We have chickens! ~ Mariella

We have chickens. Well to be precise, we have chicks, two of them! Chomp, for obvious reasons, and Star. As you may probably be able to discern from the names, they are our children’s chickens! The hours of enjoyment they are getting out of these cute noisy creatures is not as easy to quantify as our primary reason for getting them, free range eggs. 

 

I’ve been putting this off for a while now but it’s so easy to keep chicks. We have a fig cage, about 5x5m, which will be their final home, but for now they are in a little mini cage, which will double up as a chicken tractor and nursery later. They sleep in a box indoors with a red light overhead at night until they get older.

A chicken tractor is a mobile, easy to move structure with a open floor which can be moved about all over the garden, typically over beds which have been harvested and need to be prepped for the next crop. They can be any size or shape, but should have a dry, wind free section built from wood or corrugation with a shelf off the ground where they can sleep in the dry and lay eggs. The rest of the tractor can be clad with chicken wire and open to the weather. Find a more in-depth guide to chicken tractor building here : 

http://sustainablog.org/2011/10/how-to-build-a-chicken-tractor/

I made one out of the wooden side walls of an old tile crate that I got from behind a tile shop in town. I cladded it with chicken wire and that’s it. Some people keep their chickens in chicken tractors all the time and some have a large chicken coop and they put the chickens in the tractor as and when they need land worked over. A friend of mine made the effort to call a large scale free range egg farm who supplies a big supermarket chain to make sure of their methods. She was informed that they were experiencing very little rain so the chickens were not free range for the foreseeable future, when she inquired about the ethics of not altering the branding, she was met with a garbled response….does make one wonder! We buy our eggs at farmer's market just make sure but are looking so forward to our own eggs!

And it’s enjoyable to have ‘livestock’! My photographer friend Anja Wiehl put it better in images than I could in words. It’s all about the cycle of life, you feed the chickens, they lay the eggs, you eat the eggs, you crush the shells up and feed them back to the chickens to make strong healthy eggs, make sense to me!