My name is Lola and I am addicted to feathers

Our Myrtle and our Hetty both had perfect plumage until we were given a chicken by the name of Lola earlier this year.  Lola is a lovely chicken, very chatty and excitable but she has one habit which I’m struggling to keep on top of; feather plucking.  Sadly as the days get shorter this habit seems to be getting worse.

Poor Myrtle:

And this is Hetty – not as bad as Myrtle but a big bald patch nonetheless:

And the chicken with the perfect plumage is of course, Lola:

I have tried all sorts to try to change Lola’s behaviour; anti-feather pecking spray, as well as hanging things in the run to try to distract her from feather plucking

I have two of these vegetable hanging things – one above the coop (so they have to fly up on top of their hen house to get it) as well as one just above their head height and also a boredom buster seed hanging block.  These are all helping but as you can see from the handful of feathers I pulled out of the coop this morning the plucking (read battle!) continues.

 

 

Is it just me?

The days are so much shorter now and I do worry a little about the chooks – will they be bored cooped up in their run for longer periods?  How can I supplement their diet to make sure they’re getting everything they need (they’ve been happy with everything I’ve tried so far – cooked brown rice, sultanas, celery sticks, windfall apples, tomatoes and the odd handful of mealy worms to keep their protein levels up).  However, it had never crossed my mind, not once, that what they might really need is a high visibility vest.

please note this image was taken from the article mentioned above!

Whilst I can’t vouch for the usefulness or the chicken hi-vis what I can recommend is the following product that I bought for our chicken feeder.

Its a simple rain cover that stops the rain reaching the food within the feeder.  I can honestly say that for a product that cost about a fiver (£5) it has paid for itself four or five times over by preventing their pellets from getting spoiled by the weather.  I’d definitely recommend this!

Georgina

Sadly our chicken Georgina had to be put down by the vet this week.  She had been out of sorts since we got her and whilst she made a valiant attempt to get better (and almost growing back her feathers) her illness got the better of her and we all felt the kindest thing would be to let her go.  Such a shame as I suspect she would have been rather handsome with a full complement of feathers!

Keeping Rescue Chickens: Helping your chooks survive the heat!

I read somewhere earlier this year that if you have a late Spring (or no Spring as happened this year) then you are guaranteed a good summer.  For once, this old weather wisdom has been correct as the last couple of weeks have been nothing but glorious sunshine.  This does however pose problems for chickens who don’t do very well in the heat especially when temperatures hit 30 degrees plus!  So how do you keep them cool?  I have adopted a number of measures to try to keep our chooks heat stress free.

Firstly, shade! I have rigged up a few money saving shades to keep our chooks cool.  The panels on the side of the coop are old doors that we found in our loft and these are invaluable in keeping the run shady in the afternoon.  For the roof I have covered a piece of trellis with an old duvet cover.  The advantage of having these panels is that we can move them away when the weather cools or in the winter when the days are much shorter to allow maximum light into the run.  The chooks also have the coop to shelter under now that it has been raised on to the staddle stones.

The other thing I like to do is put ice cubes in their water to keep their water as cool as possible.  I also give them the odd treat of watermelon which they demolish in minutes and which helps to keep them hydrated.  I have also read that putting frozen bottles of water in the run helps as they can stand on them and cool down.  I haven’t tried this yet – I need to clear some space in the freezer first!

I’d be really keen to know what you do to keep your chickens cool in this heat and also what ideas you have for providing shade on your chicken runs.

Mostly cloudly with some sunny intervals

I realise its been ages since I’ve updated my blog.  No real reason why that I can think of, more that our life seems to be taken up with painting and decorating than anything interesting.  Still I managed to spend some time in the garden with the chickens this weekend despite the ever changeable weather (as you can see when I forgot to bring my garden shoes inside!)  The garden is progressing really well – the woodland garden is looking amazing with foxgloves, aquilegia’s and forget-me-nots all in flower.

The chickens are also doing very well and are mostly harmonious with one another – unless Lola is hungry then she gets a bit despotic!  Georgina finally appears to be growing some feathers back (believe it or not when you look at the photograph above).  She’s still very nervous but will graze within arms distance of me which I think is progress.

Gardening with chickens

Generally my husband is happy to have chickens in the garden.  However as you can tell from these photos they don’t exactly enhance the appearance of the garden and chasing the chickens off certain borders isn’t always a success as Lola found out when she fled into the pond earlier today.  The mulch that I spread over the borders now covers most of the garden and we have holes in various parts of the garden due to worm foraging and dust bathing.  Its also at this time of year that our plants are at most risk as the first leaves that push through the soil are more susceptible to scratching chicken feet.  So what can be done that doesn’t involve fencing off the entire garden (we already have a cobbled together fence to stop the chooks getting into the woodland garden!)

Last year I bought my husband a book called ‘Free Range Chicken Gardens‘ by Jessi Bloom which has some great tips.  Here are a few:

• plant woody shrubs instead of annuals.  The latter are easily damaged by scratching chickens.
• Perennials are a good choice as they tend to be hardy, dependable and tough (although these may need to be protected in early spring when new foliage is emerging)
• evergreen grasses along a border can prevent chickens from scratching mulch out of the bed
• trees and climbers are obviously good as chickens can’t damage foliage if its growing overhead
• vegetables – either grow more than you need and share with the chickens or fence off the area entirely.

