Starting with Chickens, A Beginner’s Guide: Review
There are plenty of how-to guides to chicken-keeping; it’s a bit of a burgeoning industry. This one, though, stands out from the crowd. It delivers exactly what it says on the cover and, assuming no prior knowledge on the part of the reader, starts out with an extensive and balanced list of the pros and cons of keeping your own home flock. Right from the off it’s a realistic, if slim volume that’s not afraid to admit that chickens in the garden might not be right for you.
Running through hen-house building, chicken feeding and choosing your first couple of birds, it includes a comprehensive catalogue of breeds - with photos - to help you identify which would best suit your egg-laying or table-fattening needs.
Author Katie Thear was once the editor of the monthly Country Smallholding magazine, and her style is plain, simple and easy to follow. Handy diagrams showing the insides of a hen and advice on raising your own chicks vies for space with less universal subjects, like showing your birds. Nonetheless, the balance is carefully managed, and the book - overall - is as broad as it is deep.
Of particular use to first-timers will be the contacts and bibliography at the back of the book, the quick and useful question and answer section and the chapter ‘Dealing with Problems’, which walks you through convict’s foot, farmer’s lung and the trick of holding your egg-bound chicken over a pan of boiling water to free it up (and if that doesn’t work, ‘puncture [the egg] from the outide and use the fingers to “hoik” out the shell from the vent’.
‘Vent’ is the chicken-keeper’s word for the egg chute.
Time will tell, but this feels like the kind of book you’d keep handy by your chicken run and refer to time and again without the need of anything else. It’s small enough to read over a weekend, and useful enough to become an indispensable guide.
Price £6.95
ISBN 0-906137-27-6
Author Katie Thear
Pros It’s everything you need to know in a single slim volume.
Cons Cheap-feeling, and printed on nasty paper.
Verdict A book that delivers exactly what it promises, this guide is an excellent primer for the prospective chicken-keeper.
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chicken, chickens, hens, self sufficiency, self+sufficiency
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