Chicken Keeping

We keep several hens in the garden to provide us with delicious organic eggs and point us on the road to green living..

There are 3 hens at the moment, but we may increase the flock next year. They are housed in a hen house from the Hen-House Garden Company, who are also in Suffolk. I extended their run area after a couple of weeks feeling sorry for them. This gave them more than double the area for scratching around. We feed them certified organic layers pellets plus occasional kitchen scraps. Check eBay auctions for a hen house

They provide us with around 18 large eggs a week, which is more than we need really, but we can sell the surplus at the gate quite easily. The eggs are simply delicious, especially boiled with buttered toast soldiers. We could never go back to supermarket eggs now. Check eBay auctions for books on chicken keeping

Latest development is the installation of an electric poultry fence from Electric Fence-Online. This was done to give them a much larger scratching area, with the advantage of keeping the foxes out. I had already seen the fox and her cubs eyeing the hens up one night. The fence is powered, of course, from the battery in the workshop.

Bovan Goldline hens

I have recently added 2 more Bovan Goldline hens to the flock and they are settling in fairly well. I put the two new ones into the roosting area early in the evening so the older residents had time to get used to them. One did escape before I got a chance to clip her wings, but I recovered her from a neighbour's garden the next morning. One of our original Black Rocks has gone to chicken heaven, as she hadn't laid any eggs for several months, so we now have four hens altogether. Our henhouse can house up to five, so we have some spare capacity

We are getting no eggs at all at the moment as the two originals are in moult and the two new additions are only 20 weeks old, but we should get some eggs from the new hens fairly soon hopefully.