What a Chicken Won’t Eat

I was fooling around with edible flowers in the Sunset test kitchen the other day, figuring out a recipe for an upcoming story, and had piles of pretty baby roses left over.

Why not feed them to our chickens? We give them all kinds of tempting test-kitchen food scraps to make their eggs more luscious. Roses would make a very exciting hen breakfast. Or maybe they’d even make the eggs fragrant!

The chickens did their usual NBA impressions, leaping up to see what I had in the feed bowl. I scattered the blossoms on the coop floor and waited.

As you can see, the roses were a complete dud. I’ve never seen our chickens turn their beaks up at anything before.

Wow, even their backs. Clearly these roses needed a few worms or aphids to make them worth trying.