Poultry

Building an Omlet Eglu Cube

July 9, 2008

Omlet CubeThe chickens’ future home arrived last week. Very exciting. Having got permission from the council’s environmental health people to keep chickens in the garden, it was great to finally have their home arrive, despite the missing bolts and the fact they’d tried delivering it a day too soon.

Read the full article →

Getting chickens

May 31, 2008

2008-nik-and-the-hens-thumbnail.jpgI’m about to launch myself back into the world of poultry and eggs, as I’ve put in an order for a coop. It won’t be here for another month, which gives me plenty of time to source my laying ladies, which have been named Margot, Gerry (Geraldine, not Gerald, natch) and Barbara even before they arrive.

Read the full article →

Five sites for wannabe chicken keepers

February 15, 2008

Fresh eggs every morning. You can’t beat them – especially not if you plucked them from under the chicken yourself. Here’s Blagger’s rundown of the first sites you should turn to on the road to egg and meat self-sufficiency.

Read the full article →

Hen and the Art of Chicken Maintenance: review

January 21, 2008

‘Our first cockerel was an accident called Yvette…’ Imagine Peter Mayle was rewriting A Year in Provence, but from the back of a hen coop, not France. Just as he followed his dream of a life in the sun, so Martin Gurdon followed the dream of daily fresh eggs and chickens in his garden. This [...]

Read the full article →

Getting permission for chickens

January 16, 2008

Chickens occupy a strange middle ground between pets and productive animals. They can be as affectionate as cats, and some will happily sit on your lap to be petted, but at the same time they’re a farmyard animal whose main purpose – for their owners – is to produce eggs and meat. As such there [...]

Read the full article →

Chicken Out campaign

January 12, 2008

The UK is going contented-chicken crazy right now. For three nights this week, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall took over prime-time Channel 4 to show how cruel so-called ‘standard’ chicken farming is, in Hugh’s Chicken Run. It made for uncomfortable viewing, not because he crammed 2,500 chicken so densely into a barn that they had no room to [...]

Read the full article →