Chicken food ideas

[flowerbug]

My husband wants to create a "Chicken Garden" on the back of our property. Basically a bunch of plants such as lettuce that are fast growing, easy to grow, and will provide enough fun for the chickens before the plant is completely destroyed by ravaging claws and beaks.

Any ideas on what sort of thing we can plant that they would love? Things that aren't too slow growing or have poisonous parts?

buckwheat is fast growing. alfalfa and some other perennial plants may take a few years to get really well established so they'd need to be protected from being overly munched on. turnips and radishes are quick to get going and you can get bulk seeds for them and others at the grain elevator or hardware. so if you rotate plant areas and let them sprout and grow for a bit and then let the birds in to forage while you start another patch it can go ok.

 

[so lucky]

I've actually tried doing this but I just don't have the skill. The best I could do was get the mealworms to the beetle stage, but if they bred I never got babies.

Wow, I assumed they were hard to keep from breeding! Maybe you were too nice to them. It takes quite a while for the first eggs to hatch and babies to grow to a size you can see. Is it possible you gave up and threw the whole thing out before the babies were visible?

 

[AMKuska]

I didn't realize they took a while! That's very possible. About how long does it take? The beetles all died off one by one though. Is that normal?

 

[seedcorn]

Water, too much moisture will kill them off as well.

 

[flowerbug]

I didn't realize they took a while! That's very possible. About how long does it take? The beetles all died off one by one though. Is that normal?

a lot of bugs lay eggs and then die. so perhaps... dunno for sure.

the bugs i know the most about are things like ants, bees and cockroaches. it takes quite a while for a cockroach to reach adulthood.

woodlice aka pill bugs aka rollypolies seem to be doing ok in the worm buckets here. not that i'm intentionally growing them, but they come in with the dirt and partially decayed wood chips. i wonder how many million years they've been around... i should look that up. *brb* huh, guessing about 250-300 million years...