Keeping Chickens

How The Chicken Conquered The World How The Chicken Conquered The World is a great article posted on Smithsonian Mag the other day. Basically it gives a three page history of keeping chickens and how the chicken as we know and love it evolved and helped shape history. How The Chicken Conquered The World  

New Chicken Coop It definitely feels like ‘spring’! Julia and the boys want more chickens to add to the flock, so in preparation, we’ve bought a new chicken coop. We went for another self assembly chicken coop from this ebay seller – Garden & Pets. The name of the coop we bought was Large Chicken Poultry [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Fox Kills One Of Our Chickens… This post contains a graphic description and image of one of our chickens that got ‘taken’ by a fox on Sunday night. What a roller coaster ride we’ve had keeping chickens this last 24 hours… Our first eggs have been laid, now we’re faced with breaking the news to Toby in [...]

Build A Chicken Run – we decided to build a chicken run so the chickens can have a bit of extra space when we go out. It’s ok having them wandering round the garden free range whilst we’re at home, but we’re a bit worried about leaving the chickens in the garden when we go [...]

Cleaning Out The Chicken House it’s a mucky job, but someone’s got to do it! Even though the chickens have had ‘free range’ round the garden, their chicken house is filthy. What’s more, the chickens are ’pooping’ in their nesting box, so the advice about, ‘don’t expect them to lay eggs where you want them to’ [...]