Greetings from The Coop #5

For the last few weeks we have embarked on the world of microgreens and growing them ourselves. We are totally hooked and will be scaling up our efforts to ensure we have them on hand year round. So far our favorites are Radish and Broccoli. We also tried pea and sunflower – but they were not as pleasant. The sunflower is actually considered the MOST nutritious …. but it sort of makes everything taste like dirt. It over powered everything we tried them in – sandwiches, smoothies. But we are going to keep trying different ones. You might be wondering what this has to do with the chickens…. well they couldn’t be happier with our new adventure.

It turns out they absolutely love the leftovers from the microgreen growing. They devour it in minutes. They all come running when they see us coming out with the little grow containers. These photos are from the first time we let them have a try. They were a little bit unsure but once we took it out of the containers and broke it up for them a bit, they really dug in and chowed down!

Giving our birds fresh clippings like this really added to their overall health and nutritional intake – which makes for happy chickens and delicious eggs! Did you know that they have actually done studies that prove that happy chickens and ducks actually lay eggs more frequently? Any sort of stress can slow and even stop egg production all together. So when they get treats regularly, have no fear of food scarcity and feel safe – they are happy and happy to plop out all the eggs.

We still haven’t figured out which one is their favorite – though I don’t think they will say no to any of them. I just love that none of it is going to waste. The microgreens take 5-12 days to grow, depending on the variety. We then cut the top portion in the following week. And give the root bricks to the birds, who turn them into eggs – really getting the full bang for our buck with this system.

Meet the Girls:

Almost all of them have names (and they all start with ‘S’, which is a silly story), with the exception of the barred rocks and the speckled sussex. This is because we have 2 sets of 2 barred rocks (one we call the old twins and one we call the young twins) and a set of 2 speckled sussex that we just call both speckled, because honestly you cannot tell them apart. The rest are in groups. We have the ‘Singers’ – Shania, Shakira and Sally. We have the Firestarters (again a story for another day) – Smokey, Sparky and Sizzle. We then have Savvy – which we saved from a round of meat chickens, when we realized that she might not have been meant to be a meat chicken. And at the moment only one of our ducks is named – Sandy. The 3 ducklings we have are not yet old enough to know for sure if they are girls (egg layers) or boys (meat producers), so we won’t name them till we know for sure. But at the moment the names on the table are Spaghetti, Strawberry, Sage, Sasha and Sammy.

Do you or have your raised your own chickens? Do you have any questions you want answers or topics you would like to see me cover in this series?

I love to link up my posts to lots of blogs around the internet – check out this Ultimate Handy Linky Party List to find some of the places I share to!

Estelle Forrest self-published this cookbook after a lot of playing around in the kitchen. You can purchase your own copy here:

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