Keeping Chickens

Re-stocking the flock Well we are thinking about adding some ‘white’ egg layers to our flock so we have three colours of egg. So selecting a new breed we first considered our present flock of chickens. We were advised that caution should be shown when adding to an established flock, as a ‘pecking’ order will [...]

Keeping Chickens In The Back Garden We’ve been keeping chickens in the back garden for just over three years now. So we thought we’d stop and reflect on what we’ve learnt along the way. Our ‘keeping chickens’ experiment started as just a thought, a dream, a figment of our imagination of how much grander life would [...]

Blue Eggs Blue eggs… We’ve got blue eggs! It seems we only just posted on introducing our Cream Legbars to the ‘big girls’ cage and now we’ve got blue eggs. It’s been a couple of days, and we’ve had at least two little blue eggs per day waiting for us to collect so far from [...]

Cream Legbars Well our cream legbars chicks have grown and are now I suppose really classed as cream legbar pullets! All we’re waiting for now is the first appearance of ‘blue’ pullet eggs! We have managed to ‘keep’ all of the cream legbar chicks that we had as ‘day olds’ (as detailed on the keeping [...]

Buy Organic Chicken Feed We’ve been looking for an easy place to buy organic chicken feed, the problem being is that there doesn’t seem to be many organic chicken feed suppliers in our area. We can get hold of normal layers pellets and mash fairly easily locally, but organic chicken feed would be much more [...]

Baby Chicks Well the baby chicks have arrived! After much searching we eventually found some baby cream legbar chicks back at our local breeder at Southmead Poultry, which is incidentally where our other girls have come from. Tracy at Southmead Poultry has put up with me phoning on a almost weekly basis, asking whether she had [...]

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 [...]

Battery Hen Song – Walking In Circles An interview with Phillip Lee-Woolf who wrote the sad song about the life of a battery hen – Walking In Circles. Phillip Lee Woolf breeds rare breed chickens, and he has kept hens since childhood. In 2004 Philip started the Legbars of Broadway business breeding Cotswold Legbars (blue eggs) [...]

Walking In Circles – Battery Hen Song I’ve just stumbled across Walking In Circles whilst researching a chicken keeping idea… Folks, you’ve got to go and check out Walking In Circles - A Song About The Sad Life Of A Battery Hen. This beautiful, but sad song tells the true story about the hellish life of a [...]

Chickens Kill Fox… A few weeks back most of the national newspapers in the UK ran a story about three hens and a cockerel named Duke, who’d managed to kill a fox who’d ’broken’ into their hen house during the night. The fox it appears had been pecked to death after being dealt a ‘stunning’ blow by [...]