Yes, chickens can eat bitter melon, but only some of it. The green fruit is fine as a small treat, and so are the leaves and shoot tips. The seeds aren’t, and neither is a ripe orange fruit that’s split open on the vine. And whatever you’ve heard, it isn’t a proven way to get rid of worms.
I rewrote this page from 15 sources, and you’ll find them all at the bottom. Two are from the University of Florida, which treats bitter melon as a crop worth growing and also as an invasive plant. Then there’s Feedipedia (the big animal feed database) and USDA’s food data. After those come two chapters of the Merck Veterinary Manual and three extension guides on feeding a flock. Memorial Sloan Kettering’s herb page covers what the plant does in people, and five studies cover the rest. The old version of this page had a study and some doses in it that I couldn’t trace to anyone, so they’re gone.
A word on the photos. The two white fruits below are bitter melons too, just a pale kind. The ripe orange ones are on a fruit plate in Turkey, cropped from a bigger photo. The hens come from a USDA visit to a farm in Oklahoma.
The short version.
- Green fruit: yes, as a small treat, with the seeds scooped out first.
- Leaves and shoot tips: a small handful is fine. People eat them too.
- Seeds: no. Feedipedia says they’ve been reported to be poisonous, and UF’s plant directory calls them toxic.
- Ripe, split fruit: no. Its sweet red seed coats are easy pickings, and every one of them wraps a seed.
- How much: all treats together should stay under about 10 to 15 grams a hen a day. That’s my math from two extension guides.
- Worms: it’s not a dewormer you can count on. In the one live-bird trial I found, the standard drug did better. Think your hens have worms? Start with a vet and a fecal test.
- Growing it: UF says don’t plant it in Florida, where it’s invasive.
What Bitter Melon Is, and Why It’s So Bitter
Bitter melon is a vine in the cucumber family. Its Latin name is Momordica charantia, and UF says it also goes by bitter gourd and karela, among other names. It’s a big plant. UF’s grower guide says the vines run up to 16 feet long with lots of branches.
Cooks pick the fruit green, like the one in the photo above. Feedipedia says the young fruit goes into stews and curries, and it can even be eaten raw in salads, like a cucumber. The bitterness is the whole point for a cook. Memorial Sloan Kettering’s herb page says it comes from a mix of compounds, alkaloids among them.
That bitterness is your clue that this isn’t just another squash. Feedipedia says the plant’s leaves and fruit carry compounds that do things in the body, plus some that get in the way of nutrition, and so do its seeds. It also says that while papers mention feeding bitter gourd to animals, there’s “little evidence that they are actually used”. In other words, nobody’s built a chicken diet around it. So the parts aren’t equal, and it’s worth taking them one at a time.
The Green Fruit: the Part People Eat
This is the part to share. UF says growers harvest it “when the fruit is green or slightly yellow”. Then cooks cut it in half, and the seeds “are removed and discarded”. Do the same for your hens. Halve it, scoop out the seeds and the pith, and chop the rest into small pieces.
Don’t expect much food value from it. USDA’s FoodData Central lists 100 grams of raw bitter melon pods at 94.0 grams of water, with 1.0 gram of protein and 2.8 grams of fiber. So it’s mostly water with a crunch. Your hens’ layer feed is where the protein is.
You’ll also see bitter melon sold as a vitamin C food, and it does have some. USDA lists 84.0 milligrams per 100 grams raw, and 33.0 after boiling. That doesn’t matter much to a chicken, though. The Merck Veterinary Manual says poultry make enough vitamin C on their own in normal conditions. It adds that there may be a benefit to adding some in very hot weather, but that’s about the feed, not a gourd.
One more thing. Your hens may just not like it. Nothing I read tested that in chickens. But Feedipedia mentions yearling rams in Ghana that clearly avoided bitter gourd leaves while they grazed. If your flock walks away from it, that’s fine. Just pick it up before it spoils. UC Davis’s flock feeding guide is blunt that rotten food doesn’t belong in the run.
Leaves and Shoot Tips: a Small Handful Is Fine
People eat these too. Feedipedia says the leafy shoots get eaten, and in Asia the plant is sometimes grown just for them. USDA lists raw leafy tips at 5.3 grams of protein per 100 grams, more than five times what the fruit has. They also carry 84 milligrams of calcium and 88.0 of vitamin C.
They aren’t plain greens, though. Feedipedia lists alkaloids and saponins among the compounds in the leaves. And UF’s plant directory says the fruits and leaves “are used medicinally”. Anything people take as medicine is something I’d keep to a small share of a hen’s day.
