More frugal tips on using excess growers feed

This should probably go on the earlier thread on the "scruffy frugal side of chicken keeping" but as that's quite old now I thought I'd start a new thread.

It's getting to that time of year when you will be thinking of hatching a few eggs and you'll be buying special feed for you young birds.  It's always the case and Murphy's law prevails here, that you end up with almost a full bag of growers left which won't keep till next time and it's such a waste to discard it so here's a suggestion.  You will be switching your hens to layers at around 16weeks so just dilute it by about 20% with the excess growers until it's all used up.  (make nsure is of the unmedicated type though) or just feed it to you cockerels.

I raised turkeys for Christmas and sure enough had almost a full bag of Turkey Growers and one of Finishers left which I've been steady adding to the chickens feed.  As they weren't laying anyway the extra calcium in their layers wasn't needed anyway but generally if you do this ensure they have extra calcium in the form of crushed oystershell available ad lib.

Also if you use pellets in a gravity feeder, like many do, you will find that after a couple of refills it's starting to clog up with dust from the old pellets which stop the free flow of fresh pellets.  When I top up I always carry a large red flexible plastic trug with me and tip the feeder contents into that.  By shaking and tipping (panning) the trug you can get the pellets to separate from the dust.  Put the pellets back in the feeder and then top up.  The dust goes on the wild bird table or is tipped onto a dish for the chx in the run.

If you have any tips yourself please feel free to post.
HF