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Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Merritt Chicks and Cantaloupe: FAIL

Let me preface this video by saying a few things. It's short and sweet, but let it never be said that I consider "Us Merritts" to be professional chicken farmers. We're learning, as this video will show.

On Saturday, I bought two ripe, beautiful cantaloupes. Joey said "Oh, good! We can give the rind to the chicks." Sounded good to me, tho my thoughts focused more on "Yay! We can give the rinds to the worms!"

This evening, the kids were ready to "dig in" and eat their portion as a snack. Joey and Lexie cut and cleaned the cantaloupe in half and then divided the half even further down which created approximately 6 pieces.

We were quite excited about this, as Joey had been waiting to try his experiment since Saturday.

Enjoy this very imperfect video, candid banter and all. Let it never be said I don't share my faults as well as successes. Actually, overheard in the video is
"Sheebus, let me NOT record this right now"...but then I thought...why not make it a blog? So, here ya go.




Now, what have we learned? Well, this site states that chickens LOVE cantaloupes. (Yeah, we didn't see it). http://blog.mcmurrayhatchery.com/2010/07/20/feeding-your-chickens-table-scraps/

This site gave a little more detail which included an interesting twist. "Melons: Cantaloupe, Honeydew, And watermelon. My chickens peck it down to the skin of the fruit. " found at http://www.backyardchickens.com/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=6422212

So...I am not the type to buy cantaloupe and feed it to the chickens when I have perfectly good kiddos who'd prefer to snack on the goodness of fresh fruit. So, worm food it is. Sorry, Merritt Chicks, fresh fruit is for kids!

1 comment:

G&K said...

I've given our chickens some over-ripe strawberries and the tops after removing the leaves. The gobble them up. Haven't really had them turn anything down so far. We're having a large cicada hatch right now in our area and after seeing one of the girls gobble one up the other day, I've been picking them up when I find them and throwing them a special treat. They can't eat them fast enough.