Chickens

I've always wanted laying hens but didn't have enough space when we lived in town. I've come to realise now that we really didn't need that much space. Here's what I did... To start with, we only had 2 hens, brown shavers, bred to lay almost daily. They were lovely & friendly.

We got 2 kittens about the same time who thought the hens were very interesting and they practiced stalking them, but the hens would give them a sharp peck if they got too close.

We built a chicken tractor. A chicken tractor is an enclosed run that will fit neatly on your garden beds. The hens lived in it and it really was just like a mini tractor. They turn over the soil, eating bugs, weeds and remnants of plants, while depositing their manure and giving you eggs. Its a win win!

(This is not the hens)

We throw kitchen scraps in with them, plus garden waste, and they love to dig it over! The kittens love to watch the action. It's made of scraps of electrical conduit, a tarpaulin and some cable ties. (Hubby is an electrician, but you can get these from any electrical supplier) We made it to fit exactly onto one half of the long beds. It worked so well!

 Sometimes we put it on the lawn, but not for more than 2 days in the same place or they'll dig holes.
 
Unfortunately a neighbours dog got in while we were out. They can be really vicious. I was gutted, but hooked on poultry, so decided to start again, and bought a hen with 8 chicks online. They were so cute! But they wouldn't all fit in the tractor once they got big, so we decided to fence off the orchard area for them. If you keep poultry in your orchard, they will eat the fallen fruit, plus dig for the codling moth larvae and other bad guys which live underground. Needless to say, they will also fertilise the orchard & give you eggs! If I was a hen, I'd like to live here :)

We used 2 metre high standards & 2 rolls of 1 metre wire (originally thought that 1 metre high would be enough, but after the dog incident decided to go higher. We should have bought 2 metre wire!) We were lucky to have a small child's playhouse in the orchard already, so put in a couple of perches and added 2 nesting boxes plus wood shavings on the floor. Perfect!

The chicks soon grew, and got bigger than their mum. 3 of the 8 chicks turned out to be boys and  unfortunately we aren't allowed to have roosters in our area, so they had to go. We got 2 more brown shavers as we weren't sure how the chicks would go at laying as they were all bitsers. It was wonderful, like a real farmyard! The chicken tractor is in there at the moment, as we put any broodies in there to keep them out of the nesting boxes and keep their body temperatures down so they get over it quickly, plus the vegie garden is full of vegies at the moment.

We had a massive storm last October, which took out a couple of trees, and one of our brown shavers must have had a heart attack as she was dead under her perch the next morning. It's sad when these things happen, but you move on! Our latest thing is that our favourite hen, Maude, went broody, so we put her in the tractor with some fake eggs to sit on. After a couple of weeks (should really be 21 days, but she didn't seem to mind...) we took the fake eggs away and put in 5 x day old chicks. She was over the moon! Unfortunately the chicks didn't know what to do. A real problem as it was going to be a cold night. So our solution was to put some wood shavings in a bird cage, put the chicks in, then put Maude on top. We covered them over with a blanket, and left them to it for the night.

Phew! They soon got the message that this was 'Mum', and she would keep them warm, and they've been happily living in the chicken tractor with her ever since.

You can see in the pictures that the orchard is no longer the lush green area it once was. Poultry and pretty lawns don't go together I'm afraid. I've just had to come to terms with that, and we've now fenced the orchard into 2 areas, which we will alternate them in, for 6 weeks or so in each so that it has a chance to recover!