Growing Fodder for Animals the Easy Way

do you want to learn how to make your very own fodder that is delicious and nutritious can be fed to all kinds of animals and will save you time and money stay tuned hi guys uh i am gonna show you my fodder system um the reason i want to do this video is because i've seen some similar stuff on like youtube and i feel like i've kind of honed the process and gotten it to be really simple at least for my purposes here so here we start with barley seed you want to have three cups per container and these are some standard containers that you can order online and um i can give you guys the link um so i do three cups of dry per tray this one has two cups or sorry six cups in it so two trays at a time and then you want to fill it with water and add just a half a cup of bleach now i know what you're thinking bleach is disgusting but it's actually going to keep this bacteria free and without the bleach i had very poor results um so i definitely highly recommend just a teensy bit of bleach and that will be rinsed out before these get going so once you have this um soaked for 36 hours optimally so one day is good one and a half days is best two days starts to go downhill after that so within 24 to 48 hours but 36 is really the sweet spot so after that amount of time you're going to want to um drain this out into a tray that has holes in it okay so for your first step you're going to want to take three cups of seed we're going to add water and we're going to do a half of a cup or a half of a cap of bleach just a teeny tiny bit and that will inhibit bacteria and keep the grass nice and fresh that will get rinsed out but while it's soaking for the next 36 hours ideally you're going to want a tiny bit of bleach in there so we want this container to be nice and full with water nice room for the seed to expand which it will do and then you're going to want a cover on it but not a lid you don't want it screwed tight we want to give the gas the chlorine gas the chance to escape and also give it some breathing room so i just cover it with a tea towel and that's all you need so this will sit for the next 36 hours until it is ready to go and so now that uh the seed has sat for 36 hours it has expanded this originally was six cups and now it's gone beyond that i'm going to take my tray here and these trays are standard sprouting trays and i have taken a drill and just put holes in along there so that it drains pretty readily so you're just gonna set your tray and i'm gonna pour about half of this in here because um this is i do two trays at a time usually i have a lot of chickens so about half there um it's kind of bleachy you don't need to really touch it with your hands and i recommend letting the water kind of do the work you just make sure it gets a nice even rinse and spread it out there and there we go so that's now been rinsed if it's bleached and flattened you're just going to allow that to drain all the way sometimes i'm in the middle of doing 10 things at once and then i'll just come back to it once it's drained you want to put something underneath it or you can set it on a tray or a shelving system if you have it outdoors you wouldn't need these but if you're going to want it inside like i do it you're going to want something just to catch the little drips it's not a whole lot of water so this little tray sat underneath is more than enough and then you're going to want to cover this i use a piece of cardboard or a paper bag when you first rinse your seed you're going to want it to stay dark but it's not time to put the soil on yet you want to give it a chance to um to germinate and to sprout and so i just use anything this is just a piece of a paper bag i just cover it if you have just a flat tray or anything just so it's dark cover your area and then wait for it to sprout you're going to want to rinse these every 12 hours at least if not more than that if you can get away you know you're not working uh away from the house maybe you're working from home that day or you're home for the weekend you give it an extra rinse in the middle of the day it'll really do it well but every 12 hours at least so you want to water it in the morning and at night um i just do a quick rinse and then once it's done dripping um i will take this other this tray doesn't have any holes you can see there are holes in the bottom of this tray a whole bunch of little holes to allow the water to come through and then after about a day you will get the seeds starting to sprout and you can see just teeny tiny little sprouts there you don't want to handle it you want to just let the water do the the adjusting if you want to make it flat just take a sprayer and just kind of gently spray and shake the tray and kind of have it settle i feel like it um it sprouts much more effectively when you're not handling it as much when you're not touching it and breaking those tiny little roots so once this gets going um and you know it's sprouted and it looks nice and clean that is when you're going to add some soil and this one i did earlier today uh it just a tiny bit i mean we're talking it doesn't even barely makes a layer just as thin as you can get it okay so now that the seed has sprouted you can see the little sprouts here and i have had it rinsed for about a day after it's sprouted since about a day and a half you want to take a little bit of potting soil or something very much similar to like a seed sprout or some kind of lightweight soil that is not rich in nutrients we don't want it fertilized to burn the seed or anything like that so i just use potting soil and i don't use a whole lot you just barely sprinkle it here make sure it gets to the edges there you just want a small layer right on top and i usually um allow this to sit before i water it it'll absorb a little bit of moisture that's already there and then that will sit as a layer on top and allow the the water to stay with seeds longer and then i don't have to water every 12 hours anymore um it usually goes to every 24 hours or even less depending on if i forget all right so that's that's it and then um that is going to be very lightly watered i would even say you could just use a little spray bottle at first just to keep it moist and then we'll wait until probably tomorrow when those little first shoots start to poke through and then at that point you can just do a heavy water and then that is what this one looks like this one's a little sparse i'm not sure what happened here these may just be taking their time because it's winter and it's a lot slower the process this this room is is kind of cool overnight it gets into the 50s and so even lower sometimes so um it may just need a little bit more time or you know sometimes you have variation but for the most part you can see it gets going this is uh one day older than this sprout here it's winter time right now and these are growing a lot slower than they do during the spring and summer and into the fall the dead of winter the colder it is the more your grass is going to be scented now if you're doing this inside in your house and your house stays relatively temperature consistent then you won't see any of this variation but you may see it in the early spring if you decide to do this outdoors a lot of people just have a shelf system outdoors um it's definitely a way that you can do it so here we have the dunfodder it's getting to the point where you could feed it to chickens you know pigs guinea pigs whatever you like when it is even taller actually maybe another day or two this grows very quickly so one day of growth is about here two days three days um when it gets very tall i don't like to give it to chickens because it can get caught in their crop so you want to give it to them when it's about this tall but it's great for bunnies and guinea pigs and other animals um pigs goats uh when it's very tall so it's a great uh source of nutrients for them and you can see this is a really healthy mat it gets going there and the smell is really great if it starts to smell funky in any way you have to toss it that's not a healthy situation but this it smells wonderful it smells like cut cucumbers um just really fresh and wonderful and you see there's no black spots underneath there there's nothing you know slimy it's just roots and then you see i have a tiny bit of soil there and that soil is just a top layer and it just keeps that moisture in really nicely um so you don't have to water as much and also gives the grass just a little bit of nutrients but honestly they don't really need it you can do it completely without the soil um but i just prefer to do it this way it cuts down on watering okay a little bit of water will stay here so when you're done with your one cycle so this is about seven days when you get to this stage and you're ready to give your clutter to your animals you can either let a bunny or a guinea pig graze it down and you can regrow it a bit and then you reuse that same thing for that same animal or give it to your chickens or whatever you want to do but you could also cut it into pieces uh that's a great way to you know share the wealth but um what i was going to say is um the underneath tray when you're rinsing and watering um the underneath tray can grow bacteria and you want to make sure that that does not happen because it will ruin your grass and this is very healthy there's no bacteria growing it smells nice and it's actually relatively dry you don't want them sopping wet you just want them damp this over time will get gross and so you don't want to allow that to happen so when it's when you're ready to pull this out before you put the new seat in i recommend just spraying it really quick with bleach water um and then rinsing that and then your new seed will go in here so that just cuts down on any slime or algae or just bacteria that can grow so that's it that's about the whole system um if you have any comments or questions i'm available

Channel: The Rainbow Roost

Views: 7,215

Keywords: fodder, barley, grass, sprout, sprouting, grains, animal, feed, propagation, seeds, wheatgrass, ryegrass, hay, Rainbow Roost

Id: rN8QLx_2VWk

Length: 12min 39sec (759 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 27 2021