HOW TO: Grow Sprouts for Chickens

hey guys I had a few requests asking how we sprout the grains for our chickens so this is gonna be just a little how-to video on how we sprout the grains for chickens first you are going to need berries and these are the kind of berries that you eat these are what the seeds for different types of I guess wheatgrass are called so I have hard red wheat berries in here with some soft white wheat berries also some rice and whole oats so this is just a mixture I just get what I can and it gets too filled up in this giant trash can and this is what they look like so I'm sprouted you know you could feed this to the chickens and that's what I'd been doing before but when you sprout the grains about four it becomes about 40 to 50 percent more digestible to the chickens and the nutrients multiplied by about six fold so it's a lot more nutrient dense it has a lot of chlorophyll and beta-carotene that allows the egg yolks to be a really rich dark color and you want to make sure that they are untreated and they are full WH o le not pulled HUL led the HUL led seeds have had the basically like the center cut out and so they won't sprout so you want whole seeds WH o le and again you want to make sure they're untreated they're fresh you can get them at your local feed store I just I order these online and do kind of a pickup and these are all organic so these chickens are so loved but anyway you want these seeds to be fresh and treated and pull and what I usually do is I have a mason jar larger than this I'm just using this so I can show you guys cuz I already have something soaking for tonight about and you don't want to fill it too much because even if you fill it even about that high once the seeds soak they expand a lot so just about here well like the seeds will expand to pretty much fill up the whole mason jar so this is about a good amount doesn't matter what kind of mason jar you use as long as it's filled about 3/4 of the way so once you have your berries in the jar you're going to want to fill the jar up with water and the type of water is going to depend on how long you intend to soak the seeds if you're going to soak them for between 8 to 12 hours stay overnight what you're going to want to do is fill it with very warm water not hot water because you don't want to cook the seeds but water I would say like close to like bath water it's warmer than lukewarm but not super hot and that's going to allow the seeds to soak up all that water that they need within 8 to 12 hours if you're doing anything from 12 to 24 hours then you can just use cold water and it's not going to make a big difference but if you want them to germinate very quickly so that you can have the tray ready in the morning then definitely use very warm water I'm just gonna do cold water cuz I already have some seeds soaking but I'll go ahead and show you guys this is completely full and I just leave it right here my sink just overnight so this is a mason jar that I've already had it soaking for about 12 hours now it's ready to go in the tray and what I have here is just a strainer and I pour it [Music] so my job is ready for the next set of scenes Sousa drain it real good but I drained it pretty good you just don't want a lot of standing water because you don't want mold to grow on the seeds or on the roots when they start coming out so just drain it pretty well notice it's just dripping water at this point let it drain some more so once most of all that water is out and then just get out and really spread it off pretty evenly and this goes right over here I just got this on top of our draw crate and it doesn't have to be by a window it just needs to be indoors at room temperature doesn't really need a whole ton of light but yeah this is basically my process every night slash every day is I soak the seeds once the seeds are soaked they go in this tray and then these other trays get watered twice a day so this just can't got in here and it's time for me to water these so this is day two already and I'm going to take these back to the sink and you can see that they already have some root structure popping out here and these haven't really rooted out yet so they are really loose in here which means I'm gonna need my stringer again so nifty strainer is here see this is really difficult to do with one hand guys so they're with me and then so you see all this excess water how's the strainer there to catch everything it's okay if you lose a few seeds something then I think you can put it back in the trailer wash them down the sink so this is what I do for the seats that have it routed out yet is I use this strainer because I don't want to lose all my seats so this is back out [Applause] this is day two or sorry this is day three you can see there's more roots and but they haven't routed out so they are still loose in there I'm going to do the same thing I did with these ones from day one is rinse them with the strainer ninny now once you get to day four here wait a second guys giving today no this is day four that's right so once they get to about here they have some green grown out and the roots have started to take hold so this one's a little bit easier and not when I come to the sink I'm gonna straighten it doesn't need to be like super soaked but if I had my other hand what I could do is put it up against the seeds and it would just stay in one map so I'm just gonna tilt this over here and you can kind of see it's not falling over into the strainer it's just kind of staying in one big piece now if I were to tell this anymore yeah it would definitely fall apart and you're going to have seeds and grafts everywhere which you don't want so you just be very careful when it's in these early stages that you don't you know mess with the root structure too much now once that is fully drained bales back in its pot and then you know I'm a lot thicker obviously when I'm not filming but once you get to about day 7 & 8 these are super easy just go to the sink same process she's gonna turn this way down real tonight and with this I'm admittedly a little bit more rough I don't I don't even need the strainer for this but I do because I only have one hand right now but I would just typically hold this my left hand is supporting the bottom side my right hand is against the top side to keep all of the grafts in there and then it just gets tilted completely vertically to drain and then BAM back on the dog crate it goes you have the dog crate good use of space for it you don't you can just find somewhere you know that is easy to access and can hold all of this but you know I do this just so that my chickens have some nutrient-dense greens every day and because obviously I love them too much but yeah they one two three four five six seven eight and once they are about four to five inches about fingered finger length then they are pretty much ready to go out so this is ready to go out and you want to water these twice a day morning and night I've been really bad about that so what has happened when you don't want them twice a day it is something like this so this side has a lot more green it's more tense and then you get over here and it's super sparse and these are just beginning to pop up so I don't know why that happens but this side clearly started growing a lot faster than this side and you can see it in these other ones too see the angle but the side over here is slower than this side so this sides taller same with this the sign is taller this side is shorter this side is taller this side is shorter so make sure you water them twice a day or that's gonna happen which I guess it's not a big deal but I'm super this to be about it and it's drugged me and saying that I've got a tray that is almost side in but if you do want them twice a day than they grow all all at the same time in super uniform so there's that anyway if you guys have any questions at all just leave a comment below these trays I got at Walmart pretty much they are 2 for 98 cents so I just spent probably 4 bucks on them and you can probably use anything this isn't super efficient the way I'm doing it I've already kind of sick of having to bring the trays over to the sink twice a day so what I'm thinking of doing is poking holes in me so that they drain easier and also maybe I can put like a secondary tray underneath to catch all the water but that's just that's got to be in the works because I obviously don't really have time for that right now but once I do I'll do another video anyway thanks for watching and have a wonderful day /

Channel: Forest Meadow Farm

Views: 7,189

Keywords: sprouts, grow sprouts, sprout seeds, sprouting seeds, chickens, chicken feed, chicken sprouts, chicken scratch, homestead, homesteading, homestead life, feeding chickens, fodder, grow fodder, fodder seeds, sprouting fodder, forest meadow farm, forest meadow farm official

Id: shGf5o_Cg9E

Length: 14min 8sec (848 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 20 2020