How To Get Started With Chickens - Part 1

Wow, yesterday's post about why everyone should keep chickens got a lot of responses. As Steve said, people seem to want to know more about chickens. I had a lot of the same questions when I got started.

steve said...

what about noise? are they loud? we have a backyard but we have lots of close neighbors. i don't want the chickens waking everyone up (though i don't know why i care...my neighbors have no problems letting their dogs out at 4am to raise all hell).

Nope. Cockerels are noisy, but you don't need one unless you're planning to breed your own chicks. Hens are pretty quiet, they just make this soft clucking occasionally which is very charming. Incidentally, if you have loads of space and you do want a cockerel, you can still eat the fertilised eggs. As long as you collect them promptly and don't let the hens sit on them and incubate them, they're indistinguishable from unfertilised eggs.

You might have heard that eggs with a spot of blood are the fertilised ones? Nope, that's a myth. Some eggs have spots of blood that's all, whether fertilised or unfertilised. Really, there's no way of telling fertilised from unfertilised eggs unless you have access to a lab.

Anonymous said...

Uh, you forgot the number one reason (which is a huge oversight given you repeat reasons to make a "top ten" list), which is that they eat all your kitchen scraps and turn them into eggs.

Actually in the UK it is illegal to feed catering waste to farmed animals. Catering waste is defined as any food which has been in a human kitchen, including domestic kitchens, and vegetarian kitchens. Farmed animals are defined as any animal which is normally farmed, even when they are kept as pets.

So if you feed carrot peelings to your free range backyard chickens you are a criminal. But if you keep thousands of chickens in a warehouse with no windows but with electric lights on 24 hours a day, each one in a box the size of a sheet of A4 paper so their feet dissolve from their own shit, and cut all their beaks off with a hot wire to stop them pecking each other to death, that's perfectly OK.

billy said...

You wait until one falls ill and you take it to the vets and it costs you twenty quid and dies anyway. . .

That never happens with guinea pigs does it?

Then there is the tears when the fox gets one. Then you breed and get seven cockerels. . .

I know we have foxes in our area because I've seen them. A guy down the road feeds them. They've never taken any of our chickens yet (touch wood). But I expect they will one day, c'est la vie. When that happens I'll decide whether the mess and upset makes it not worth carrying on. But from a economical point of view the hens have already paid their way, so even if I had to replace them once a year due to fox losses it would still be worth it.

I'm not breeding them and I don't recommend you breed them either unless you know all about it and have a plan for what do do with all the cocks. I'm talking about keeping backyard hens for eggs. Breeding, showing, preserving rare breeds, and rearing for meat are all very different operations. That's not what I'm talking about.

Guinea pigs are much less trouble and several times more intelligent than a chicken!

You'll get no argument from me there! But you don't get the eggs, do you. I'll stick with my chickens.

There were more questions and I'll deal with them in the next post. In the meantime you might want to look at the Omlet website. I found it very helpful for answering my questions and allaying any fears when I got started. The Omlet products were too pricey for me, although they look good quality. We cobbled our own henhouse and run out of materials we had to hand, which kept the cost to almost nothing. I'll cover that in a future post as well.

Links to Part 2 and Part 3

10 Reasons Why Everyone Should Keep Chickens

1. You get eggs


2. They're no trouble. You top up their food and water occasionally, clean out their house occasionally, collect the eggs and that's about it


3. Honestly, they're no trouble at all. A lot less effort than having a dog or even a cat. About the same as having a guinea pig or a rabbit, I'd say


4. The eggs are cheaper than buying them because the food costs, well, chickenfeed


5. The eggs are much, much nicer than shop-bought eggs, even free-range organic ones


6. When they stop laying you can eat them if you like, as long as you haven't got sentimental about them


7. They eat garden pests such as slugs, snails, leatherjackets etc.


8. You can put their bedding plus the manure on the compost heap. It's excellent activator and will improve your garden or veg plot no end


9. Even free-range eggs are often produced in conditions you might not expect. The hens must have theoretical access to an outdoor run but in practice they might never get there. They're less crowded than battery hens it's true, but still their living conditions won't be a patch on your own pampered hens, and that's why your own hens' eggs taste better (see point 5)


10. You really feel you're living the good life when you have chickens in your back garden

Stormy Weather

After an amazingly hot and dry April (usually a cold and wet month here in England) we seem to be having a whole month's worth of rainfall in just a few days now it's early May. The newly-installed waterbutt is full to overflowing and the poor old chickens need wellies, their pen is so full of mud.

