RE: 6 weeks into the season in the southeast: April garden

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Just so you know, if you are buying already processed grains in the chicken feed, most of the nutrition will have oxidized in 3 weeks. Whole grains last a long time, but once crushed, they have a very short shelf life.

I think your plants are coleus and geraniums.

It's cool you get 2 growing seasons! Not so here in New England.



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You have so much knowledge to share. I will seriously tip you 10 HIVE if you did a write up on how you feed your flock, in particular what are options for long-term feed storage. For humans, we store ground flour in mylar bags with dessicant packets to prevent oxidization. But still we put them at a shelf life of a year. I would be fine buying whole grains from a mill (like we really should buy wheat berries instead of flour) but am not sure of the optimal kinds and mix. Think about accepting a commission! Thanks as always

I don't want to brag anymore since we are just plain lucky, but we really get 3 seasons really with a fall garden after the summer crop is harvested. Here is our kale I planted in October, overwintered, harvested first week of March. I left the hardiest plant for seed saving.

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Thank you for the complement!

I do not yet make my own feed, as we already have too much on our plate. We were getting our feed from a homesteader who had done extensive research and was grinding her own. Her mill broke, so we are back to buying commercial.

I hope to some day, in a few years, collect many large dead freezers for storing grain, and buy a mill (VERY pricey), and start milling our own. I probably would not be looking at more than a year at a time, for grain storage. Having done the math in the next paragraph, it looks like we'd not be able to store more than 3 months of grain at a time.

I do keep a record of how many bags of 50# we use each month, and in 2018 when we had 2 pigs, 90 broilers and 18 layers, we went through 5100# of grain. That's over 2.5 tons, 102 bags of grain. It would take a lot of freezers to store that, safe from rats from next door.

It is not something to be undertaken lightly, as chicken nutrition is a finely balanced thing if you want the healthiest birds who produce meat and eggs well. The other thing is to make the feed enticing enough so they eat it all. Fines like the vitamin/mineral mix tend to sift out.

If we did start making our own feed, it would also be for the pigs, in addition to layers, and broilers, and chick feed. All these would have to be carefully researched.

In the meantime, this is how we feed our flocks:

https://steemit.com/homesteading/@goldenoakfarm/feed-them-well-about-chicken-nutrition

https://steemit.com/homesteading/@goldenoakfarm/march-6-2019-goldenoakfarm

https://steemit.com/homesteading/@goldenoakfarm/herbs-for-hens-december-1-2019-goldenoakfarm

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