Hooray…The Chickens are back!
14th April 2010 | Dee's Diary, Food, Southlands Farm News
Thanks to Mr “B—-y” Fox we have been without chickens since Christmas, but I promised myself I would wait till spring and brave it and get some more.
My aim had been to adopt some battery hens. Sadly due to the change in rules of housing battery hens (Well done Compassion in World Farming and Chicken out keep up the good work!) there is a big hold up in supply for some reason and I was not able to get any for some time. I have signed up as a fan of re homing battery hens and have become a member of The Battery Hen Welfare Trust. I will still endeavour to house some as and when I can.
In the meantime I found a new supplier on the web C & G Farming, Hagg Farm Teviotdale. Suppliers of good quality birds at and not too far away. After talking to Grant Shields the owner I reserved fourteen birds.
I love my old hen house that Hector made me but the winds had bent the roof hinges and it is a bit tricky to muck out and a little on the small side for the 14 birds I had enthusiastically ordered. So I decided to keep the old hen house and store it away to use if we ever had a broody hen.
As for our mounting housing crisis we had a brain wave… to convert my old underused potting shed into a des res hen house.
The old apple tree had draped its boughs over the shed roof and it had rotted through so we replaced that with new struts and plywood then cream sheets of corrugated metal. There was already a shelf inside and Charles added some high up roosting bars.
Years ago in our old kitchen I had painted a set of shelves turquoise blue I found them again in the garage and they are now screwed on the inside back wall, filled with straw and very “shabby chick” nesting boxes. For the door Charles cut a cool Indian inspires doorway to add a little style!!!! And an ingenious pulley system to open it from the outside. Two sturdy bolts on the door and to finish it off I painted it “our” farm pale green. Aesthetics being high on my priority list!
We collected the chickens and shut them in the new hen house for a couple of days.
It is wonderful to look through the window and see a huge row of chickens all roosting along the bar. We have a mixture of: Two brown Goldline, four White Star, three Light Sussex, two Black rocks and three White Ambers, fourteen in total.
Now they are happy settled chooks pecking away all day and I have been rewarded with small but perfectly formed eggs of speckled, pale brown and brilliant white. I feel every day it is such a treat when there is an egg or two lying in the straw …and best of all they taste amazing.
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