Sulcata Tortoise Diet (Beginners Guide + Food List)

Sulcata Tortoises are known for eating everything that you put in front of them. But this doesn’t mean that everything is good for them. There are certain foods that should be avoided and some that should be a staple in their diet.

Sulcata tortoises are herbivorous, which means that they will eat fruits, vegetables and plants. A well-balanced diet for a pet Sulcata tortoise will consist mostly of leafy greens, with fruits only being given occasionally.

But you can’t simply throw a random amount of food in the enclosure and let your tortoise eat as much as it needs. You have to be very exact with the amount of food, and take into consideration that depending on the age of your tortoise, its dietary needs will change. But before discussing how to feed your Sulcata tortoise, let’s first see what Sulcata tortoises eat.

What Sulcata Tortoises Eat

Since Sulcata tortoises are herbivorous, they can eat a huge variety of foods, except meat. So to make things simpler, I will divide them in 4 categories:

Fruits
Vegetables
Processed food
Pellets

Fruits

Most fruits are good to eat, but there are some that aren’t good for tortoises due to the high amount of phosphorus or citric acid that they contain. Citric acid irritates the stomach of a tortoise, and phosphorus blocks the absorption of calcium, which is essential for a healthy bone structure and shell.

So here is a list of fruit that you should avoid:

Raisin
Prune
Date
Avocado
Guava
Banana
Coconut
Kiwi
Persimmon
Cantaloupe
Apricot
Pomegranate
Honeydew
Nectarine
Mulberry
Peach
Orange
Lemon
Lime
Grapefruit

So if you don’t find a fruit on this list, it’s good to eat.

If you want a more in depth explanation about fruits and tortoises, you can always check out my article: Can Turtles Eat Fruits? (How Much, How Often + List). While turtles and tortoises have different diets, they can both eat fruits and are affected in the same way by them.

Vegetables

Just like fruits, vegetables are great for tortoises, but there are some that contain a lot of phosphorus. Besides those other vegetables that you should avoid are like: iceberg salad, cucumbers, eggplants, and mushroom. While those vegetables won’t harm your tortoise in any way, they also have little to no nutritional value for your tortoise.

Here is a list with some vegetables that contain a high amount of phosphorus, which you should avoid:

Corn
Tomatoes
Asparagus
Beets
Peppers
Pumpkin
Cauliflower
Brussels Sprouts
Carrots
Broccoli
Sweet potatoes
Green Beans
Squash
Romaine Lettuce
Turnips

So if you don’t find a vegetable on this list, it’s good to eat.

Processed food

Processed food is bad for tortoises. So no kind of processed food for them. So no cheese, bread, pastas, chips, etc.

Pellets

While pellets can be considered a type of processed food, they are made especially for tortoises, so they are ok.

But as you can imagine there can be some significant differences based on the brand of the food, so if you want to know which those differences are and which one is the best I would recommend you to check out this article where I and the rest of the members of Turtleowner.com, choose the best tortoise food on the market, based on our years of experience and a lot of research: Buyer’s Guide: Best Tortoise Food.

What You Should Feed Your Sulcata Tortoise

Overall, you should feed your tortoise more vegetables than fruits and pellet. Vegetables should make up for 70% percent of your tortoises diet, and the rest can be filled with fruits or pellets.

Now that we covered what Sulcata tortoises can eat, we should also take a look at how to properly feed them, since this is just as important.

How to Properly Feed Your Sulcata Tortoise

Over the years, I’ve read about countless methods of feeding tortoises. But out of all of them, two stood out the most, as being the most used and the most efficient. And they are the 15 minutes method and the size of the head method.

The 15 Minutes Method

The 15 minutes method is very simple, you give your tortoise a lot of food, and let it eat for 15 minutes. After that, you remove the food.

As simple as this method might be, it’s definitely not the best one of the two. This is because Sulcata tortoises, wild or pets, are opportunistic feeders by nature. This means that they will eat everything that they can in the fastest time possible, because they don’t know when they will have the chance to eat again. Even if you feed them regularly, they will not abandon this mentality.

While this is one of the most popular methods, it’s starting to lose a lot of popularity lately due to its disadvantages.