On the one hand the wet weather is much-needed. If the April conditions had continued we would have been facing a drought. But on the other hand the timing is poor. A nice wet April dampens the earth ready for sowing and planting crops in warmer, dryer May. But a dry April followed by a very wet May means we have to wait for dryer weather to get crops in the ground, losing valuable growing time and increasing the risk of seedlings dying indoors.

Mini Egg

Ladies, ladies. You're having a laugh.

Chilly Chickens

The chickens are coping very well with the snow and ice. I check that their water is ice-free a few times a day, and I've added some extra dry bedding to the henhouse to help them stay cosy. You can tell they're healthy and happy. They moulted in the late autumn but now they're in full plumage again and looking very handsome. They're also back to laying a daily egg each, after the midwinter lay-off. We got out of the habit of eating them so we're now awash with eggs. The situation is made worse because I bought half a dozen duck eggs at the farm shop as a treat for my dad, who is staying with us for a few weeks. And he brought us a gift of (you've guessed it) a dozen duck eggs.

Never mind. I'll just plan plenty of eggy meals for the next week or two. Quiche, eggy bread, pancakes, hammy-eggy-cheesey-topside, clafoutis, it'll be a trial (sigh!) but we'll use them all up somehow.

World Exclusive Interview

Stonehead is a good friend of Bean-Sprouts, and a regular commenter. He has an active blog of his own where he talks about life on a croft in North-East Scotland, environmental and political issues. I'm fascinated because he has gone much further along the road we are travelling, buying a smallholding and living off the land. I interviewed him exclusively for Bean-Sprouts.

Bean-sprouts: Describe a typical day for you.
Stonehead: Hmm, no such thing as a typical day! I get up between 5.30 and 6am. I have a shower every second day to conserve water, then it's straight into getting all the breakfast things ready before making packed lunches. I then head out to do the morning chores, feeding and mucking out the chickens and pigs.

With the chores done, I head inside for breakfast with the rest of the family. The other half heads off for work, the Big Lad gets the school bus, and I take the Wee 'Un to playgroup. If it's playgroup duty day, then I'm out until noon or so helping keep an eye on the children with lots of making stuff and story telling. If it's not playgroup duty, then I have from 9.30 until 11.30 to get jobs done. This can be building chicken houses, working in the vegetable patch, working with the soft fruit and fruit trees, mowing grass, planting, topping, baking, cider making, brewing, preserving.

After collecting the Wee 'Un I either finish off the morning's work or play outside games with the Wee 'Un. If working, we turn it into a play session as well so he can help with parts of the job. The Wee 'Un helps me make lunch, we then do some quick baking before having a quiet play and do some reading while we wait for the Big Lad to get home and for the bakes to cook. With the Big Lad home, we feed the chickens then the boys play together outside while I do more jobs.

From around 4.30pm until 5.30/6pm it's a repeat of the morning chores, the other half usually gets home just as we finish. We eat between 7.15 and 8pm, so that the boys can chill out for a while, then off to bed. Then it's tidy up and relax time. I try to fit in a bit of blogging around then, but usually it's more like 10pm until 11pm as it's nice to spend a bit of time with the other half! Weekends are even busier.

Bean-sprouts: What made you decide to pursue this lifestyle?
Stonehead: We don't regard it as a lifestyle. It's our way of life. I've always wanted either a small farm of my own or a yacht. I like working with animals, I like working the land, I like tinkering, and I like working hard for myself and my family.

