Chickens

By Worcestershire Life on March 29th 2011

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Keeping a few hens in your garden

Spring is the best time to buy chickens and Marigold Webb has some advice for the would-be hen keeper.

My husband comes from a long line of chicken keepers and for most of our marriage we have kept a few hens in our garden. We currently have four delightful, and very decorative, Black Rock hens. Previously we had rather more Welsummers, and a cockerel as well. They laid the most beautiful dark brown eggs, though not so regularly as the Black Rocks; they also went broody, sat on clutches of eggs, and hatched chicks which delighted children and grandchildren in turn. My father-in-law and his mother kept Marans, grey in colour with even darker brown eggs than the Welsummers. But they became rather large, dumpy and grumpy in old age.
The Black Rocks are a modern hybrid breed; they have shiny black plumage and are prodigious layers of eggs. They look really handsome as they stroll across the lawn, pecking at the grass. My husband refers to them as his black ladies, bound to a life of chastity like medieval Benedictine nuns in their black habits. Like the nuns, they are great gardeners, forever digging and scratching in the flower beds. I have to admit that they are not selective in their endeavours, and seem to have difficulty distinguishing between weeds and choice garden plants, usually plants that have been recently given by visiting gardening friends. They also prefer an informal type of garden, chickens don't do tidy edging. The fastidious may find that toilet training is also somewhat rudimentary. But if you're prepared to tolerate chicken poo and the carefully mulched topsoil from the flower beds on the lawn, read on.
During my gardening life, I have visited many nurseries in this country and abroad. One of my first recollections of Dutch nurserymen was that the smaller nurseries had free range bantams roaming across the nursery beds. Being Dutch, the bantams were probably better disciplined than their English relations, and perhaps they could distinguish weeds from future income. However, it was not so much the weeds that the Dutch nurseryman were seeking to control, as the slugs, snails, and other injurious insects that might threaten their valuable crops. Bantams and chickens are omnivores (they'll eat anything), and slugs and snails are the foie gras and caviar of their diet. Why are our hosta leaves undamaged? Forget grit or copper
bands or pellets. The chickens have eaten the culprits.

Free-range

It is possible to strike a balance between wanton destruction and pest control. We let the chickens roam free from September to February or March, as long as we’re at home too. After that it's two days a week maximum free range. During the winter, they clean up the pests, and on the days that they are allowed free range in spring and summer, we cover any plants that we particular want to remain undamaged. We need to be about, to ensure that while the chickens get the slugs and snails, the foxes don't get the chickens.

Chicken housing

When not roaming the garden, the chickens are confined on grass in a wooden pen of about 100 yards square. The sides are covered with chicken wire seven foot high with a strand of barbed wire along the top. The chicken wire is buried six inches deep, with a further six inches below ground turned outwards at a right angle. This should prevent access by Mr Fox both from above and below. If the grass becomes too worn, they are moved to a reserve pen at the other end of their house. At night they are shut in ‘le palais des poules’ a converted brick- built pigsty, which has a fine ceramic French cockerel modelled by a friend on the external wall. It's the nearest the chickens ever get to a gentleman.
We are lucky to have space for a large run, and a ready-made chicken house. In actual fact we might be better off with a small portable chicken house and run that we could move round the garden at frequent intervals thereby ensuring that the hens were always on fresh, clean grass. Forsham Cottage Arks at Tenbury Wells offer an excellent choice. They do away with a requirement for seven foot fox-proof fencing, and the chickens are protected by roof netting from attack from above. Two years ago we witnessed a buzzard, of which there is a large family nearby, swoop down and pick up a fully-grown Black Rock hen. Luckily, the chicken was too heavy; the bird rose with difficulty, and having risen to about four foot, dropped the hen, which appeared none the worse for the experience. However, if it had been a chick, or even a half-grown bird, the result would have been different.

Bedding

Their bedding is wood shavings cleaned weekly, and the nesting boxes are lined with clean hay, shaken to get rid of dust and hay seeds. We tried lining two nesting boxes with wood shavings, leaving one only containing hay; the hens immediately started to lay all their eggs in the hay, and abandoned the wood shavings. A wooden bar spans the diameter of the building, and they roost on this at night. A galvanised fresh water container and an ad lib galvanised feeder filled with organic layers pellets, and grit and oyster shell complete the furnishings.

