When a neighbor gave us a bag of cherry tomatoes from her garden recently, my thoughts turned, as they so often do, to our chickens.
I immediately offered up a dozen eggs in exchange. Then I asked myself a perennial question, one that always begins with "can chickens eat . . . ." In this case, the food in question was tomatoes, which I had never fed to our hens.
A quick check of an online owners' forum revealed that it is safe to give tomatoes to chickens, who love the fruit. Sure enough, when I tossed three cherry tomatoes into the pen, Snow, Stella and Nala attacked them with gusto.
The girls aren’t accustomed to smooth, round fruit that rolls around on the ground, as if it were trying to elude them. But it only took the hens a few seconds to realize that the key to capturing a rambling tomato is to pierce it with your beak. Needless to say, the tomatoes quickly disappeared.
Most of the folks who posted comments online regarding the safety of feeding tomatoes to chickens confined themselves to answering that specific question. But one owner with a sense of humor offered a more sweeping response that addressed the generally omnivorous habits of chickens. “If it doesn’t eat chickens,” she wrote, “chickens will eat it!”
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