There was a recipie in one of the backyard poultry magazine(I think it was the last issue but not sure)for garlic mixed in there drinking water for a week or so and then back to regular water,can anyone find it for me as I gave my magazines away.I just read an article aabout feeding chickens powdered garlic in there food and after a few weeks the coop smells like a pizzaria and not chicken poo,but it was a lot of garlic like 1/3 of there food was replaced with garlic.Just found the site again it was 3% of there feed not 1/3.I googled grlic in chicken feed and it came up science daily ,Garlic perfumes poultry house.It also said that peaple perfered the taste of the eggs over the ones without the garlic.
This message was edited Oct 4, 2009 8:08 PM
Garlic for chickens
A lady at our market was feeding green onion trimmings to her hens. Soon you couldn't eat the eggs, they tasted like strong onion.
last time the chickens accidentally got into my garlic patch we couldn't' eat the eggs for quite a while, it was as bad as onions.
that is pretty interesting.. never heard of that before.
i i could just get them to eat tomatoes, ham, salt and pepper - i wouldn't have to do any work for my omlettes!!!
the garlic pizzaria smell would be nice for the compost pile too... hmm
I've often wondered whether a diet of squash bugs or tomato hornworms would affect the flavor of the eggs, but so far I haven't noticed anything! I guess it's such a small proportion of their total intake that it doesn't make a difference...
Of course it could be that squash bugs and tomato hornworms taste good. Not that I'm going to check it out. :-)
I could see tomato hornworms tasting half-decent since they're fat little things and look a bit like those witchetty grubs that aborigines in Australia eat, at least in terms of texture, but squash bugs even SMELL bad! Our chickens eat the small ones but they turn their beaks up at the larger ones.