Chicken feed

The standard older textbooks on keeping poultry on a domestic scale will tell you that chickens will cheerfully gobble up all the cooked kitchen scraps that you cannot put on the compost heap. In villages all over Europe, you will still see chickens outside the back door of cottages and farmsteads consuming scraps and looking none the worse for it. However, I now have to add a cautionary warning. Following the last major outbreak of foot and mouth disease in 2001, the cause of which was ultimately traced to pig food containing contaminated restaurant scraps, legislation was introduced to prevent the leftovers of cooked food for humans being fed to animals. So it is now illegal to recycle your leftover cooked food to your chickens, however much they may appreciate it.

Chicken health

Providing they are kept clean, chickens are generally very healthy. The two
main problems that will occur are worms internally, and lice and red mites externally. We use Flubenvet wormer twice a year; we regularly dust the brick building in which the chickens live, and which contains many nooks and crannies in which red mites can hide. Sometimes we add a tonic to the drinking water, but exercise, fresh
grass, and the mixed insect wildlife in the flower beds and borders generally keep their combs red, and their
plumage shiny.

Is it worth it?

We get a lot of pleasure and enjoyment from watching the chickens in the garden; they will run up to meet us when we come onto the lawn, hoping for a scrap, and then follow us back to their abode. If cultivation coincides with their periods of freedom, they will come and observe the digging or raking, and pick the ground over for newly exposed tasty morsels. What's more, four chickens provide us with more than enough eggs for at least 10 months of the year. Their yolks are rich and orange, and their taste is so much better than even the free-range, organic version from the supermarket. Their care does take a little time, and I'm not sure that we save much money. The organic pellets cost around £15 a bag, and you can buy quite a lot of eggs for that.
I am delighted that chicken fancying has attracted at least two new generations of Webbs. Both my children keep chickens, my son, ably assisted, or more probably led, by his wife Louise who has an aviary (Peckingham Palace) of varying fowl, chickens, bantams, guinea fowl, quail, Indian Runner ducks and a Golden pheasant all who seem to co-exist happily and peacefully. The grandchildren have their own named birds. My son Ed tells me that he is even thinking of introducing them at Wychbold. Well, as I said at the beginning of this article, you see them at all the best nurseries in Holland.

Worcestershire’s chicken experts

Sarah Sabin, at Newland Grange Poultry, has looked after chickens since she was eleven years old and her experience shows. The operation at Newland Grange is on a fairly large scale with a whole range of fowl from the steely black and very heavy Jersey Giants to the elegant Lavender, Black and Buff Orpingtons and rare blue egg- laying Dorkings housed in immaculate wooden houses according to their breed. She also produced an interesting statistic that as 80 per cent of her customers were first time chicken keepers, she usually suggested that they started with hybrid varieties as they were easier to look after and make great pets. A useful addition to Sarah’s business is to provide chicken boarding for holiday lets, which solves the problem of what to do with the birds when their owners go away.

Newland Grange Poultry, Newland Grange, Stocks Lane, Newland, Malvern WR13 5AZ.
Tel: Sarah Sabin 07830 176254; www.newlandgrange.com

Worcestershire’s chicken experts

At Amelia’s Chicks at Poppy Cottage in Malvern I was greeted by Mike and Liz Lawrence, their delightful children and their very friendly, mostly hybrid, chickens. When I visited there were only seven, but more were expected later in the spring. Liz explained that the best time for buying chickens was March, April or May. The existing ones seemed to be entirely compatible with their nice garden and this seemed to have been achieved by sensible management. The chickens had been allotted a designated area within the garden with sufficient space and a decent, well fenced run. They are allowed out periodically when the plants have become more established and are excellent at reducing the slug population. They usually have chickens for sale and £1 of every bird sold goes to a Downs Syndrome charity.

Amelia’s Chicks, Poppy Cottage, Malvern. Tel: Liz Lawrence 07962 21114; www.ameliaschicks.co.uk

Chickens

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