Monday 10 March 2008

Grapes. the foolproof way of worming.

Chickens need to be wormed twice a year. More often if they don't get fresh ground to peck at.

Lydia and Scarlett don't need worming for another 6 months, but Delilah is due for worming now. Flubenvet is the wormer of choice because (a) there is no egg withdrawal period and (b) it's very difficult to overdose your chicken.

The Flubenvet instructions are for keepers of large flocks, and tell you to put in so much per 4kg of food and feed for seven days. My chickens eat about 200g of food between them. Anyway, the upshot is that it works out at about 1g of powder over the seven days, per chicken,

Recommendation is to dip a half grape in the powder, and give it to your chook. Chickens are greedy, love grapes, and gobble them up. The only tricky bit is meant to be making sure the grapes are shared equally (assuming you are worming all your hens at once).

Only Delilah needs worming. As she is top chook, abnd very greedy, it would be a piece of cake. I cut up some grapes, put wormer on two halves and left the others. Went out at treat time, and gave them each half a grape. Delilah got the Flubenvet one.

Chickens love grapes. It's the law. Except, it turns out, mine don't. Not yet anyway. The grapes were abandoned on the floor of the run, and Delilah was on tiptoe trying to see if I had anything more interesting in the treat pot.

I gave up, and stuffed the grapes into the Swingball along with last night's leftover cabbage.

Did I mention that you need 1g per hen and that the smallest size available is 240g? This means I have a 30 year supply.

I'll try grapes again tomorrow... but I'll lace the sweetcorn kernels with the Flubenvet.


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