To get to the other SLIDE.
Be our guest - Suzy Beecher, welcome Suzy.
Hello,
I'm SuzyB, I live in the northwest with my husband and two children, two cats,
two fish and more recently, two chickens.
I'm a full time PA and fill my spare
time with digital scrapping, photography (I'm the ‘Her Space’ in the
photography challenge blog ‘Her Space, My Space, His Space'), blogging and
making a mess in my garden.
When the girls very kindly invited me to come talk chickens with you, I was delighted
to accept. I’d fancied the idea of
having chickens for a couple of years now, but it wasn’t until recently when I
heard of the Battery Hen Welfare Trust that I decided now was the time to do
it, especially when there are so many ex battery hens needing rehoming. I
wasn’t put off by the people who told me they smell (only if you don’t keep
them clean), that they encourage rats (only if your coop isn’t vermin proof and
you leave their feed accessible at night) and that they wreck your garden.
Ok,
they were right on that one.
I
spent hours on ebay looking for the perfect coop that would home the amount of
hens I wanted, and would keep them safe from predators, sourced my feed and
bedding and decided on the area of my garden that they would live in, (I wanted
a little wooden hen house that I could paint, put a picket fence around and
generally look like it was from little house on the Prairie but it didn’t
happen like that).
When the time came to get my girls,
the BHWT were booked to capacity so instead I made my way to Happy Chicks in
Poulton le Fylde (or should that be Poultry le Fylde) near Blackpool. Happy
Chicks buy as many battery hens as they can from their local battery farms at
culling time and ‘foster’ them until they can be rehomed.
We've all seen the shocking pictures
of battery hens but it really is true that within a couple of weeks of being
released, they start to grow their feathers back and plump up nicely. Our hens
had been at Happy Chicks for a couple of weeks by the time we got them and
consequently were already acclimatised, had learnt to walk and were happy being
outside. I had been advised to adopt 3 hens minimum that way if anything should
happen to one of them, as in our case it did, we wouldn’t be left with a
solitary and lonely hen and so we bought home Ginger, Cinnamon and Nutmeg, our
Spice girls. They weren't in too bad a shape considering..
They were happy enough to go into
their new home, and despite the fact we had the fencers in the next morning
making a terrible racket, sawing against the coop and having their radio
blarting out from the coop roof, Ginger still managed to produce our first egg!
Must have looked a bit strange, a 36
year old woman dancing round the garden screaming ‘an egg, an egg’ while a
group of three chickens sat there saying to each other ‘so what, it's an egg,
there’s nowt clever about that’.
I disagree, I think its ace.
The more space they have, the better
so I extended the coop run by attaching a stand alone square run to the front (just
a bog standard run, the kind you get for guinea pigs/rabbits etc) which gave
them a nice piece of grass to play on and scratch about it. It has a top on it
as I was concerned about both my cats and the cats we have living at each side
of us but I needn’t have worried as the girls can hold their own against them
and the cats stay away!
We
had some issues when they were ascertaining the pecking order which can
be a bit upsetting to watch, particularly when the lowest in the order gets
bullied, as did poor Ginger, but it does right itself once the order is
established. Unfortunately a few weeks
later we lost Ginger…
She died in her sleep one night for
no reason that we know of, maybe she was just weary from her terrible start in
life, but at least she died in a happier place where she could dig her big dust
holes and eat corn from our hands.
I was surprised at what characters
they are, very different personalities. Nutmeg is the boss, she’s nosiest, was
first to eat from our hands and does a fantastic impression of roadrunner when
the patio doors open and she thinks there’s food around.
Cinnamon is shy in comparison, not so
keen on being stroked, puts herself to bed early and pretends to lay eggs.
What I should warn you about is the
fact they will trash your garden.
Completely and utterly, if you let them. My
4ft x 4ft patch of grass where the square run sat lasted just under a week. I
moved the run to a new patch, laid some turf down on the baldy bit. The new
patch lasted just over a week. Now I have a long run now that runs along the
border of my garden so they are no longer static on grass.
You can just about make out the
square where the run first was, and the new turf laid this weekend (which
hopefully will come back to life, looks a bit pants right now).
They poo where they stand whether its
your patio or your lawn and they don’t care whether its weeds or your
vegetables they are pecking at, if its green, they will take a fancy to it. They
dig large holes to have a bath in and will dig where they please. My raised
vegetable bed was just begging to become a large dust bath until I hit on the
idea of putting the square run over the top, fits perfectly, stops both
chickens and cats using as their toilet!
However, for those of you thinking
about getting chickens, I can't encourage you enough, they are interesting, very
amusing, supposedly intelligent (although I think I lucked out on the clever
ones!) and brilliant time wasters because you’ll find yourself just watching
them and their funny ways.
They take very little looking after,
it helps if you are an early riser though; I let my girls out at around 7.30am
each morning, make sure they have feed and water, replace the straw in the
nesting box (where Cinnamon has made that her bedroom) and leave them in the
run during the day while I'm at work.
When I get home, I let them out to free range in the garden until they
put themselves to bed, Cinnamon at around 7.30pm, Nutmeg just under an hour
later. Once they’ve gone in, I shut the house up, shut the coop up and that’s
it for another day. Once a week I clean them out, replacing the woodshavings on
the floor of the house and that too only takes 10 minutes.
They keep your garden free from
snails, slugs and other plant eating biddly wigs and they will always be happy
to see you – there’s nothing nicer than the gentle bok bok of a happy hen. And
of course the eggs! Sad as I am, it
still makes me a little giddy each day when I trot out and collect our daily
egg courtesy of Nutmeg. Cinnamon still hasn’t laid, maybe she’s all egged out,
maybe she’s taking a well earned rest, who knows. You cant beat the flavour of
a freshly laid egg, and the colour of the yoke is so vivid! Fab.
In a couple of weeks I shall be
adding 3 more to my flock and I cant wait. If you want to follow the adventures
of Cinnamon and Nutmeg, you can see more of them on my blog, www.mind-spillage.blogspot.com
and if you are thinking of maybe getting chickens and want to ask me anything
about my experiences, please feel free to email through the link on my blog.
Thank you Suzy, you make it all sound so rewarding, and that layout is such fun too, I think you might have to come back and scrap with us.
