Chicken-n-Veg

We took opportunity of the sunny weather on Saturday to dig up all our potatoes so we could get them dried in the sun before storage. We had one bed of Charlotte potatoes and half a bed of Edzell Blue, and managed to dig up enough to fill four large hessian sacks. This didn’t seem bad considering how many we had already dug up to eat as delicious new potatoes.

Earlier this week we fitted an automatic VSBb pop-hole opener to our henhouse. This was really to give us additional peace of mind when we are not there. Whenever we go away we arrange for someone visit daily, to feed the hens and collect the eggs. We cannot, however, expect them to also open up the henhouse every morning and shut it every evening. Also the electric fence has to be turned off to collect the eggs and it would be easy for someone to forget to turn it back on. By having the pop-hole close automatically at dusk, at least the hens should be safe at night when the foxes are most active, even if the fence is not powered. We actually found the gruesome remains of a hens foot in our garden last week and our next door neighbour found three more feet in their garden. Obviously someone in the area has lost some of their hens to foxes, so ours are clearly at risk too.

We got the opener from Flyte So Fancy, our henhouse supplier, as they actually had a custom kit for our Haven henhouse. It included a pre cut door, sliders and pulley wheels. This made fitting very easy – it was just a case of unscrewing the old door fixings and replacing with the supplied kit.

The electronics were housed in a weatherproof box and powered by four AA batteries, which apparently will not need replacing for at least a year. It was fitted on the outside of the house and a motorised draw string opens and closes the pop-hole door according to light levels. The light sensor settings are adjustable with a small screwdriver.

It all seems to be working very well so far. It has been operational for four days and we haven’t had a hen locked out yet ! The only thing we have noticed is that dawn is very early at this time of year – around 4.30am. Our neighbours might not appreciate the noise at this time and also the foxes will still be roaming. So we have now, therefore, ordered an additional battery timer. This will allow us to override when the door  is opened in the morning. We will set it to close automatically at dusk and then open after 7am.

This weekend we got eight eggs from our eight hens, for the first time, so we can  now be confident that they are all laying. For the last couple of weeks we have typically been getting six eggs a day (and occasionally seven).

This weekend, in an effort to make looking after our hens even easier than it already is, we made a droppings ‘tray’ to sit under their perch. It was very easy to make and should be suitable for most henhouses that don’t come with a built in tray.

The hens enjoy kicking up their litter material all over the area around the pop hole, making a real mess in their run, jamming up the horizontal slider for their door. The solution was making a dropping tray by modifying a heavy duty tarpaulin. We had a spare one, but they are very cheap to buy. It was measured and cut for size allowing a 7.5-10cm (3-4 inch) turn up on each edge. It was then just a case of hemming the cut edges and sewing the corners. Handles (from cut off material) were also sewn on the sides.

Time will tell how long lasting or successful it is, but they certainly haven’t been able to kick any bits in the first couple of days of use. It should make cleaning out a breeze. It is waterproof so nothing goes through onto the floor of the henhouse.The handles mean it can be easily lifted out and tipped straight in the compost bins. It’s also easier for us to fill it with the litter material and carry it back to the hen house.

This evening we made up some carrot, radish and lettuce seed tapes. Seed tapes (basically seeds stuck onto paper at regular intervals) are available from quite a few seed retailers, but at quite a high price, which is why we prefer to make our own. I think that seed tapes are a very convenient way of dealing with very small seeds, with very little going to waste and saves lots work on thinning out when the seeds come out. They are extremely quick and easy to use. Simply make a small trench of the required depth, as you would for the seeds and lay the tape in the trench before covering and watering. Hey presto – job done ! Perfectly spaced, straight rows and no seeds blown all over your beds by the wind.

Carrot seed tape is one of the most frequently sold seed tapes. Supposedly a big advantage of carrot seed tape is that not having to thin out the carrots reduces the risk of carrot fly. The very act of thinning the carrot seedlings attracts carrot fly.

For the seed tape paper we used kitchen roll. You can just as easily use old newspapers but we didn’t have any on hand. We use all ours to line the bottom of the hen house. It is just important that the paper will quickly break down in wet soil. Glossy magazine paper would not be suitable. This should be cut into thin strips (say 1.5 cm or 3/4 inch wide). One advantage of the kitchen roll is that it is easily folded, concertina style, to make it quick to cut the strips. It can also be made into longer strips than the newspaper, matching the length of our raised beds.

To stick the seed to the paper we used rice glue. This is often used for traditional Japanese paper crafts and quickly breaks down in wet soil. It is made very simply by wizzing up a small quantity of left-over cooked rice in a food blender with a small quantity of water. You are looking for a consistency similar to PVA adhesive. Don’t make up too much as it really won’t last more than a few days before going off. Alternatively you could make up a flour and water paste, but we find the rice glue is stronger and makes for easier handling of the tapes when they are dry. We put the glue into one of the squeezy, refillable glue pens that you can get from hobby shops. We just made the nozzle slightly larger to stop it from blocking up. You could also use a cheap icing syringe or just a small paint brush. Then it is simply a matter of putting spots of glue at the intervals you want and dropping a seed on each glue spot. A pair of tweezers helps here.

Then leave the tape to dry overnight. Don’t forget to label the tape if you are making several different tapes at the same time.

Today we harvested our first two potato plants. They were Charlotte salad potatoes and we got a little over a kilogram of new potatoes (about two and a half lbs) from the two plants. They tasted absolutely wonderful, boiled with a little mint and eaten with salmon and salad. They were also approved of, as finger food, by our six and a half month old son. He definitely seemed to be purring as he crammed them in his mouth.

We actually planted an area of approximately 6m x 1.2m with potatoes, about (two thirds are Charlotte and the rest are Edzell Blue), so it looks like we will have a very good crop this year.

I think all, or almost all of our younger hens are now laying. It started off a week ago, with one tiny egg in a nest box (see photo above). In the following days we had a number of soft shelled, broken eggs in the perching area and some more smaller eggs outside the henhouse as well in the nest boxes. By the end of the week, however, they seemed to have got the hang of how and where to lay their eggs. For the last few days we have been getting two or three smaller eggs in the nest boxes, along with the larger eggs laid by our ex-battery farm hens. We haven’t had any soft shelled eggs for at least five days.

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.