Fresh forage for week old chicks
Our Light
Sussex chicks eat
like crazy, so I decided that six days was plenty old enough to try
them out on forage. I don't want to put the chicks on pasture yet
for fear of predators snagging such tender morsels, so instead I
brought the pasture to them.
First try was some
compost worms dug out of the worm bin. I figured redworms
might be small enough for a tiny chick to handle, and I've seen our
mother hen feed her chicks worms at this age. But while our
chicks were interested and carried the worms all over the brooder, I
don't think they managed to consume any. Maybe the mother hen
breaks the worms into smaller pieces?
Next, I brought in a
weed bouquet. Our adult chickens love broad plantain, clover, and
sourgrass, so I included them all (along with some grass and violets
that came along for the ride.) The chicks might have eaten some
of the plantain seeds --- it was tough to tell whether 
they
managed to peck any out in the midst of the melee --- but what they
were clearly consuming with great pleasure was the sourgrass buds,
flowers, and flowering stems. Looks like there's at least
something fresh that motherless chicks can eat by their lonesome.
Modern chicken-keeping
books warn you not to feed your chicks too much greenery at a tender
age, but such advice smacks of doctors scaring young mothers away from
breast-feeding for fear of malnourishing their babies. In
contrast, the hundred-plus year old chicken books I've been perusing
this year stress the importance of fresh forage for chickens of all
ages. Hopefully a few more weed bouquets will get our chicks in
foraging mode before I turn them onto pasture.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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