I have been keeping chickens for a while now and find they are invaluable for many reasons as well as giving lovely fresh eggs.  I try to supplement their diet with as much ‘free’ food as possible.  The free part of their diet is made up of ‘mash’ and allotment greens.  I find this is a perfect way of recycling food scraps and things from the allotment which weren’t quite good enough for us to eat or inedible.  Examples are veggies that have been overly nibbled or are too small to be bothered with peeling, gluts of anything which hasn’t already been preserved in some way, things which are too tough for us (e.g runner beans that are too big).  Any of these kinds of things get cooked down with peelings and scraps from the last few days, I usually add a handful of oats to help with consistency.

Healthy chickens need a decent amount of raw greens.  If they can free range and eat grass and weeds that is great but if not take the weeds to them.  Unfortunately they don’t like bindweed but dandelions are a real favourite.  I encourage chickweed in parts of my garden as we like it in salads and the chooks love it too.  What they get from the garden/allotment varies on the time of year.  In the summer there is a lot of salad – bolted plants or tough leaves are all good for chickens.  The tops of certain root veggies like beetroot/Swedes/radishes etc are welcome too.  In the winter I tend to take away a few of the tougher leaves from each brassica plant for them.  Don’t forget seeds too – I always harvest more seeds than I need for the following year and they get thrown in to the chicken’s food – these seeds include poppies, marigolds, parsley, plantain seeds etc.

Last but not least the chickens are also experts at dispatching pests.  Cabbage white caterpillars get collected as a tasty treat and so do snails.  Snails and slugs do carry parasites so some people don’t recommend this.  I give my chickens a worm treatment every now and again and haven’t had any problems.   Generally I operate under the thinking that if they look healthy and are laying all is well!