eggs & tea blog

Several of my cover crop experiments have grown up and produced seeds. I harvested the tops from the flowering sorghum, and the dry pods of the pigeon peas. Both are nutritious, and the sorghum might be a good food for the chickens, although there is just enough here to use for seed. Pictures of the harvest table, sorghum, pigeon pea pods, and pigeon peas:

It takes a lot of time to shell those pea pods by hand, probably more than two hours for what you see on the table (although it’s fun). Other folks say they just stomp on the brittle shells (after they’re really dry, i guess) then separate out the peas from the chaff, but i didn’t try that.

I did try feeding a head of sorghum to the chickens as-is. They just looked at it, quizzically. When i stripped the grains off with my fingers and threw them on the ground, then the chickens happily ate them. I’ve updated the chicken food notes with more about sorghum as a possible chicken food we could grow.

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This entry (Permalink) was posted on Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 2:50 pm and is filed under chickens, crops, food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response , or trackback from your own site.