There’s nothing i love more than to watch the chickens eat. They love food so much. They’ll eat almost anything and they’re happy to function as the clean up crew when you have peels and stems and odd ends and pieces of things after cooking. I like to listen to them make that airy huffing noise they do when they’re trying to toss something deeper into their beak during chewing. It almost sounds like they’re whispering. Somebody gave me a spaghetti squash recently. They weren’t going to be able to eat it and so they wondered if i would like it. It was a very big squash and it had gone a bit bitter. I ate half of it and then decided the chickens could have the rest. The great thing about chickens is that they aren’t picky in the slightest when it comes to table scraps. They could care less that it had gone bitter. They loved every stringy morsel they could get their beaks on and after that, they ate the peel as well.
Today i have a mango that i’m going to cut up later and they may have the peel. There are some asparagus stems on the menu for their evening meal…i usually use kitchen scissors to cut up the tough ends into bite sized pieces and then sprinkle them in their pen. Also, i have a piece of wild sockeye salmon that was in the freezer during a power outage. When i took a look at it i realized it had thawed and refrozen and wasnt fit for supper but, i will cook it well and see if the chickens would like it. They are a fantastic stand in garbage disposal. The compost pile really only gets citrus, tomatoes, and onions…the things they cant eat. Its not going to be a balanced or well varied compost but it’s not as if with my thousands of grasshoppers that i ever plan to use it on a garden. Its simply a way to break down food without having to take up space in the garbage since the private trash retrieval service out here limits the amount of garbage you can toss each week.