Chicken-n-Veg

Archive for May, 2009

We have been able to let the chickens have full access to the garden for quite a few days this month, whenever someone has been keeping an eye on them. On the days that we’ve not been able to let them out, however, it has become clear that the space in the run is not enough. Theoretically it is big enough, but we want really happy chickens and don’t want any squabbling due to the limited space.

There are two good reasons why we didn’t feel able to let them out when we weren’t about:

• They seem to have developed a taste for most things growing in our vegetable beds
• We see a fox in the garden most evenings (and even sometimes during the day)

We therefore ordered a Hotline electric poultry net and a high capacity 12V leisure battery. This arrived late last week and we erected it this weekend. It’s a 50m poultry net, giving a very generous run of approximately 12m x 12m  (40ft x 40ft). The net was placed around as many points of interest as possible – Yucca plants, Pampas grass, trees, tree stumps. grass and bare earth for dust baths (although it will probably all be bare earth soon). The hens seem extremely happy with their new surroundings – sunbathing, having dust baths, destroying the plants. We can now let them out all day Knowing that they are safe from Mr Fox and that our vegetables are safe from them.

We spent quite a bit of time at the weekend building and placing two more raised beds. These are hopefully the last raised beds we will need. We intend to use them mainly for ‘permanent’ fruit plants such as raspberry, gooseberry and rhubarb, ie. plants that with a bit of care will last for years. We will perhaps also use the beds for some annual strawberries.

The beds were built from scaffolding boards and are 3.9m x 1.2m. The inside of the beds were lined with polythene (actually a roll of damp proof course), to stop them wicking moisture from the soil. They were also treated with several coats of a green horticultural wood preserver. This is stated to be non-toxic and suitable for any horticultural purpose, ie. safe for vegetables and won’t kill the worms in the soil. We can certainly confirm that worms love the previous beds we built. The polythene liner will stop any preservative treatment from leaching into the soil anyway.

We got a lot of ‘help’ from the hens as we were digging to get the new beds level. The ex-battery hens in particular were so keen to get to all of the worms that we were unearthing that it was very lucky that none were decapitated by our spades. We also needed to keep shooing them away from the vegetable beds, as they seemed to want to help us thin out our seedlings.

When we checked the nest boxes mid morning we found our first egg. It weighed in at 74g. Very Large / Size 1 according to our Good Housekeeping Cook Book. By the end of the day we had two additional (Large / Size 2) eggs. Impressive work by our three ex-battery hens on their first full day. One perfect egg each, laid in the right place. To a commercial egg producer they might be ‘past it’ but they seem fine to us. Boiled eggs for tea – yummy.

With our original five hens seemingly very settled, we decided that now was a suitable time to adopt three ex-battery hens as we had always intended. We got them from a local poultry supplier called Little Misses Chickens. As well as doing some small scale breeding and rearing of birds, they take in unwanted birds – hens, cockerels, ducks, guinea fowls, etc. They also do a Battery Hen Rescue day, every other month, where they rescue quite a large number of hens. These rescued hens are only sold on when they have had some time to recuperate. This meant that rather than get them in a sorrowful state, almost straight from the battery farm, our three ex-bats were well feathered and spritely. They were also already acclimatised to being outside with other hens. They do have droopy, pale combs, which (from reading online) is common for caged hens due to the high temp in their cages, but this will apparently improve over time. They are more than a year old and of the normal ginger Warren(ish) hybrid variety favoured by the commercial producers for their reliable egg production. We expect that these girls will provide our first eggs in the next day or so. Apparently they will lay about five eggs a week this year, dropping to four a week next year.

We introduced the three new hens into the run with our original five birds late in the afternoon. Apart from one scuffle, when Snowdrop got a few pecks for being very nosy as we put the first newcomer in, we haven’t seen any problems. They all seemed quite happy walking around and eating / drinking together. We will obviously monitor them in the coming days to make sure that there is no real trouble.  The older battery hens can certainly stick up for themselves, but so far don’t seem as they are going to bully our existing hens too much.

We fitted coloured leg bands to the new hens so we could tell them apart. The new girls have now been named Matilda, Pansy and Isobel.

When it came to dusk our younger hens went to bed early, as normal, leaving the 3 ex-bats alone in the run. Within a quarter of an hour, however, they sussed what they had to do and went up the ladder as well.

When I checked on them this evening the ex-bats were not using the perches, as expected – a year in a cage without a perch will do that ! I am going to lift them onto the perches every night, for a week or so, to see if they can get the hang of it.