Keeping Chickens

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]