One of its biggest disadvantages is that you can easily overfeed your tortoise, and this can lead to two serious problems, one is pyramiding, and the other is an unbalanced diet. Like all animals, tortoises have their preferences, and if you present them with different types of food they will instantly go for the tastiest one each time, and the tastier option doesn’t always contain all the necessary nutrients.

So, if you were to use this method your tortoise will definitely not be starving, but there is a good chance that you will be overfeeding your tortoise. This is why I would recommend you to use the size of the head method, which is just as easy to use, it’s just as efficient but has none of the disadvantages

The Size of the Head

This method says that you should feed your tortoise the same amount of food that it would take to fill its head (without the neck) if it were hollow.

The simplest way to put this method into practice is to find a small container, like a medicine cup, a shot glass, or a bottle cap. This container has to be approximately the same size as the head of your tortoise, without the neck. Then you fill that container to the top, and then you feed the food inside the container to your tortoise. And that’s all.

You don’t always have to use a container, you can always estimate the food that you would need to fill its head. If you sometimes give your tortoise a little too much food, and sometimes you give it a little too much, there won’t be any problem. Your tortoise won’t be affected by small differences.

This method does a great job because it takes into consideration the size of the tortoise, and gives you a fixed amount of food that you have to give your tortoise. And as the tortoise grows the amount of food will change.

This is the method I use to feed all my tortoises, and the results are great. During my research a lot of people that used this method had great results, and nobody had any problem with it.

Between the two methods, I would definitely recommend you the size of the head method. Besides the reasons that I already listed, there is another important reason. It allows you to have a more diversified feeding schedule.

Sulcata Tortoise Feeding Schedule

The first thing that you have to take into consideration when thinking how often you have to feed your tortoise, or when making a feeding schedule, is the age of the tortoise. Baby Sulcata tortoises need a different amount of food than juveniles, and juveniles need a different amount of food than adult Sulcata tortoises. So let’s take a look at each age group.

Feeding Schedule for Baby Sulcata Tortoises

Out of all the age groups, baby tortoises need to eat the most often. This is because they need a lot of energy to grow. When tortoises are at this stage in life, they experience the fastest growth rate. And to be able to grow so fast, they will need a lot of energy that they will get from eating.

So, baby Sulcata tortoises should be fed every day using the size of the head method.

Feeding Schedule for Juvenile Sulcata Tortoises

Tortoises grown from babies into juveniles. Sulcata tortoises usually become juveniles after they reach 3 to 4 inches, this usually happens when they are between 8 and 12 months old.

A juvenile won’t grow as fast as a baby tortoise, but it will still grow faster than an adult. So it still needs to be fed quite often. Here you have two good options.

You can either feed your Sulcata tortoise once every two days, the amount of food that it will take to fill their head. Or you can feed them half of that amount every day.

There is no difference for them if you feed them every day, or if you feed them every two days, as long as the amount of food is right. So it’s up to you to choose which way you want to do it. I would recommend you to feed your juvenile Sulcata tortoise every two days, this way the chances of you forgetting to feed your tortoise are smaller.

And if it ever happens that you forget to feed your tortoise once, don’t worry. In the wild, Sulcata tortoises can go weeks without eating. So your tortoise won’t be affected at all.

Feeding Schedule for Adult Sulcata Tortoises

Adult Sulcata tortoises grow very slowly, and after some time they will not grow at all. So they won’t need as much food as babies and juveniles.

The best way to feed your adult Sulcata tortoise is once every 3 days, using the size of the head method. This might seem enough food when you compare it to the rest of the age groups, but remember that due to the way the size of the head method works, the size of the food portion also increases, so there is no problem, your tortoise is getting way more food than it got as a baby, when it was eating daily.

Final Thoughts

While Sulcata tortoises can eat a lot of things, not all of them can be good for them.

From my experience, I know that it’s not that easy to remember all the things that you should avoid, but as times go by you will memorize those things without even noticing. And in the meantime, you can always take another look at this article and check out the lists.

I hope that I managed to cover every possible aspect, but if you have any question about what Sulcata tortoises eat, or anything else about tortoises, don’t hesitate to ask in the comment section below. I will do my best to answer you as soon as possible.