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Poor chicken husbandry and pig news.

In my last post, I described, complacently perhaps, how the boss chicken, who is now called Shaniqua (thank you Manuel) had tried out living next door, but had returned the next morning after getting short shrift from the neighbours- (the chicken neighbours, not the lovely vicar who would have made her welcome, I have no doubt.). 

Well a couple of days after I posted it, I lost one of the two white Legbars. Again, she was missing over night, but I left for work the next morning pretty sanguine about the chances of her returning unscathed. I have had them for a month now, so I am basically a very cool, experienced chicken keeper…”unflappable”, you might say…until I got home from work and found that the white one had returned but it was now soaked from beak to claw in its own blood. That was not cool. And I was definitely very uncool.

My first thought was that I had read that chickens can’t resist the smell/taste of blood and peck their pals to death if they get a whiff of it. I was quite keen to avoid that happening, so I grabbed the bloody chicken and ran it under the warm tap. I checked later in my chicken handbook, whether this was the right thing to do and it turns out it wasn’t, but I was properly panicking. I then kept the chicken in the kitchen, until it had dried off (are you imagining how helpful the dog was throughout this process?) and then I shut it in a spare rabbit hutch we keep on our porch for those eventualities when you suddenly need to contain an animal.

By the next morning the chicken had laid an egg, was no longer quite so soaked in blood and was making a noise that suggested it was not enjoying life in a hutch, so I released it and it returned to its duties as if nothing had happened. You will be reassured to hear that its sisters have not pecked it to death.

I think that this white chicken probably also got in with the chickens next door too. She had actually only a fairly minor wound, which had just bled very profusely. But the whole experience was very unsettling. And definitely seemed like a pretty potent illustration of why people contain their chickens.

I am grateful to everybody who was kind enough to come up with an opinion about the containment/non containment question. I think, after careful consideration, I am going to go for the clipped wings, fenced in option. These are the top 5 reasons why

1)   I find that loss and/or wounding of chickens makes me unhappy

2)   It is clear from what they have accomplished so far, in terms of their impact on the seedlings I planted out in the late summer, that truly free range chickens are incompatible with growing anything in a garden.

3)   Apparently even with wings, chickens tend not to fly away from foxes, but (according to chicken experts) they crouch down. (…so the fox can’t see them?)

4)   It’s probably annoying for the neighbours to have my chickens in their gardens, and they haven’t even begun to cause real havoc by getting on to the road yet.

5)   They have begun lurking around open doors in a rather sinister way. I definitely don’t want them living in the house with us.

I have bought some second hand electric poultry netting on preloved, so I am just waiting to get round to putting it up.

But now…for some PIG NEWS!!!!

Last week I went to see some pigs, that had been advertised on Preloved (are you detecting a theme emerging here?) I had been given careful directions which I followed meticulously until they led me to a yard full of partially dismantled cars, and a remarkable selection of poultry, including guinea fowl and Turkeys. Beyond the car yard, in the middle of the field was a cheery man, with a big gun. I think I was telling the truth, when I told him that I had never had a conversation with someone holding a gun before. He explained that he had just been shooting crows- and pointed out the dead one in the field. He is a proper gold star country person.

We went on a tour of his livestock and he showed me the piglets- a bunch of little pink middle whites, about six weeks old- and some bigger saddlebacks, that were about 12 weeks. When we stood next to the pen with the saddlebacks, they stood on their hind legs to have a better look at us. I have to say, they had beguilingly intelligent faces, which were all the more unsettling for having the same colour scheme as our dog, Rollo.

We stood next to them and discussed ham weights and bacon weights, and they stood on their hind legs, leaning on the fence, grunting in a friendly way, throughout the conversation.

The cheerful man, who had put down the gun by this point, was very cheerful and very enthusiastic about the joys of pig keeping. He said that he was happy to help with transporting the pigs to us, and would then be happy to help with transporting them to the abattoir- which is something I had been worrying about the logistics of. The man said that he thought about his pigs “just like children”. He certainly did seem to love them, and they seemed to love him. It’s just the whole eating them thing that is…complicated.

We are going to visit the pigs again this Sunday, so I will take more pictures then. I had originally intended to get Gloucester Old Spot pigs, but I think that the benefits of getting local pigs from cheerful, helpful people- outweigh the more esoteric benefits of being picky about the breed.

Please let me know if you have strong feelings about this “which breed?” thing- or about the chickens. Or about anything else. Although nobody is writing in the comments here, I did get quite a few responses to the last post, and I loved all of that.

Check back soon for more pig pictures. And if you are really lucky, a fencing update.

Chickens come home to Roost…probably

I have now been a chicken husbander for over three weeks- a time frame I can measure in the number of times I have had to clean their house out. 

Cleaning their house is no small undertaking. 