The only chicken study I found on the leaves points the same way. In 2024, a team in Nigeria mixed bitter melon leaf powder half and half with clove basil leaf powder and added it to broiler chicks’ feed (they call the plant wild cucumber). The smallest amount they tried didn’t hurt the chicks’ growth. More than that raised stress markers in the birds’ blood, and the chicks that got the most gained the least weight early on. That’s powdered leaf in meat-bird feed, not fresh leaves for laying hens. Still, more wasn’t better in that trial.
If you’re feeding a lot of greens in general, our page on whether chickens can eat too many greens is worth a look.
Keep the Seeds Out
This is the part that matters most. Every source I read that mentions the seeds either says to toss them or warns about them.
- Feedipedia says the seeds “have been reported to be poisonous”. It also says they’re high in trypsin inhibitors.
- UF’s plant directory puts it plainly: “the seeds are toxic”.
- Memorial Sloan Kettering says vicine, a compound in the seeds, may cause favism in people. Headache and fever are among the signs, and coma is on its list too.
- A 2003 review of bitter melon’s safety, in a pharmacy journal, lists a favism-like illness among the side effects reported. It also lists low blood sugar comas and convulsions in children, and lower fertility in mice.
Vicine matters for hens too, and there’s a real hen study on it. It just isn’t about bitter melon. Faba beans carry vicine as well. In 2017, a French team fed laying hens faba beans that were high or low in it. On the high-vicine beans, the hens’ eggs got smaller (clearly in one trial and slightly in the other), and their red blood cells broke down more. The beans low in vicine didn’t do that.
Nobody I found has fed bitter melon seeds to hens and measured what happened. So I can’t give you a safe number, and I won’t make one up. What I can tell you is that scooping them out takes about ten seconds with a spoon. The photo above shows where they sit, tucked into the white pith.
The Ripe, Split Fruit Goes in the Trash
Leave a bitter melon on the vine and it changes. UF says the fruit turns from green to orange, and the seed coat, called the aril, “turns bright red” and “starts to taste sweet”. Pick it too late and it splits open at the end, and the seeds can drop to the ground. UF’s plant directory says the tips split into three and curl back to show the red arils.
That’s the stage to keep away from your flock. A sweet red bit sitting in an open fruit is easy pickings, and each aril wraps a seed. UF’s grower guide does call the arils edible, but that’s a guide for people growing a vegetable. A hen isn’t that careful. And birds clearly swallow these seeds, since the plant directory says birds and animals are how they get spread around.
Feedipedia adds one more reason. It says the mature fruits of wild plants “are said to be poisonous to people and domestic animals”. That’s a cautious “said to be”, but it’s enough for me. Pick the fruit green, and if one gets away from you and turns orange, put it in the trash. Don’t toss it in the run, and don’t put it on the compost pile either, where its seeds can sprout.
How Much: Think in Grams
Here’s the budget I’d work from. Colorado State Extension says “Treats should make up no more than 10% of their daily diet”. It also says not to feed more than your birds can eat in 5 to 10 minutes, so you don’t draw in nuisance animals.
Alabama Extension says a laying hen eats between 100 and 150 grams of feed a day, roughly a quarter of a pound. Ten percent of that is 10 to 15 grams a hen a day. And that’s for all treats together, not just bitter melon.
For a flock of six, that’s 60 to 90 grams of treats a day. UF’s table, built from USDA data, puts a cup of half-inch pieces of boiled bitter melon at 124 grams. So six hens’ whole treat budget for the day is about half to three-quarters of a cup of it. I’d give a lot less than that, mixed in with other scraps, and not every day.
The feed is the main course. Alabama says the key for a small flock is a complete feed as the sole source of nutrients. UC Davis’s guide says to “treat the scraps like a treat not like the main course”. Not sure how much feed your flock goes through? Our chicken feed calculator works it out. And our page on the best feed for chickens helps when you’re standing in the feed store.
Not a Dewormer on This Evidence
The old version of this page called bitter melon a natural dewormer. Here’s what I could actually find behind that.
In 1976, a study in an Indian journal tested ten medicinal plants against roundworms (Ascaridia galli) taken from birds. In the lab dish, bitter melon was one of four plants that beat piperazine, a dewormer drug. That was a dish, though, not a chicken.
In 2008, a team in Bangladesh tried it in live birds. They took 60 local chickens that already carried roundworms from a market, and split them into three groups of 20. One group got a bitter melon fruit extract in its water and another got ivermectin, a dewormer. The third got nothing.
