10 Best Plants to Feed Chickens for FREE (Cut Feed Costs Naturally!)

In this video, we're going to be showing you the system that we've been creating to feed our chickens for free and reduce feed costs. So in our first video that we put out about how to feed your chickens for free, we talked about the mulberry tree, but we talked about the dwarf everbearing, which gets a lot of hype and it did really well for us the first, you know, couple years. However, the native mulberry, this is a white native mulberry tree, super strong, really healthy, disease resistant, pest resistant. We haven't had any issues with any of those things. Now over here is the dwarf everbearing tree that we showed you in that first video and you can see it's just not doing good. I had a part of the tree that was up this way I had to cut off because it got some kind of weird fungal type thing. These everbearing dwarf mulberries are very prone to disease. And again, you look over here, this is a, this is a red mulberry and you see it's just thriving. Look at the trunk on this thing. This thing's only about two years, maybe two, two and a half years old. And then like down here, so we've got this one, it's a white mulberry. And then we got this one that's also a white mulberry, but they're just thriving. So if you, if you're wondering what type of tree to plant in your chicken area as a food forest, mulberry, especially native mulberry is the way to go. Great shade, it drops barriers for your chickens to eat that are really healthy for them. And also predator protection, just helping your chickens to feel safe. Next up on the list of plants that we are starting to plant in different areas out here is going to be elderberry. Elderberry, as many of you already know, especially those of you who are crunchy, you know all about this plant. It's an awesome antioxidant. It is an immune booster. You can, the great thing about this plant and even the mulberry is they can be used for the chicken and animal consumption, but also for humans. So you can make teas out of the berries, but the chickens love them. And during the season, once these ripen up and become like that dark purple, the deep purple, you'll just see, they'll start jumping up and they'll start grabbing them off of there. And what we'll do is we'll come back and we'll do a video of that in the future and show y'all what that looks like. Just a really good plant, provides nice cover so they can get underneath it. It's good for protection from predators, good shade. You can't go wrong with elderberry. So get you some elderberries planted. I wanted to show you what the elderberry flowers look like. They're so beautiful. They're super fragrant. And a cool thing is you can actually harvest the flower and make tea out of it. That's really good for your immune system, colds, flu, all these different things during that season. So just a really awesome plant. All right, next up is going to be canna edulis. We've talked about this plant vaguely in other videos. This plant is a really good biomass plant, so you can use it in the garden. Again, we love, you know, plants that have multi-uses in them. And a cool thing is the chickens actually eat the young leaves. They're really nutritious for them. Also the rhizomes that are in the ground can be harvested and cooked during the winter when all the food is scarce. You can give it to them as a carbohydrate. The chickens love it. I want to show you what we do. We've shown you in the other video, the first video we put out on feeding the chickens. But we put these metal wire like this around the plants when they're first getting established. This is about ready to come out now, now that the plants are big enough. But you don't want them to scratch underneath young plants because they will tear them up. All right, so another really nice tree to plant in your chicken food forest is going to be the willow. These are hybrid willows. This right here is a native willow. They both work really well. They both have different things to offer. The chickens will actually eat the leaves, the young leaves, and creates really nice shade. The thing about shade is it attracts different types of insects and things like that, that want to escape the heat. And so this is going to help keep them cooler in the summer months. It's going to protect them from predators and just help them to feel safe and feel calm, which is going to help them lay better. All right, so this next plant is one of my absolute favorites and many of you have already guessed what it is. That is blackberry, specifically thornless blackberry. We also have thorn ones with thorns on them. This is my preferred type of blackberry. No thorns, it's easy to harvest them. If you look down here, all these areas where there used to be fruits, the chickens have already harvested them themselves. See these vines that are coming down? I don't cut these back for that very reason. I want them to hang down and be able to eat those throughout the season. So if you look up here, it's covered in blackberries. Down here was the same thing. And over here, I mean, these things are just prolific growers. Like look at all the berries on here. It's just covered in these berries. The blackberry bush in general is just, it takes very little care. It's drought resistant, pest resistant. It is the number one, in my opinion, plant for growing fruit for your chickens and your family. These not so desirable blackberries will be loved by the chickens. Blackberries help enhance egg production because they have high levels of vitamin K and vitamin E, which support bone metabolism, fertility, and regular laying cycles. It also improves shell quality, boosts immune function, aids digestion, and provides hydration during these hot months. Next on the list, wild sunflower. They are amazing. They're prolific growers. They don't require a lot of water. So drought resistant, pest resistant. They create lots of biomass, lots of shade for your chickens. The flowers are great for pollinators. So if you're a gardener, it's kind of a double whammy. And then they will go to seed eventually. When they go to seed, the chickens eat them and the wild birds. So you don't have to buy bird feed for your wild birds. And the chickens love them. They have a really high protein content. I think it's like 20 to 30% protein, which is really good. Get you some wild sunflowers planted. Our native birds planted these for us. I wanted to show you this other area on our property where we've let the sunflowers just go. And then what we've done is just we mowed through these little areas so we can kind of have pathways. I need to come through again with my machete and kind of clean up the walkways. But yeah, we just keep those areas mowed and the chickens love it. Like you can see them dying inside here. And this attracts crickets and different little critters that want to escape the heat. Again, this is why it's so important to have these types of things growing on your property in your chicken area to encourage more food to come in. One of our absolute favorite greens to grow for our chickens is chard. Chard is a very easy leafy green to grow. It's prolific. It'll grow all year long in my zone. I'm in zone eight. And so we put it in different areas in our garden. You can plant it in your chicken run. We usually just add it into our garden. I may start putting it into the chicken run though, because it just makes sense. I'm going to go ahead and just what I do is just chop them like that all the way down. And so it's raining right now, which is a perfect time to cut them. If you're not going to get any rain, you can cut them down to the ground like this, and then just make sure you water them in really good. One of the best ways that you can bring in more or encourage more insects to come in, and then also just grow more food is to let different patches on your property grow out. Don't mow it. So we've been mowing around this area because you want mowed area as well, right? But this whole entire area is perfect for foraging. And there's going to be seeds that are appear on these plants that you normally would not get with just regular short grass. So this is just a great way to reduce feed costs, create a foraging environment for your chickens. And you can do it just like I'm doing it. It's super easy. One of the plants that we showed in our first video that we did on feeding our chickens for free was comfrey. And so I hadn't had a chance to show y'all, but we've been planting it little by little in different patches in our chicken area. So we got our chickens and this thing used to have a cage around it. Now it's mature enough. I removed the cage. I don't have to worry about it. And you can see that they've been kind of harvesting some of these younger leaves. The younger leaves are the best ones to be eating. The bigger ones are the ones that might be a little more toxic if they eat too much of it. But so this is a really good protein for them. Good way to fill their stomach. I hope you've enjoyed this video. If you have some plants that you recommend planting in our food forest for our chickens, be sure to leave a comment below. Don't hesitate. Some of these plants you can still plant. And if you can't plant them now, plant them next season. God bless y'all in Jesus name. We'll see you in the next video.