I must admit that whilst this is useful I do want to have some annuals in the garden (for my cutting garden) and I do want my herb bed to develop (currently a disaster) so we’ve decided to try a number of solutions.  The long border in our garden we will put a low fence around it and hope the chickens don’t realise they can jump over it!  In the big border we will plant some more robust shrubs so that the chickens have somewhere that they can scratch for worms and hide from the sun.  And in the herb garden I think I will take out the softer/low growing herbs such as chives and thyme and plant those in pots and put the sturdier herbs in the border e.g. rosemary and lavender.  So we’ll see how it goes. I don’t want to keep shooing the chooks away from the plants so I think we need to be cleverer about how we do our gardening.

Thank you so much… here’s a box of eggs!

I’ve been busy making labels for egg boxes.  I have a big love of bunting so that had to be incorporated into the design.  I realise that they aren’t brilliant but its a work in progress and I’m having fun with my brand new set of colouring pens.  This is also going to help us deal with the mountain of eggs that is building up in the kitchen as I intend to give a box of eggs to friends and family at every opportunity.  These are the scenarios I’ve thought of so far in which eggs will be given:

• Thank you for dinner (box of eggs instead of the obvious bottle of wine – although my husband is already challenging this!)
• Meeting up with friends I haven’t seen for ages
• Visiting family on any occasion
• Thank you for looking after the chickens
• Birthday presents
• Easter eggs (again, I think my husband might challenge this but surely better than chocolate???)

(The eagle eyed among you will notice that I started these before Georgina & Lola joined us hence their omission from the labels!)

Meet Lola and Georgina!

Lola and Georgina joined the Fat Chaffinch Farmstead this week!  They are rescue hens of sorts; they belonged to a friend of mine but were being harassed by the neighbourhood rats who kept stealing their eggs.  As you can see from Georgina she hasn’t coped with this very well so I agreed to take them in.   I must admit it has been rather stressful.  Myrtle, Hetty and Violet were most indignant at having new coop-mates and poor Georgina was bullied mercilessly by butter-wouldn’t-melt Myrtle but four days in the angst is subsiding and yesterday I had all five chickens eating grass around my feet in the garden without a single squabble.  The only problem is what on earth are we going to do with all of the eggs – so far we’ve had 13 eggs in just 3 days!

The perks of hanging out with chickens

I realise that we’ve just passed our first anniversary of having chickens in the garden.  I must admit that I can’t imagine the garden without chickens clucking away whilst I potter around.  The other thing I love about having chickens is that by spending time in the garden with them you notice that despite the cold weather, frozen pond and frozen toes that there are signs of  Spring all around you.  Buds on the pear trees, green flowers on the Euphorbias and fresh green growth on the honeysuckles.  Enough to make you forget about your frozen toes and dream of oncoming warmer days!

Keeping Rescue Hens – useful chicken products

The grey skies finally broke over the weekend so I took the opportunity to do a pre-Spring sort out of the chicken stuff.  Here are the four products that I find most useful:

Poultry mite & lice powder or Diatom:  Invaluable stuff for keeping on top of chicken mites in the Summer.  I normally dust the chooks once a week; applying the powder under their wings, on their tummy and around their vent area (I find its easier if one person holds the chicken whilst the other applies the dust).  The chicken coop itself was cleaned out weekly with poultry shield (another really useful product) and then followed up with a dusting of diatom.  The only thing I have noticed is that Diatom powder will get mouldy in the coop once the damp winter months arrive so make sure that you give the coop a good clean out before winter descends to avoid this (I’m pretty certain that mould won’t be good for small chicken lungs!)

Verm-x: I give our chickens Flubenvet worming tablets every six months but in between that I give them Verm-x, a herbal worming remedy.  I give this to them once a month (excluding the months when they are given the Flubenvet) in the hope that this helps to keep them in tip top condition.

Poultry anti-peck: I’ve found this product useful particularly with the rescue hens who have been fairly vicious with one another when establishing the pecking order. Its useful if you catch the pecking early enough before they’ve broken the skin.  If it gets to this stage then I’d recommend the next product.

Anti-sceptic spray with Violet: This stuff is brilliant.  Rescue hens when they first arrive don’t tend to be very hardy and can injure themselves quite quickly so its useful to have an anti-sceptic spray handy.  As mentioned in my previous post about introducing new chickens, chickens do have cannibalistic tendencies so will keep pecking if they see blood.  This stuff not only helps to cleanse any wounds but if the wounds are caused by pecking then by dying it purple it tends to distract whichever chicken is doing the pecking.

So where to get all of these products?  I really like the company Flyte So Fancy as I’ve always found them very friendly and helpful although there are plenty of other online companies that sell chicken products as well as some of the larger pet stores.

I’d be interested to know of any other products that you use that you find invaluable.  Its been one year now since we started keeping chickens and I still find I’m learning all of the time!