Diet Tips
Tortoises and box turtles have specific dietary needs which vary between species. It is important to know what is and isn't safe for them to eat, and to make sure your shell baby has a safe and well balanced diet.
For a more extensive, searchable database for plants, vegetables, and other foods suitable for various tortoises, please see the Tortoise Table.
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We are often asked what we feed our tortoises. The tortoises in our care live outside in natural environments. We plant tortoise safe plants (see the Tortoise Table) in the environment and remove unwanted ones as needed. Therefore, they eat what is in their environment as much as possible. We put cuttle bones in every enclosure, replacing as needed. We buy calcium powder without vitamin D since our tortoise get vitamin D from the sun and too much vitamin D3 can be harmful. We put this calcium powder on their supplemental food and shake it up in the container, coating it. That way we don’t need to add it to each feeding. We love to add Zoo Med Tortoise Food Flower Topper when we have it.
We supplement their diets twice a week with the following.
Herbivorous tortoises: Russians, Hemann’s, Sulcatas, Leopards, and Greeks get Mazuri Tortoise Diet and Mazuri Tortoise Diet LS depending on the tortoise’s size and ability to eat the smaller pellets. Zoo Med Grassland Tortoise Food is great, too, just more expensive.
Red and Yellow Footed Tortoises get Mazuri Tortoise Diet LS and Zoo Med Natural Forest Tortoise Food, mixed or alternated.
Box Turtles get a mix of dried mean worms (sorry, should say meal worms. left it in for the laugh), other dried bugs, ReptoMin or Mazuri aquatic turtle food, Zoo Med Gourmet Box Turtle Food. Weekly or more often they are fed fresh, live earth worms we raise in our organic compost and snails found in the yard. Avoid feeding only protein. They need variety too.
We treat everyone with an occasional pumpkin or cucumber seasonally. We DON’T feed them grocery store food. We PLANT their environment with food and they thrive!!
Remember Foods high in oxalates bind with calcium, preventing absorption. Oxalic acid is naturally occurring and found in plants such as spinach, chard, beets, berries and kale. When urine contains higher levels of calcium and oxalate than it can dilute, those calcium and oxalate crystals bind together and form into hard masses, or “stones," in the urinary tract.
