Saturday morning, we drove up to Stebbing for our lesson on chicken keeping, and to pick up the first three members of our little home flock: Margot, Gerry and Barbara.

The lesson itself was both interesting and useful, and made us feel better about not picking up rescue hens from a battery farm. As Kirsty, the breeder selling us our chickens, explained, every regular hen you keep in your back garden means neither you nor your neighbours, to whom you’ll inevitably end up giving eggs, will be supporting the battery industry.

We never buy battery eggs anyway, but it was interesting what she also said about so-called ‘free range’ hens. Most of these never see the outside world at all and spend their whole lives in a crowded barn. This is because that’s where all of their food and water is kept, while the outside area to which they have access – on an industrial scale at least – is planted out with dull rye grass, which does nothing to inspire them.

The best eggs, if they’re not your own, are the woodland eggs you can buy in some supermarkets (Sainsbury’s in particular) where the chickens actually have an incentive to head out and enjoy the fresh air because they have access to woods, which more closely match the jungle forests in which they evolved.

So anyway, at the end of the session we loaded three chickens into a box, drove them home and then literally poured them out into their new home in the garden. They were reluctant to leave the box, and clearly a little bit scared as they refused to venture out into their run until we had cleared off on our bikes for the afternoon.

Gerry (above) has quickly established herself as our favourite. She’s a Bovans Amber, and slightly smaller than the other two in our flock. She was the first one to let us pick her up, and she sat quite happily on our laps enjoying a tickle as we drank our gin and tonic on Saturday evening.

Barbara (above) is a Sussex Ranger, and captured the heart of our neighbour who came around with his granddaughter to view the new arrivals. She has the silkiest feathers of the flock.

Margot (above) is a Maran Cuivre, and is the biggest of the flock. We had thought, as a result, that she would have been the dominant hen, but she is actually the most timid. She is quick to run away from the door whenever we open the run, and spent most of Sunday morning digging herself a hen-sized bowl at the back of the run where she could hunker down and bathe in the dust.

They are quickly establishing individual characters that will mark them apart just as clearly as the colour of their feathers, and we’re sure Gerry will become more of a pet than a pure egg-making machine.

Despite this, we’re going to try and remember that they are working animals with a short lifespan, so we shouldn’t be lavishing hundreds of pounds of medical care on them at the vet if they fall ill.

We’ve also been warned about spending too much time worrying about the consistency of their stools, which apparently becomes something of a chicken keepers’ obsession.

In the meantime we have to just sit back and relax and wait for our first eggs which, all being well, should arrive in six or seven weeks. Our pullets are just 17 weeks old right now, and won’t be productive until week 24.

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