I'm a pragmatic green - I don't buy the spiritual, hippy, pagan thing at all. I think we have one world, we have to tread lightly, we have to use resources sparingly and we have to be responsible for our actions. I do get a lot out of being outside in all weathers and enjoy being part of the natural world, but I'm not the communing with nature sort.

One thing I definitely am is an anti-consumer. I have a pathological hatred of being sold stuff that I don't want or need. I accept that I and my family have certain needs that can only be met by shopping, but I try to do so as little as possible. I'm a huge fan of bartering, trading and giving, I love making things and I like being minimalist. This can cause friction with the other half and the boys, but as we're generally in accord most of the time I can fudge on certain things (like TV!).

While I was very good at my career, I was always conscious that I was mainly generating money for people for whom I had little time but I persisted until we had sufficient money to be able to just afford the croft. However, I regarded the whole wage-slave thing as total BS, so once we were in a position to escape to the hills, I grasped it with both hands and got out of there. So why do I pursue this life? Because it's "my" life, just as it's also the other half's. We both choose to share it with each other. (The poor lads haven't much choice at this point!)

Plans for 2007

It's fashionable to say "I don't do New Year resolutions", but I like them. I'm a great believer in turning over a new leaf, in re-inventing yourself, and in taking stock and taking action. In fact, I like resolutions so much I make them all the time, not just at New Year. That's what my monthly challenge polls are about - setting goals and targets and then holding myself to them.

So what changes will we be making in 2007? For one thing, we plan to do more with the allotment. We were only given a quarter of a plot, and half of that was very weedy, the other half having been under plastic sheeting for a season. So we cultivated the clean part, and laid the sheeting down over the weedy areas until spring. It was a smart way to begin, because the area was manageable. In fact we tried to cram rather too much in and some crops suffered from overcrowding. So now we can cultivate the whole of the plot we were given, but we have also been given another section of plot. Maybe this time we're overstretching ourselves, but we'll see.

Another goal for 2007 is to try our hand at beekeeping. I've looked up local courses, and the nearest one is fully booked up. I'm on a waiting list for 2008. But I'm looking further afield, and considering going on a weekend course somewhere. If all else fails perhaps I'll just dive straight in without any lessons. I'm good at learning stuff from books, willing to try things and see if they work, and sensible enough to join a local club for some expert advice if I come unstuck.

The main project for 2007 is to pay off our mortgage. We have calculated that if we were free of our mortgage and largely self-sufficient in food, Ed could afford to give up his full-time job. So we have spent the past couple of days making calculations about how much we can afford to tighten our belts and how quickly that will pay off the loans. Funnily enough this is the part that really makes me feel like we might actually one day buy some land. I'm confident that I can learn the knowledge and skills needed to make it work (perhaps foolhardily so), but what worries me is the ever rising cost of land and property. The financial aspect of buying a smallholding is the daunting bit, and it feels good to make steps towards that.

I'd also like to visit a smallholding or organic farm for some real hands-on experience and a taster of what it would be like to live like that permanently. To that end I have been investigating WWOOFs (voluntary working for brief periods on organic farms). You arrange with a farmer to come and do voluntary work for a weekend. I expect to work hard, but I also expect to learn a lot, not least whether this is really the life for me or should I just stick with my allotment and backyard chickens.

What are your plans for 2007?

Review of 2006

Earlier this year I realised that although I have spent most of my life studying and working in academia, when I daydream I don't dream about publishing papers, giving lectures or attending conferences. I dream about living on a farm, waking early to milk the cows and collect the eggs. I dream about owning a plot of land and raising some livestock and growing some crops. This has always been my daydream for years now, but I hardly talked about it or even consciously thought of it as something achievable.
Watching the TV series "It's Not Easy Being Green" stirred in me such feeling of envy and longing that I spoke to my husband, Ed about it. I told him this was what I really wanted to do, and I'd like to try to make it a reality.