The nice bus driver from Chichester who sold me the chickens- and everything else (and even left me the packet of cable ties, because he could see how much I liked them)- built the coop from some old pieces of chicken coop that he found in a skip, and some old pallets. It’s an impressive piece of ingenuity and recycling, but it is not a brilliant piece of carpentry, ergonomics or chicken centred design. The coop’s main flaw is that the only access to it, unless you are a chicken, is by taking off one of the roof panels. The nice bus driver was 6ft 3, so it wasn’t too tricky for him to lean down into it to retrieve eggs or clean it out. I am not 6ft 3 and I have to use a stepladder and a stool to climb into it to clean it. So you wont be surprised to learn that the three times I have completed the whole process, complete with spraying red mite spray around the coop, with me in it, has left a very clear impression.

The predicted egg tsunami has not overtaken us yet: for a couple of days last week they laid six eggs a day, but since then it has usually been 4 but sometimes 2. I’m not quite sure what makes the difference. Some eggs are smaller and some are white, but I’m not really sure who is laying eggs when. I suspect that there’s quite a few of them who are freeloading-but impossible to tell which.

Eggman

The main topic of chicken husbandry debate, round here, at the moment concerns the license they should be granted to wander about outside their enclosure.

I confess to being a constitutional liberal, attached, at quite a visceral level to the idea that all beings should be allowed to enjoy wandering about, as the fancy takes them, to the extent that this does not bring them into conflict with the wellbeing of others. I think that Karl, the busdriver and his wife, must have been similarly disposed because he described to me how the chickens had originally lived in an enclosure, but, with their wings unclipped, they had almost immediately taken themselves out of the enclosure and taken to roaming about as they pleased. Karl described how much he enjoyed watching them do this, in the summer. I love it too.

Poor Ben- who never signed up for 11 chickens…I think he thought we might get 4- does not feel quite the same. And in fact I cannot fault his reasoning. He says that unconstrained poultry will

1) Be eaten by the dog

I think the dog is probably too much of a wuss. I think he can feel that he should want to eat the chickens but I suspect he also has a sincere respect for their sharp beaks and scrabbly claws. Having said that, he has caught up with them a couple of times, and got a mouthful of feathers. He spends a lot of time staring at them and if he looks too interested we yell “ROLLO DON’T EAT THE CHICKENS!” which he finds confusing and worrying. I don't think he will eat the chickens. If I was a betting woman would bet money, that he won't eat them. Not an enormous amount of money though.

2) Be eaten by a fox

My friend Kay from whom we bought the house, says she lost chickens here, to foxes. When I described the current arrangement she suggested a kind of sweepstake on  how many I would lose before Christmas. John, next door keeps his chickens in a pen behind electric wire…but then he says he has never seen a fox. But perhaps that's because of the wire. 

The thing is, if I put up an electric fence, then I will have to clip the chickens' wings if I am to have any control over which side of it they are on, and surely they are more likely to be eaten by a fox if they can't fly up into a tree to escape from him. 

3)Go in the road

There's no counter argument to this one, it would just be bad.

4)Make the place look messy.

The place is messy anyway, so this one is definitely not a legitimate concern.

Like the scene in Jurassic Park where the velociraptiors encircle the heroes..

Earlier in the week, John from next door, came round with one of the chickens, to say that they were hanging out in his garden, with his chickens. I rejected his kind offer to round them up and throw them over the fence, saying I had been told that they would bring themselves home when it got dark, which they did…all except for the black and gold one.

I spent an anxious night worried about all the various things that could have happened to her. She is the boss chicken, after all and she is very beautiful. She was not back by the time I left for work, but later that morning, Ben texted to say that she had gone to bed with John’s chickens and he had thrown her back when she had started squabbling with them in the morning. She seems to have been contented to stick to our side of the fence since, so it clearly wasn’t so much nicer over there…a relief, as I had begun to imagine how it might feel if the rest of the family, one by one, decided they preferred it next door.

I would be interested in your opinions- experienced chicken keepers amongst you and opinionated non experts- what do you think? Should I clip their wings and put up a fence to keep them in? Or should they be allowed the run of the place?

"Yes, we have eaten all the seedlings you planted"

Sinister interest in the guinea pigs' eyes...

Meet the Chickens

Group shot

There are two of these white chaps. Apparently a floppy comb (red bit on top of the head) is a sign of stress. Sadly they still appear to be a bit stressed today.

Ben with our first two eggs: We Are Now Chicken Keepers

This one with a hairdo is called a Silkie- there is another one in white with a blue (yes blue) face

One of the two Frizzles

Well, thank you to everybody who contributed to the Meet the Meat Crowdfunding effort. It was very exciting to make it past our target. I love the fact that everybody is involved now- even if you are only in it for the bacon/cake.

