What Do Tortoises Eat? (+Complete Food List)

Despite their tough exterior, tortoises have a very distinct and sensible diet. And this is not because they are picky eaters, it’s because there are a lot of foods that can be very dangerous for them. So let’s see what a tortoise can eat, and what it can’t.

Tortoises are herbivores, and their diet mainly consists of vegetables like lettuce, spinach, and watercress; fruits such as apples, grapes, strawberries, and berries; and some occasional plants like alfalfa, dandelion leaves, and chicory.

Overall, tortoises can eat a lot of the most common fruits and vegetables that can be found in a supermarket, but some of them can be very dangerous. For example, you should avoid: bananas, kiwi, avocado, and oranges. In the case of vegetables, you should stay away from: corn, broccoli, cauliflower and tomatoes, to name a few. Now, let’s take a closer look at what are the best foods to feed your turtle, and which are the ones that you should stay away from.

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 shock is essential for a healthy bone structure and shell.

So instead of having an endless list of fruits that are safe for tortoises, I will make a list of fruits that you should avoid. If you don’t find a fruit on this list then it’s completely safe for a tortoise.

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

Raisin
Prune
Date
Avocado
Guava
Banana
Coconut
Kivi
Persimmon
Cantaloupe
Apricot
Pomegranate
Honeydew
Nectarine
Mulberry
Peach

And as a general idea you should remember that citrus fruits are bad for tortoises so make sure to avoid:

Oranges
Lemons
Limes
Grapefruit
Citron
Pomelo

For a complete list of citrus fruits, you can check out this Wikipedia page, but the ones that I listed above are the most common.

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

If you want a more in-depth explanation of fruits and tortoises you can always check out my article: Can Turtles Eat Fruits? (How Much, How Often + List)

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 iceberg salad, cucumbers, eggplants, and mushrooms. 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 of some vegetables that contain a high amount of phosphorus, which you should avoid:

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

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

Processed Food

Processed foods are bad for tortoises. So no kind of processed food for them. No cheese, bread, pasta, chips, or any other kind of processed food.

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.

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

Plants

One of the most interesting things about tortoises, whether they are wild or not, is that they somehow know on their own if a plant is safe for them to eat or not.

While this won’t happen 100% of the time, if they have a well-balanced diet they won’t go around eating every plant in your house or your garden.

If you were to give them some of those plants mixed in with their food they would probably eat them, so don’t do this.

Here is a shortlist of some of the most common and toxic plants for tortoises:

Amaryllis
Asparagus Fern
Avocado Leaves
Azalea
Begonia
Boxwood
Buttercups
Calla Lily
Castor Bean
Crowfoot
Daffodil
Ficus
Holly
Iris
Ivy
Juniper
Nightshade Family
Poinsettia
Primrose

What to Feed Your Tortoise

Now that we discussed what a tortoise should and shouldn’t eat, let’s quickly cover how much of each category it should eat.

A good and healthy tortoise diet will consist of:

50% vegetables
25% fruits
25% pellets

Vegetables should be the main part of a good diet as they contain most of the nutrients that tortoises need.

Fruits, while also containing a lot of vitamins, shouldn’t be the staple of the diet, mainly because of the high amounts of phosphorus that they can contain.

Pellets are very good and nutritional, but since they are normally not what tortoises eat in the wild, you shouldn’t make them the main part of the diet.

As you might have noticed I didn’t include plants in the diet, this is mostly because they are not easy to find most of the time, and the nutritional value is not something that can’t be replaced by a vegetable. But if you want you can include them from time to time.

The percentages that I gave you are not something that has to be followed with maximum precision, instead use them as a general guideline. It’s ok if for example one month you give your tortoise a little more pellets than fruits, or if vegetables make up a little more than 50% of their diet.

How to Properly Feed Your 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 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 tastiest 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.

Tortoise Feeding Schedule

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

Feeding Schedule for Baby 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 tortoises should be fed every day using the size of the head method.

Feeding Schedule for Juvenile Tortoises

Tortoises grow from babies into juveniles. Red Eared sliders 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 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 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 tortoises can go weeks without eating. So your tortoise won’t be affected at all.

Feeding Schedule for Adult Tortoises

Adult 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 tortoise is once every 3 days, using the size of the head method. This might seem like 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 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 questions about what 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.