Keeping Chickens

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 in keeping [...]

Baby Chicks
Well the baby chicks have arrived!
After much searching we eventually found some baby ceamy 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 any baby Creamy [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Chicken Manure Compost Bin
I posted the other day on Chicken Manure, and again with photos of our plastic compost bins full to the brim with chicken poo, bedding and straw waste material from our chickens on the Chicken Run post.
We have a ‘three’ compost bin system, we have two plastic compost bins that hold 330L [...]

Fox Kills Chicken… The Morning After sees Toby say to Julia, ‘oh well never mind Mum, we can get another chicken’!
There’s feathers still blowing round the garden, but the survivors don’t seem any worse for wear. They’re a little ‘miffed’ that they’re being kept in their run and keep pecking at the door to be [...]