Obviously the headline act is the pigs but I have decided to hold off on them until the Christmas holidays for following three reasons

1) I am getting so much pleasure from looking at websites selling modular electric fencing

and I will no longer have any reason to do this once I have purchased the fencing- and purchasing fencing is definitely preliminary to owning pigs.

2) Whilst we did acquire a dog in July 2013 so we had started work on the accreditation process for being Countryside People, owning pigs is an Intermediate Level Countryside People activity. (Owning horses and riding about on them is Advanced Level and killing things on a horse you own and ride about on is Advanced Plus) The Basic Level activity, before Pig Keeping must surely be chicken keeping.

3)If I got pigs now then I would need to send them for slaughter in April/May. So they would have lived through the cold and dark of winter, and as soon as it started to be spring I would have to send them off. That seems a little mean.(Am I revealing that I am fundamentally unsuited to keeping animals for meat?) I want to be able to think the pigs lay in the sun, enjoying life, not shivering in frozen mud. (Not sure if pigs shiver)

So this half term, I put my mind to acquiring chickens.

Now, whilst I had made it to the crowd funding target, I had, in fact only managed it by making a pretty sizeable contribution. I had a lovely time looking at websites selling bijou chicken housing, and poultry fencing and other equipment, but I could see that I was going to have to come up with some kind of plan, if there was going to be any money left over for pigs.

And that is where Preloved came in. I went there initially in hopes of finding a second hand coop somewhere local but the reality was so much better: it turned out that there were a quite a few adverts, not just for coops, but for entire flocks with all the stuff thrown in. One of them offered the whole set up for £200 under a sad picture of some cross looking chickens staring through wire- described as "bought by mistake". 

I replied to an advert offering 11 chickens and a house and asked the lady if she would sell us everything. She was a bit surprised, she had been expecting to parcel them out in bits, but eventually after a bit of consultation on both sides we struck a deal on the whole thing, chickens, coop, bags of food, drinkers, food hoppers: all of it...and she sent her husband Karl and his pal Dan round to set it up with me on Saturday afternoon.

It was a real pleasure to spend the afternoon with Karl learning all about the birds he was handing over and profiting from his superior fencing expertise. ("I just nail stuff together and if it stays then that's job done") He introduced me to the world of cable ties: a revelation. 

He and his wife had acquired the chickens whilst living in a tied cottage on a farm. They had recently moved to housing association property where the chickens took up more than half the tiny garden, and they were worried that they were miserable. Karl said that he felt confident that they were going to be happy in our garden, which was much more what they were used to.

There are 11 chickens.

Two Frizzles- which look frizzled- with all their feathers all fluffed up. They must be much less effectively insulated than the others. They are also much younger than the rest of the flock and apparently they had to be sprayed with special bad tasting anti-peck stuff to stop the others from bullying them, when they first arrived. They hang out together. 

Two silkies- a brown one and a white one. They have weird quiffs and they look particularly dinosaury. The white one has a pale blue face. 

There is a Black one with gold feathers around her neck. Apparently she is the boss.

There are two white ones and they are the only ones whose combs (weird red bits on their heads) are floppy- which is apparently a sign of stress. I am not sure why they are finding life particularly stressful. I have put some anti-stress drops in their water, but they are still flopping.

The other 4 are all brown- apparently legbars. They only have tiny combs, so they may be stressed too, like the white ones, but because I can't tell I'm not going to worry about it.

We have had at least two eggs everyday- today there were four. Karl said that they wouldn't start laying for a while because they would be getting used to their new home, so it's very exciting that they are laying.

Apparently you can expect an egg a day from young birds, like these..which is potentially 77 eggs a week. Which is a truly appalling prospect.

For now, though, I am thoroughly enjoying being a chicken keeper. I have even discovered a number (like 4 or 5) of chicken keeping podcasts..updated weekly...

I will update you next week, when hopefully the chicken sponsors will have given them some names.

Please do ask questions and make comments: keen to share! So keen!

Meet the Plan

Welcome to a dream!

I have always dreamed of being a farmer-I know I am not alone in this-and I know also that my idea of what is involved in farming is derived mainly from the last two decades of the Archers and from picture books I read as a child, and then read to my own children. And I know the picture I have in my head may not be entirely accurate.
In fact, I have lived most of my life in London, where, (other than a few tomatoes from the patio), food comes from shops. I rarely caught a glimpse of what lies on the other side of the packaging, and frankly, when I have taken the trouble to go and find out, I usually wish that I hadn't.
We moved to Hampshire in 2012, and we now have enough land for pigs and chickens.
This blog is linked to a crowdfunder project, if you would like to help with the cost of setting up the smallholding, in exchange for some of its produce please click here
If I manage to raise the money, then check back here to follow the progress of the whole thing.
If the Archers is anything to go by, I'm expecting things to get pretty exciting round here.