eggs & tea blog

As my Azolla grew, i found a place to put in: in a plastic trashcan lid.  On the gravel under the eaves of our house, it looks quite zen-like – if anything can be said to ‘look zen-like’, which of course would be rather silly:

I did drop a little manure in the water, but otherwise it just grows and grows on sunlight.  Here is a detail of the structure:

The big test: I took a large handful of the Azolla down to my chickens in the morning, before their feeders were filled (they have all the feed they want all day).  At this point they are very hungry, and will all swarm around me, begging to be fed.  I walked into the throng and set down the handful of Azolla.  Immediately, several of the most aggressive hens lunged forward and took huge mouthfuls of it.  Then, they froze.  Cocked their heads side to side, looking up at me, puzzled, as if to say, “What is this?  We were expecting food!  WTF?”

In short, they didn’t like it much.  I came back a while later in the morning and they had in fact eaten it, but it took a while for enough chickens to wander by it bored/curious enough to take a bite.  Here are my theories:

1. It probably doesn’t taste very good.  If i dried it out, i could mix it with the standard dry food and they might not notice it.  That’s what they reportedly do in India.
2. It does grow in stagnant water.  Maybe i should rinse it before serving, to make it taste fresher.
3. Like most things, i’m sure the chickens would be more interested if they had it from chick-time.  These are 2+year old hens, already set in their tastes.

To grow a more useful amount of it, i’ll need to come up with some waterproof basins or troughs, and a way to maintain their water level.  Also, mosquitoes are definitely an issue, so i’d either have to make my troughs deep enough for larva-eating fish, or some other idea.

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This entry (Permalink) was posted on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at 9:04 pm and is filed under chickens, crops. 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.