The Phoenix Tortoise Company
Giant Tortoise Food, Supplements and Husbandry
The Phoenix Tortoise Company
Giant Tortoise Food, Supplements and Husbandry
About The Phoenix Tortoise Company
Our Purpose
At The Phoenix Tortoise Company, we are passionate small-scale breeders focusing on producing the healthiest baby sulcatas possible. We focus on proper diet, husbandry, and enabling natural behaviors - but our ultimate goal is a nice round shell on all of our tortoises.
We are proud members of the Turtle and Tortoise Preservation Group, supporting the preservation of tortoise species through captive breeding.
Links and Suggestions
Our favorite links and products - we receive nothing from these, its just what we use.
One of the things we get asked the most is how do you care for your hatchlings and what do you recommend. Below is the list of things we use and how we recommend you do it by some excellent tortoise care gurus.
How should I set up my hatchling sulcata habitat?
We find this video by garden state tortoise to be excellent: https://youtu.be/qBlpYQm0HQg?si=Z6Yf3_Tsqhv1jztb
Do you have a care guide for the hatchling sulcatas?
We do not, because someone has already written what we consider to the gold standard baseline for hatchling care - Tom's guide to raising sulcatas, leopard and star tortoises: https://tortoiseforum.org/threads/the-best-way-to-raise-a-sulcata-leopard-or-star-tortoise.181497/
What supplements do you use?
We primarily use the Sticky Tongue Farms powders, they have always produced great results for us: https://www.stickytonguefarms.com/
What about feeding?
Sulcatas should be eating 95% grasses, hays and other high fiber plant matter. We feed primarily Bermuda grass and timothy hay, but timothy hay is only accepted occasionally and sometimes these things simply aren't available. In that case, we recommend spring mix greens (no spinach) heavily fortified with herb mixes. We mix our own here but Kapidolo farms does a stellar mix: https://www.kapidolofarms.com/
What is in your herb mix?
We buy bulk organic herbs from many places but primarily from Monterey Bay Herb Co., our list is: Hibiscus Flowers, Nettle, Moringa powder, Dandelion Leaf, Plantain, Echinacea, Alfalfa, Red Clover, Rose Flower, Calendula Flower, Red Clover flower, Chamomile flower and Nopal Powder. We also feed fresh cactus pads when available and cactus fruit as an extremely rare treat. Mixing the herbs on the spring mix helps balance out the nutrition profile for spring greens when grass or hay isn't regularly available.
What about these prepared pellet diets I see on the internet?
There are a number of them out there, most are inappropriate for sulcatas, or are formulated for them and not readily accepted. Some of the more recent pellet mixed are extremely overpriced timothy hay pellets mixed with flowers but if you really want to feed these it is much cheaper to buy a bag of timothy hay pellets from a feed store and a bag of appropriate herb flowers.
We will post more FAQs as they come through!
