Buying Vegetables
Living in Kansas, I am truly blessed with local farmer grown seasonal produce available at Farmer's Markets and vegetables grown in my own backyard. It is hard to imagine that many of you can only get fresh produce from your local grocer.
Those who read along my blog will recall that this Spring my birds, for the first time, refused to eat grocery store broccoli. So taking my clues from the birds, who did not care for any of our different grocers broccoli, I switched them to frozen peas.
In the past, my birds hardly ate frozen peas but this year, in the absence of tasty broccoli, they eat frozen peas quite well. In fact, they are currently eating a minimum of one lb a day and on days where I am short of other veggies, they eat two lbs!
In addition to frozen peas, I also use grocer carrots when local ones are not available. I like to process them to coarse and them add flock raiser and continue processing till it is more of fine grind crumble. This carrot/flock raiser crumble is added to cous cous (semolina), poppy seed, and quinoa mixture and also to my nestling egg food.
Peas and carrots purchased at the local store have always been safe. "Spider" brought up the question of purchasing the various greens from grocers or even health food store. One of his friends birds had gotten E. coli from health food store organic produce.
Hardly a week goes by that either meat, cookie dough, or even produce is not being recalled as unsafe because of bacterial contamination. By coincidence, right before the cookie dough recall, my grand daughter was shopping with me and we decided to make cookies from scratch rather than buy what turned out to be the recalled cookie dough brand! Experiences like this make me wonder just what is safe from my grocer.
What's the Point: The point of all this rambling is that variety is great but grow your own or buy from a trusted local farmer, or if you are concern with store bought veggies safety, limit your grocery store buying to carrots and frozen peas!
3 comments:
Hi Linda,
It sounds like there is quite a bit being done with veggies and other greens at this time of year in your aviary, which is great for vitamins etc, but I am sure that you are balancing the greens with some form of protein so that the diet is not too high in carbs. I am certain that your birds will now be starting their moult, and I know that for that specific time higher protein is required. Are you feeding hard boiled egg and or soy beans as well? The greens are lovely for the colour but I found the dark green garden greens best this year. During my moult I fed garden greens first thing in the morning, alternating chickweed, dandelion, shepherds purse, plantin and comfrey. All of these have fantastic green colour and the birds responded well for colour, however I continued to feed the breeding formula pellets to all birds through the moult and supplemented with boiled egg once a week. The pellets I use is the Orlux/ Versele Laga brand Nutribird C19, being 19% protein (breeding formula)
Your thoughts?
Shawn
ps: Still no word from SA post office, will keep you updated... Oh well!
Hi Shawn:
Protein is also important for the feathers. I offer flock raiser free choice which is like a breeding formula in that it is 20% protein. It also has extra lysine and methionine for good feather structure. Like you, I think the dark greens are best for yellow color.
I prefer to show only young birds and almost never show my older birds which I consider my breeding stock.
All young birds continue to have daily egg food till sometime after the molt in September.
Do you remember how long my packages to you have taken in the past?It was mailed June 19 th from our main airport post office.
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