DIY Wheat Sprout Chicken Fodder

This is a system for easily creating chicken fodder with no soil and minimal mess from wheat berries.

Required Items

  1. 5 Pack Seed Germination Tray - Amazon Link, $16.99 for 5 pack
  2. Sproutable Hard Red Spring Wheat Berries - Amazon Link, $46.71 for 25 lbs
  3. 2 Mason Jars
  4. Fine wire mesh screen

Optional Items

Steps

  • Day 1: place 1 cup wheat berries into mason jar. Fill with water to the rim. Use wire mesh screen on top. Morning and evening, dump it and rinse it until you don’t have any more “foamy bubbles.” Leave seeds submerged for 24 hours.
  • Day 2: wheat berries will have swelled up. Drain the liquid from the mason jar, and place the mason jar in a bowl on its side such that the water will drain out the mesh. Leave for 24 hours.
  • Day 3: wheat berries will have begun to germinate. Dump the sprouted wheat berries to into one of the seed trays. Use kitchen sink sprayer to wash seeds off and rehydrate, and evenly distribute seeds in the tray. Cover the seed tray with one of the other ones, so that the seeds are in the dark. Leave for 24 hours.
  • Day 4: seeds will have begun to sprout. Morning and night, spray down the sprouting seeds. Add water to the lower tray once the sprouts have roots. Add a small amount of MaxiGrow to the water.
  • Day 5: a small grass mat should be visible. Add water to tray throughout the day, as required.
  • Day 6: grass mat should be growing. Sprouts should be a few inches tall. Spray down periodically to keep hydrated. But, dump the water out of the tray - if the berries stay too wet they will start getting mold on the root mat.
  • Day 7: repeat of day 6. Keep bottom tray dry.
  • Day 8: At this point, the sprouts are several inches tall. At this point hosing down with the sprayer in the sink may not be possible. Add water back in the tray.
  • Day 9-10: Continue adding water in the tray as required. Ready for harvest once the grass spires have split into two.

To harvest, use a sharp knife to cut the root matt off to remove from the seed tray. Both the grass mat and the root mat can be fed to the chickens.

The creator of the video said the system was reliably producing 2 to 2.5 lbs of fodder per tray.

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