Whether you have a couple of chickens on your urban homestead, have a dozen or so to keep your family and friends in eggs or you have a full-blown brood of 25 plus, your largest expense to keeping your flock is the cost of feed. Are you wondering How To Supplement Your Chicken’s Feed? Well, take a look at what we do for our chickens here on the Little Frugal Homestead.
Our chickens will happily slurp up juicy watermelon and pick at super seedy cucumbers!
A Shared Garden
There is not a special chicken garden on the homestead. We just plant a garden and share the bounty with our feathered friends!
All damaged, overgrown or pest attacked produce gets fed to the birds. This is just about a zero-waste garden. By-products of some produce such as the green tops of carrots are especially tasty and healthy.
Did you know that cucumbers will turn orange once they get overripe? I had never seen this before! What they are actually doing is preparing their seed to thrive another year. Once the orange cucumber starts to crack, you can harvest the seeds to save for next year’s garden. Or you can feed them to your chickens. They love the seeds and the crispy flesh all the way down to the skin.
Gleaning For Your Flock
We are blessed to have farming friends who share with us. They get fresh eggs in return for their chicken generosity. When they sell collard greens and cabbages there are always extra leaves to be gathered. Chickens love all the fresh green leaves.
And we had a wonderful surprise this year! Sunflowers! This is my first year to harvest and dry sunflower seed heads to treat my chickens over the winter. Sunflower seeds have a bonus. They aren’t just nutritious snacks, they keep boredom down in the winter. This prevents feather picking and general unhappiness among the flock.
Related: Gleaning Produce, take advantage of FREE food!
Weeds are FREE!
Yes, you read that right. I think everyone has weeds. You have to look at them as free food opportunities. If your flock already free ranges, they are taking advantage of the tasty things of nature. For those of us who cannot free-range, we can still share those weeds by pulling them and putting them in with the flock.
We have an abundance of pigweed in our area. It is considered a nuisance to the farmers here. But in reality, it is edible to humans and animals alike.
Other weed options:
- Chickweed
- Clover
- Dandelion
- Beautyberry
- Lambs quarters
Don’t Forget Leftovers
Yep, if you are unable to consume your leftovers, the chickens will be more than happy to take care of that for you. I always laugh at the chickens with leftover spaghetti or rice. It is like they see it as bugs or worms and it definitely causes a frenzy in the coop. I’ll let you in on a little secret. I always cook a little extra spaghetti to share with my feathered friends. But I will admit, leftovers are few and far between for our flock as I try to keep food waste to a minimum. But they are certainly appreciative of what they do get.
Words of Caution
Be aware that some things are not healthy for your birds and their diet should be monitored so that they do not become obese. Watch intake of carbohydrates, salt, and sugar. And avoid processed foods as much as possible.
Foods to avoid altogether:
- Moldy foods
- Popcorn
- Onions
- Avocados
- Uncooked beans
- Citrus
- Chocolate
Supplementing Can Be Easy and Frugal
It can be expensive to use chicken feed exclusively. In our area, a 50 lb. bag of local feed is $13. If we opt for a higher protein blend that price goes up to $16.
How to supplement your chicken’s feed can be as easy as growing extra food in your garden, gleaning free produce, gathering free weeds from nature or eliminating food waste by feeding the flock leftovers. These frugal tips will save you money!
Just be sure that chicken feed is their main source of nutrition and that all other food is just a supplement.
How do you supplement your chicken’s feed? We would love to hear from you!
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Your chicken articles always make me nostalgic for our “girls.”
I can’t imagine being without mine! Thanks for stopping by!
Melissa
Great ideas for saving some money on your chicken feed! They sure do love watermelons and cucumbers, don’t they!?!
I think watermelon is an obsession, I really do! They just go crazy for it!
Thanks for stopping by Lisa!
Melissa
Great Article!
I’m just starting a small sprout and vegetable garden as well as a mealworm farm for my chickens. ❤️
That’s awesome! I have read about mealworm farms but I have just bought the dried ones.
Thanks for stopping by!
Melissa
My chickens always eat from our garden and they get a lot of our leftovers.
Same here LeAnn! Thanks for stopping by!
Melissa
Great Post. Lots of good advice. I can’t have chickens in my backyard yet, but I’m in the process of writing a proposal to my borough. Wish me luck.
Good for you! I have known folks who had to do that and won! They were only allowed like 3 or so but it was better than none, and no roosters, of course.
