and had less brown on her head.

I named this one Trudy, she's a really pretty blue and gold color, I don't know if she's just a blue maran with a lot of brown/gold or if the wheaton color can look like this. I'm going to put her photos on a chicken forum and ask because I can't find any other hens like her on-line!

 This is Elsa, she's a very light grey color and she's a splash maran, she's one of the prettiest colors. For a while I called her Hans because I though she might be a boy, but she's a girl.

This was originally Betty, but at this age you can see that Betty is really a Burt. He is a Black Copper Maran and becoming the sweetest little rooster, he's also the boss of this little flock.

Last but not least, is Billy, a Splash Maran, and another Rooster! I loved watching his color change as a chick, I really like these Splash Marans.

So 2 out of 6 Marans ended up roosters. I'm happy with that, I'm actually planning on breeding these boys to some of my Easter Eggers to try getting some Olive eggers in the future.

The gang in the new night box, sorry about the flash, but this was the only picture that turned out.