The worm counts in the extract group fell from 8 to 3 over three weeks, and those birds gained weight while the untreated ones lost it. The authors were upbeat, calling it a cheap option for farmers there. But they also wrote that “ivermectin was more effective than korolla fruit extract” (korolla is the plant’s Bengali name). Two more things from their table. Each count came from just five birds, and the untreated group’s count fell too, from 9 to 4, by the last check.
Feedipedia’s take on the leaves is much the same. It says their deworming effect in ruminants was “mostly assessed in vitro”, which means in the lab. So if you think your hens have worms, start with the Merck Veterinary Manual’s advice: a fecal test is the reliable way to confirm them. Merck also says the number of drugs approved for worms in poultry “is decreasing”, so ask a vet who sees poultry what’s approved for your birds. I’m not giving a dose of anything here, bitter melon included.
The black hen on her nest above is from the same Oklahoma farm as the red hens.
Growing It by the Run
If you’re thinking of growing one up the run fence, UF’s grower guide has the numbers you need.
- The seeds want warm, moist soil, anywhere from 60 to 95°F.
- The vines run up to 16 feet, and the trellis is usually about 6 feet high.
- In Florida, it starts blooming about four weeks after seeding. It needs insects such as bees to pollinate the flowers.
- Growers in north Florida start picking about 50 days after seeding.
Now the catch. UF rates bitter melon “Caution – Manage to Prevent Escape” and calls it invasive in south Florida. Its plant directory lists it as a Category 2 invasive and gives a short instruction: “Do not plant.” It first escaped cultivation in Florida in 1993, and it spreads by seed and by underground stems. So if you’re in Florida, skip it.
Anywhere else, my advice is to keep the vine outside the run, or high enough that your hens can’t strip it. Pick every fruit green, before it can split and drop seeds where your flock scratches. And don’t be thrown by the smell. UF’s plant directory says it’s sometimes called stink vine, though the smell from handling it washes off with water.
For other foods, our Can Chickens Eat It? checker gives you a quick answer. And if you’ve got other garden gourds around, our pages on gourds and on zucchini and cucumbers cover those. For squash seeds, our page on acorn squash seeds works out how many a hen can have.
Sources
- UF/IFAS Extension: Bitter Melon, an Asian Vegetable Expanding in Florida (HS1271, Guodong Liu and colleagues; first published 2015, revised July 2026).
- UF/IFAS Center for Aquatic and Invasive Plants: Momordica charantia (plant directory).
- Feedipedia: Bitter gourd (Momordica charantia) (V. Heuzé and colleagues, 2021).
- USDA FoodData Central (SR Legacy, balsam-pear (bitter gourd): pods raw 168393 and boiled 168394, leafy tips raw 168391).
- Merck Veterinary Manual: Nutritional Requirements of Poultry (Doug Korver).
- Merck Veterinary Manual: Helminthiasis in Poultry (Rüdiger Hauck).
- Colorado State University Extension: Raising Poultry the Organic Way (disease control and feeding).
- Alabama Cooperative Extension System: Feeding the Laying Hen (ANR-2913).
- UC Davis and UC Cooperative Extension: Feeding Your Flock (Maurice Pitesky and colleagues, PDF).
- Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, About Herbs: Bitter Melon.
- Ethan Basch and colleagues: Bitter melon (Momordica charantia): a review of efficacy and safety (American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy, 2003).
- M. Lessire and colleagues: faba beans with different levels of vicine and convicine, fed to laying hens (Animal, 2017).
- H. M. Shahadat and colleagues: Comparative efficacy of korolla (Momordica charantia) extract and Ivermec pour on in indigenous chicken infected with Ascaridia galli (Bangladesh Journal of Veterinary Medicine, 2008).
- J. Lal and colleagues: In vitro anthelmintic action of some indigenous medicinal plants on Ascaridia galli worms (Indian Journal of Physiology and Pharmacology, 1976).
- O. D. Oloruntola and colleagues: broiler chickens fed a wild cucumber (Momordica charantia) and clove basil leaf powder blend (Thai Journal of Agricultural Science, 2024).
Sources checked October 26, 2026. The gram math is mine, from Colorado State’s 10 percent and Alabama’s feed numbers. We aren’t vets. If a hen looks sick, call a vet who sees poultry.
Related read: How to Raise Chickens for Eggs — Instant PDF download. Secure checkout by Stripe