I was on tenterhooks to see his response. If he had laughed at me and called me crazy, I would have perhaps planted a few vegetables in our garden and tried to satisfy myself with that. He didn't laugh at me. He didn't say much either, although that's Ed all over. But the next day he called me over to the computer and said "Look at this". He had been searching on the Internet for smallholdings for sale and had found some properties he liked the look of.

Since then we have tried to gain the knowledge and skills we need to make our dream a reality. We have got a small allotment and grown some crops there. We have built a chicken run in the garden and populated it with two hens. We started this blog which has been much more successful than we ever dreamed, and was recently featured in The Times. More importantly, the blog also helped us make contact with a lot of really helpful and friendly people who dream the same dream as us. Some of them have gone substantially further along the road to self-sufficiency that we have.

In 2006 I also taught students in prisons for the first time, which was very rewarding and educational for me. I developed my relationship with my dad as we spent a lot of time together emptying his house in Liverpool and selling it, which allowed him to settle permanently in Ireland. The kitchen and master bedroom got remodelled following the subsidence we suffered in 2005. Sam, our youngest, started full-time school, and his teacher shared with us her concerns that he has Asperger's Syndrome just like our eldest son (the same teacher was the first to spot the obvious that time, too). So we have begun the protracted diagnosis procedure again.

But it has been our change of direction that has dominated the year. We will look back on 2006 as the year we stared making our dream a reality. The first step was admitting what we dreamed about. What do you dream about?

Christmas Decorating

The Martha Stewart of Tyne and Wear has been at it again. Today my sister, Steph, has helped me:

• Take up my new jeans
• Make Christmas decorations out of candles and greenery from the garden
• Ice the Christmas cake
• Make cheesey sausage rolls
• Make a cheesey suet roly-poly for Ed's vegetarian Christmas lunch
• Buy a tree and decorate it
• Make soup for lunch
• Decorate the house
• Put up fairy lights around the hen house
• Make mince pies
• Make mulled wine
• Tidy up the house, and prepare a buffet for this evening (our other sister, Lindsey is coming with her husband for carols around the piano)

All this with five children between the ages of two and eight running round the house in an excited state. I'm exhausted, but I'm really looking forward to this evening. I'm thoroughly in the Christmas mood now.

Smashing Eggs

The hens haven't been laying for a while. They stop when the days become short. I've been meaning to put a light in the henhouse but I haven't got round to it yet.

Yesterday there was an egg, though, which came as a surprise. I think it came as a surprise to the hen, too. It wasn't in the nesting box as usual but on the pile of poo underneath the place where they like to roost at night. I think it must have just popped out whilst she was half asleep.

At least that one had a soft landing. Today there was another egg that wasn't so lucky. It also seems to have been laid by a perching chicken, and so suffered a fairly long drop onto a hard floor.

What on earth are the silly creatures up to?

Uses for Shredded Paper

My dad gave us an automatic paper shredder, so now we can be self-sufficient in chicken bedding. When I told my friends, one said:

Aaaarrrgh! Why didn't I thinkof that? We shred stuff regularly, but I've always just thrown the resulting shreds away. and then paid for hay for the chickens bedding. Thank you.

We've used quite a bit of shredded paper as packing material for dad's belongings. You can also add shredded paper to the compost heap, or make it into briquettes for burning. Any other uses for shredded paper?

Hen Research

Chris and Linda Evans, of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, have been studying chickens. It seems they're smarter than we thought:

When male chickens come across food, they make a “took, took, took” call to tell the flock – but hens react only if they don’t already know that food is around.

My chickens come running every time I open the back door, and make demanding clucks in the hope I'm going to feed them. But the animal behaviourists from Sydney think they're doing rather more than that:

“If you’re on a long drive and you pass a restaurant sign, that could be a salient piece of information. But if, after food has been brought to the table, someone says: ‘There’s food,’ that’s a redundant comment. It’s that kind of contrast,” Chris Evans explains.

