Keeping Chickens

Chicken Coop & Run Before Roof Went On

Building Chicken Coops doesn’t have to be a DIY nightmare! This building chicken coops article is inspired by the fantastic information in the Build A Chicken Coop book.
There is once again a huge interest in keeping chickens and the Build A Chicken Coop book provides detailed step by [...]

Chicken Mash

Chicken mash, layers mash, poultry mash… are ‘tasty’ chicken ‘mash’ type feeds that you can make up at home, using left over kitchen vegetable scraps, corn, pellets and bread - not to be confused with chicken & mash ‘home cooking’ recipes for humans!
The only problem with making chicken mash at home; is that if you have [...]

Chickens In The Snow
It snowed just enough to cover the floor a little and leave footprints, so I just couldn’t resist taking a photograph of our chicken’s foot prints in the snow.
I imagine this is the first snow that the chickens have seen, and they seemed happy enough scratching around in the snow - although [...]

Keeping Chickens In Winter
As we’re now well into our first winter as chicken keepers, I thought I’d write about any difference between keeping chickens in winter to other seasons.
Well the first big difference is the mud / wet due to the rain or snow in the chicken run. Obvious I suppose, but the chicken run quickly can [...]

Keeping Chickens On A Budget seems to be a bit of a buzz at the moment - what with the re-printing of a war time favourite Keeping poultry and rabbits on scraps; due to second hand copies of the original ‘going like hot cakes’ on various online sites.
Plus the regular mention of the ‘current economic [...]

Keeping Poultry And Rabbits On Scraps
Keeping Poultry And Rabbits On Scraps according to the paper today was a ‘war time’ best selling handbook, that’s making a come back due to the ‘credit - crunch’.
The book was first published in 1941 as Nazi Germany was attempting to starve Britain into submission.
Keeping Poultry and Rabbits on Scraps [...]

Sorry I haven’t posted on Keeping Chickens for a while, you may have noticed on some of the pictures that Julia was pregnant and getting pretty close to ‘due date’.
We added another son to our family on 14th November and named him Jacob. Jacob is doing well and weighed in at 7lbs 11oz.
Would you believe, our [...]

Red Mite Chickens
Whilst cleaning out the chicken house the other day, we noticed some red mites hiding in the nesting box; so we have treated the chickens with red mite powder.
According to the chicken keeping books; red mites like to live in the dark recesses of the chicken house and only come out during the night [...]

Three eggs per day, hip-hip horray!
Our veggie growing neighbours told us that our chickens had laid three eggs on some of the days that they looked after our chickens for us whilst we went away.
Well it looks like they’re right.
We seem to be getting two eggs laid in the morning and one egg laid in the afternoon. It [...]

Looking After Chickens Whilst On Holiday
We faced and passed our first, ‘who’s going to look after the chickens whilst we’re away?’ dilemma…
We wanted to go away for a few days to Worth Matravers (see below) before our eldest started school on the 9th September; our veggie keeping neigbours stepped up to the scratch perfectly!
We gave them a [...]