I wish you luck and please come back and let us know if you succeed!
Thanks for stopping by Linda!
Melissa
I love all my birds (turkeys, ducks, guineas, quail and chickens) but my chickens have the most personality!
That’s a lot of fowl running around your place! We have wild turkeys and quail every once in a while. I have a friend who has all of that at her place too, it’s like a zoo!
Thanks for stopping by Jeannette!
Melissa
New subscriber, glad I found you! Looking forward to more blogs from you with great information.
Thank you Jamie for subscribing! I have a monthly newsletter and heads up on giveaways! So glad to have you here!
Melissa
You are a great resource. Thank you.
Thank you for your kind words. So glad you found it useful!
Thanks for stopping by!
Melissa
Our flock has grown substantially as we fell so in love with our birds. I want our farm to be as organic and natural as we can make it so wanted to research feeding our flock ourselves. Your awesome informative article couldn’t have come at a better time!! Now just have to figure out what to feed our ducks, lol.
Wonderful! Funny how you start with a few chickens and the next thing you know, you have a full blown operation!
Ducks can eat regular laying feed like your chickens but could use a supplement of Brewer’s yeast. And they do not need high protein feed. Also ducklings cannot have medicated chick feed – we didn’t use medicated for our chicks so that doesn’t matter to us. Ducks also forage and eat some different things than chickens, so they are independent foragers.
Thanks for stopping by Kathryn!
Melissa
Great information, especially for those of us in the planning stage of raising chickens! Thank you!
So glad we could help!
Melissa
Our chickens like our extra garden produce and weeds. They also like when my grandchildren come over and have extra food on their plates.
It is kind of nice to always have some excited little faces to see you isn’t it? Our chickens are in sight of the front door and they all line up when we open the door in hopes that we will be bringing some goodies!
Thanks for stopping by Sue!
Melissa
Some good ideas! Thanks for sharing.
Glad you found it useful! Thanks for stopping by Tami!
Melissa
Love this site!~
Thanks for the invite!~
Welcome!! Thanks so much for stopping by Leslie!
Melissa
So glad to have found this site. Thanks to Marys heirloom seeds!
Thanks for stopping by! And we love Mary’s Heirloom Seeds!
Melissa
Due to hawks and owls and opossums my girls are locked up tight. So I forage for them. I also glean my garden for my girls, they love tomatoe hornworms…we have bees so bugs are picked off by hand and given to my girls.
We have those predators as well as coyotes and foxes! Our coop is like Ft. Knox! Truly!
I picked 3 big bundles of pigweed today and they were in heaven!
Thanks for stopping by Elizabeth!
Melissa
Although we haven’t fed our chickens popcorn, I didn’t realize it was on the ‘forbidden’ list. I’m glad I read this post, now!
It can effect their crop. But some folks have fed it to their flock with no real issues. They definitely do not need the salt or butter. I would also consider microwave popcorn a processed food. If you really wanted to feed them popcorn, only the pure air popped kind would be the right choice.
Hope this helps!
Thanks for stopping by Julie!
Melissa
Lots of good information, I’m looking forward to get chickens.
They are fun to have around. Eggs are a benefit but the entertainment is FREE!
Melissa
Great to know about the sunflowers to keep from boredom as a added benefit.
My chickens have a nice run (exercise area) but there is still some picking and such. I am always looking for ways to keep them from picking on one another. There is such a thing as “pecking order”. Also, when I put things in there for them, I try to use several pans or put it down in several areas to give everyone a chance at it.
Thanks for stopping by Jill!
Melissa
These are goals!
Totally agree! I think we all tend to drift sometimes, especially when we have so much going on and we just have to refocus ourselves.
Thanks for stopping by!
Melissa
Love chicken gardening. Thanks for this opportunity.
It is a wonderful giveaway! Good Luck!
Melissa
Lots of good information for when I get enough property for chickens.
We had chickens at our last house on just an acre. We just had a small coop in the corner of our backyard. It was behind a privacy fence so it worked well for us.
Hope you achieve your goal of raising chickens!
Thanks for stopping by!
Melissa
Thanks for the chance to win the prize pack!
You’re welcome! So glad to have you stop by!
Melissa
Thanks for reminding me of the free food for our hens.
You’re welcome! I always have to remind myself! It is something to keep up with and life gets busy!
Thanks for stopping by!
Melissa