Growing vegetables for chickens

Posted by louisa on Thursday 22 July 2010 in chickens, growing, wild food | 1 comment

As I mentioned in my post about the economics of getting started with chickens, we’re hoping to feed the chickens a combination of bought-in food (nutritionally balanced layers pellets) and “free” food – scraps, foraged stuff and things we’ve grown especially for them in the garden — and it’s the latter I want to think about now.

Before they moved in, I had started growing some stuff for them (specifically radishes because they’re such a quick crop) and I’d left some lettuces in the ground for longer than I would have done normally, because I thought they’d like them as a snack. They didn’t. The radishes were slightly more successful but only for the green tops, not the red roots – which would be great if we liked radishes because we could easily share but since we don’t, it seems inefficient to grow them.

So anyway, I’m trying to find crops that I can grow for them to supplement their pellets. They’re currently snacking on borage (which they’re eating in the somewhat blurry pics here) and bolting spinach. I’ve got some perpetual spinach & chard growing too – we’ll use some of it, but it’ll be mostly for them. I should be able to start picking those in a few weeks. Around the same time, we’ll be harvesting carrots so they’ll be able to have the tops from those. For late winter/next spring, I’ve sown kale & spring cabbages, and there should also be lots of brassica leaves/surplus — but there is a bit of a gap in the middle between the autumn and late winter/spring harvests.

Next year, I’ll be more on the ball and have early winter cabbages ready to feed them then but now I’m trying to plug the gap with quick-grow stuff. Any suggestions? I’m too late for planting comfrey for them but there still maybe a little time for clover?

I am going to keep foraging for them too, with the rule that unless I can identify something so definitely that I’d be confident to eat it myself, I won’t feed it to them. It’s a cautious route to take – probably missing out on a lot of good stuff for them – but I’d rather be cautious than have a poisoned chicken. They very much like nettles which is a good thing given how many we have around here! I’ve been wilting them to lessen the sting but I’m tempted to dry a lot now to have for over the winter.

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Chicken update: one week on

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 7 July 2010 in chickens, growing | 1 comment

I’m not going go on and on and on about the chickens but I thought I’d just do a quick update because it’s a week now since we got them – and we had a good bonding day yesterday.

The as-yet-still-unnamed girls seem to have settled in well. The first couple of nights, they needed a little encouragement to go to bed but now they go of their own accord. They were also sleeping in one of the nestbox in a big heap too but now they seem to be using the perches more.

Diet wise, they’ve shunned some of the scraps I’ve taken down – the bolted lettuce has been mostly rejected – but they like leftover pasta and nettles (which is good because there are *loads* in the field next to our house but I’m going to get better gardening gloves before I pick any more as the ones I had one yesterday weren’t good enough and ow-ee, stings all over). They’re eating borage leaves in this picture, which were also popular – handy since we’ve got a healthy patch of them in the herb bed.

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Economics of having chickens: getting started

Posted by louisa on Thursday 1 July 2010 in chickens, frugal | 1 comment

After 18 months of waiting, we *finally* got some chickens on Tuesday. This post is the first in what I imagine will be an occasional series about the economics of having chickens.

Despite my tight-fisted frugal heart, having chickens at home isn’t about getting cheap eggs. It’s about getting good eggs from well treated and well fed chickens. It’s about food metres and not food miles. It’s about using up an otherwise hard to make productive bit of ground. It’s about introducing more diversity into our garden and harvesting poop for fertiliser. And it’s about living with some fascinating pseudo-dinosaurs – learning about them, looking after them and laughing at them because they’re such fun, odd things. But while those things are almost priceless, they do have a price.

Back when I first got giddy about the idea of having chickens, I read a great page about the economics of having chickens – breaking it down to the cost per egg over the first year (when there are higher capital costs but potentially high egg production) and in future years (smaller capital cost, slowing egg production etc). It was great – but can I find it now? No. I hate Google sometimes. But I’m going to work out something similar for myself and this post is the first stage of that.

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Chickens!

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 30 June 2010 in chickens | 1 comment

Yesterday, I alluded to needing a quick dinner because we were going to be busy doing exciting things (the casserole was yummo, btw) – well, the exciting thing was this: we got chickens!

We’ve been planning to get them for about 18 months and a chicken-facilitating garden was on my desirable-but-not-necessary list when we were looking for our house. In anticipation, I read loads about them and went on a course about keeping chickens in April last year, and got super excited about having them ASAP – then the house purchase got delayed and delayed and delayed… When we eventually moved in, it was late autumn and we couldn’t do that much in the garden. Then our plan from just having a random coop and a wire fence around the bottom of the garden evolved into levelling up a section of earth and building Fort Chicken (pictured below) – and, well, we’re slow and disorganised, with a billion other jobs needing doing at the same time.

But anyway, anyway, they’re here now. We went for point of lays – more expensive than hatching eggs or day old chicks but better for first timers and when we expand/replace in the future, we can look at those options, letting our existing chickens do the hard child rearing work for us*. Following a recommendation from a friend, we went to Edward Boothman near Silsden to get them and brought four home last night. Fort Chicken’s coop can apparently hold 15(!) chickens but we think the space in there and the run is more suited to 6-8 — we’ll get settled in with these girls then get the others as POL in the late summer/autumn (spring chickens come of age).

These girls are ISA Brown/Warrens – Edward’s recommendation for first timers as they’re good layers (300-325ish a year each!) and have friendly personalities. I’d like a few different types eventually but these are good to start with. Names to be confirmed when we get to know them but likely to be either chemical elements (if we follow our main pet naming scheme) or Buck Kar, Stanley Chicken (my best friend’s grandfather’s name), Warren Buckland (a lecturer of mine at uni) and Warren’s Song, Pt. 7.

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