In other words, this is not a Pavlov-type automatic response to a stimulus. Rather, there is a cognitive element which makes it more like human communication (I think it's going a bit far to liken it to language, as the New Scientist article does).

via Down The Lane forums.

Self-Sufficiency Library

I must start with a confession. I copied the idea for this post from another blog. I saw the original post a while ago but I can't find it now. If the person who originally blogged about their own self-sufficiency library would like to mail me I'll gladly attribute and link.

Here are a few of the books I find useful and inspiring. It's not an exhaustive list, there are certainly other books scattered around the house I could have included. Over the next few weeks I'll review some of them.

.

Oh, and if any publishers would like to send me books for review, I'd be very glad to receive them. I'll also review CDs, chocolate, and bottles of wine.

Test (Chicken) Run

It's been raining a lot lately, so the improvements Ed and Steph made to the chicken run have been thoroughly tested. I'm pleased to say they seem to be working very well so far. The run no longer gets muddy and wet whenever it rains.

Down Time

Steph asked me to add some detail photos showing the blocks from the quilt I bought in a charity shop, so here they are.

This blog is supposed to be a journal describing the Rimmer family's journey to greater self-sufficiency. We dream one day of having a smallholding and giving up our full-time jobs. So far we have got an allotment and two chickens in the back yard.

It's a quiet time of year on the allotment. There are still some root vegetables in the ground - kohl rabi, beetroot, carrots and swedes. They can stay there safely until we need them as long as the ground doesn't freeze. And there are some onions slowly growing that will be ready next year. Even the chickens are laying less as the days get shorter, and I had to buy eggs from a shop last week as we had run out.

We're depending on the weekly organic veg box delivery and trips to the local shops. If we were really self sufficient we would have spent the summer preserving and storing the food we grew, and now we would be living on it.

Chicken Run

I cleaned out the henhouse and the run at the weekend. It's a dirty job certainly, but it is very satisfying. I also cleaned out my 6-year-old daughter's bedroom at the weekend and believe it or not shoveling shit was more enjoyable than sorting out bits of pink plastic junk.

My husband Ed and my sister Steph fixed the drainage problem in the chicken run by building a small retaining wall to stop the mud washing onto the paving. They also laid crazy paving slabs on top of existing paving to keep the chickens' feet out of the water. We'll have to wait for the next rainstorm to see if it really works. I don't think we'll be waiting long.

Winter Egg Production

Chickens are supposed to lay less in the winter. Apparently it's triggered by the shortening days, so we've been planning to install a low-watt lightbulb in the henhouse. We haven't done it yet because they're still producing an egg a day each.

Eglus in the News

I don't normally like to blog about news stories too often but I couldn't let this pass without telling you about it. It's a story from the BBC News website about eglus. I once described eglus as

...funky urban henhouses for the iPod generation. They look like someone has disembowelled an iMac and attached a run on the front.

I thought I was being original and witty, but if you google for eglu+imac you'll see that almost everybody who has written about eglus has made the comparison.

We decided to save the £400 and make a henhouse out of an underused wendy house, and very swanky it is too. But if you don't happen to have an old wendy house knocking around, then an eglu isn't a bad way to go. I applaud them for making poultry-keeping accessible to the masses.

Barter

I've just bartered 4kg of runner beans (note to self - plant fewer next year) and 2 kg of yellow courgettes from the allotment for some apples, bananas and oranges at the local farm shop. I got talking to the shopkeeper and he's going to help me get some more chickens for myself and a neighbour who wants some too. That will save me having to go all the way to Warrington.

Edited at 14:04 - This is a shoutout to my dad, Bill, who has finally been dragged kicking and screaming into the 20th century, and is getting to grips with this new-fangled interweb thingy. Bet you can't figure out how to leave a comment, baldie.

Summer Has Gone

The swallows and housemartins have gone. They'll be back next summer. But this morning I could hear all the geese who gather on the field at the end of the road, and the chickens are feasting on the elderberries that are dropping into their run.