The first thing to consider is to give your canaries fresh food the match with the season you are. Of course they are not out in the wild but try to keep the natural way of things.
List of fresh food that our canaries eat:
- Broccoli – not only the flowering head on top but also the leaves and the stalk. If you were throwing away the stalk and you have canaries, do not do it! They like it a lot!
- Cauliflower – the same here like with the broccoli. They eat all the parts of cauliflower
- Peppers (not spicy ones) – not only the flesh but also the seeds! They go crazy for the seeds!
- Salad greens: kale (purple and green), dino kale (or lacinato kale), collard greens, spinach, swiss chard, red leaf lettuce – salads are very easy to have even in your balcony! We have all these salads in out balcony, so that we can give our canaries fresh leaves, without having to worry about pesticides!
- Cabbage
- Celery leaves
- Green leaves of the red beets
- Green leaves of the Kohlrabi
- Green leaves of the radish
- Carrot tops (our canaries do not like them a lot)
- cucumbers
- zucchini
- tomatoes (not all our canaries like it)
- corn
- peas
- parsnip
- squash
- berries (our canaries do not enjoy them a lot)
- Apple (not the seeds!)
- grapes (not the seeds!)
- pears
- mandarin and orange (not all our canaries like it)
- banana (not all our canaries like it)
- melon
- water melon (Seb likes it a lot, while Mira not that much – depends on the canary)
- strawberries (not all canaries like it)
- cherries
- kiwi
- peach (not their favourite)
Extra:
- Hard boiled eggs with the egg shell (we boil it 15 minutes)
- Boiled rice without salt (when we boil rice for us, we give them 3-4 rice seeds)
- Boiled carrot without salt
AVOID
- Avocado (toxic or canaries)
- Onion and garlic (opinions differ but we choose to avoid these two)
- mushrooms
- Rhubarb
- Fruit seeds or pits in general
- Parsley, coriander (cilandro) and dill (we avoid them due to different opinions again – see link in References)
Last but not least! Provide your canaries with fresh water every day! It is very important, cause when they drink water, there is food that remains there and the water is not fresh very quickly.
In our YouTube Channel you can see Mira and Seb eating different fresh delicacies!
https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC7szfhHYxWOIlOZanzbdlew/videos
If you want to learn a bit more info about Mira and Seb, our canaries here it is: Meet Mira and Seb: the canaries
General Rule
- Clean very well whatever food you are providing to your birds!
- Do not leave fresh food a very long time in the cage. Depending on the temperatures you have, not leave the food more than a day
- Do not leave cooked egg more than a couple of hours
- Cut the fruit or vegetable in small pieces that your canaries can snack on them easily – after a few times providing them with different sizes you will find out the optimal amount/size
We still need to try kiwi, mango, dandelions, peach, nectarine and sweet potato. They are in our to do list! Please share your experience and if your canary enjoys something that is not in our list, please let us know, so that we can provide them also to Mira and Seb!
We will try to write different posts about how to take care of a canary! Stay tuned to get more info!
References
Yannis and Stella @Apollon, Naxos 
2 thoughts on “Fresh food for canaries”