Spinach is a leafy green flowering plant. We all know how beneficial health effects it has, but can chickens eat spinach? Basically any leafy green that is safe for a human to eat is safe for a chicken as well.
Want to know the answer to the question; can chickens eat spinach? Well, read on! The information here may be quite eye-opening.
Can Chickens Eat Spinach?
Yes, chickens can eat spinach, but to an extent.
Chickens do love to eat their spinach, and there is a decent amount of vitamins and nutrients in the spinach that your chickens are going to love feasting upon.
However, there is a dark side to spinach. If your chickens eat too much of it, they can be poisoned. This can cause some rather serious health issues. For this reason, the vast majority of backyard chicken owners are probably not going to even entertain the idea of feeding spinach to their chickens.
How to Feed Spinach to Your Chickens
If you absolutely must serve spinach to your chickens, then you will want to ensure that you give them a small amount only.
You should be serving no more than a few leaves once per week. If you can, then you may want to mix the spinach up with some other vegetables and herbs. It is going to make a far more nutritious treat for your feathered animals.
However, as we stated before, you probably will want to avoid serving spinach to your chickens. Since it is hard to gauge exactly how much spinach your chickens can eat before they get poisoned, it is probably best that you try and look into other herbs that the chickens can eat instead.
There are plenty of options out there. In fact, the only time that we would ever bother to serve our chickens spinach is if it was scraps from a meal that we were eating ourselves.
This way we wouldn’t be going out of your way to buy spinach for our chickens. It would also ensure that the spinach quantity is kept to the absolute minimum. Since there will be so many other ingredients there, it is likely that the chickens are going to be getting a far bigger dose of them than anything else!
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Things To Bear In Mind
Obviously, chickens can eat spinach, but you will want to check if the chickens seems to be eating all of it. If they are, then you probably won’t want to feed it to your chickens again. If one chicken is eating all of it, even if you are only giving them a small quantity, then that chicken is highly likely to end up getting sick.
In addition to this, you will want to notice if there is any changed behavior in your chickens when you feed them the spinach. If there is, then you may want to cut back on the amount that you are giving them. In fact, if your chickens look to be getting sick, then you will probably want to cut out the spinach completely.
In addition to this, you must remember that spinach is going to rot easily. You do not want to leave uneaten spinach in the chicken coop for too long. If you do, then it will rot and start to attract pests.
See also: Can chickens eat cilantro.