Perfectly happy in the snow
They are also cheap to feed, as even organic chicken food is cheap, and they also love to eat grass or any leftover vegetables you have from your garden produce. A lot of people will moan that other animals like rats will get into your chicken area and eat their food; well, there are special feeders that you can teach your chickens to open and close, which means the rats cannot get to the food and so don’t bother the chickens or eat their food.
These feeders highlight another advantage chickens have over many other pets. You can leave them if you go on holiday. I keep pigs too, and if I give my pigs 5 days’ worth of food, they will eat it in 30 minutes. But if I give my chickens 2 weeks’ worth of food and drink, I can leave them for a week and come back to find they have only eaten what they needed.
It can take a little while for them to get used to the correct feeder technique
Once they reach their ‘point of lay’ (PoL), which is usually at about 20 weeks old, they will start laying eggs. Different breeds of chickens lay different colours, sizes and amounts of eggs. If you provide a good environment for your chickens, and feed them a quality and varied diet, you will have amazing eggs all through the year. How many pets can be as productive as this? They do slow down egg production through the winter as there is a correlation between egg production and sunlight, but you will still get eggs in the most wintery of weeks if you have a few chickens.
Sometimes the laying area gets crowded though
You will want to get a few chickens, at least two, as they are social animals and will be unhappy if they don’t have another poultry pal to scratch about with. You can tell if they get unhappy as their combs (the red flesh on top of their heads) will go floppy; if they are happy and well it will be stiff and upright.
Something else they produce is chicken ‘droppings’. If you grow any plants at home in your garden, especially flowers, fruit or vegetables, this produce will save you a lot in terms of fertiliser! It is an excellent and very strong fertiliser, so much so you can by ‘chicken pellets’ in a garden centre, which is just the droppings in pellet form. It might sound horrible, but the droppings quickly dry and then you can rake them up or even pick them up and collect them in a bucket to be used when you need them, or add to your compost heap!
Chickens are also hardy in terms of illness. There is simple medication for worms or bugs that are easy to deal with and fit into your regular schedule of helping the chickens stay hygienic and healthy. They tend to live for about 3-4 years, depending on the breed and how many eggs they lay.
You can keep them in even a small garden too. The first chickens I owned were kept in a teeny garden and they were fine. Two chickens don’t need much room, a few square metres is fine for them as long as they have room to stretch their wings. They won’t like to be kept in all the time, so they will want to have a little garden, a patch of grass to scratch and peck in.
Even in a small garden a couple of chickens can be happy
Chickens are also fascinating to watch and be around; you and they will benefit from this as you will make them feel safe and they will make you feel happy as they gambol about the place having fun (it is scientifically proven that spending time with chickens increases happiness, so much so that they have them in old people’s homes, hospitals and health centres helping people dealing with depression). They form a complex social hierarchy when you have a few of them, literally a ‘pecking order’, where a head-hen - a chief chicken - forces her way to the top of the group and becomes responsible for keeping the others in order. If you don’t have a cockerel (you don’t need one, I don’t bother with one), then the chief chicken will keep an eye out for predators and warn the others if they see something that might be a threat. They do this a lot, they are literally very chicken! But if you sit and watch them you will see their individual personalities.
Different chickens will be braver, or stronger willed, more greedy or prefer different foods/treats, some will be quite independent and some will have a favourite chicken chum to be with most of the time, some will be very curious, others very cautious, some are really agile, others are lazy, some will be clever, some will be really stupid. Hours can go by on a sunny day watching the chickens run around the place, interacting with each other and the environment.
They are great characters, no two are quite the same
No comments:
Post a Comment