Housing measures for poultry come into force across the UK at 00:01 Monday 29 November 2021. Avian flu is back again. While it causes no threat to humans, it can rip through flocks of wild bird who in turn can pass it on to domestic fowl. This means whether you are keeper of two ducks…
From past posts, I imagine you are all au fait with the likes of chicken maths and then chick maths. This my friends is a totally different story all together. This is egg maths. It all stared with red mite which are pesky little critters who feast off the skin of hens. It ended up…
When I wrote the post Socially Distanced Animal Buying At The Farm last month, I totally intended to go and pick up the two rabbits we had reserved and nothing else. The people had told me that they had an incubator full of eggs but at that point, even though I had a little chuckle…
**Contains an image of a fox ravaged duck It’s been a funny old month on the farm. Christmas has been and gone and in terms of farm life, everything carried on as usual. Having the children off school meant any animal feeding had help took three times longer but they do enjoy collecting the eggs,…
I’ve been meaning to write this post for ages but things got in the way. Over the summer, there were big changes in the chicken shed. We had an old coop which has been used for many things over the years including chickens. The chicks I had purchased were fully grown but then the battery…
We started off the last farm month with promising weather and a first cut of haylage in one field. Considering that this time last year, all hay was safely in the shed, we had high hopes for a repeat. Alas the weather had other ideas and a very wet June has ensued. There have been…
In the last month, lambing has just about exploded. We have pet lambs coming out of our ears and the lambing shed is actually starting to look a bit quieter which is a relief for us all. All in all, it has gone well. You have to be pragmatic about it sometimes. Remember my post…
We are a nation of turkey lovers and nothing says Christmas more than the smell of turkey filling the house on Christmas Day. As one of our most seasonal foods, it seems while we may know quite a bit about cooking the bird (or visiting Mr Google several times between picking up the turkey and…
I hope you enjoyed the first post in my chicken keeping series last week. This one is the next (and last) preparation post before the fun bit-choosing which hens you want. Before that though, you have decided you want to keep a few hens and you have chosen the coop. What do they eat? What…
I have kept chickens for as long as I have lived at the farm. I started with two (Daphne and Pearl) and I certainly caught the chicken bug. Things haven’t always gone to plan. I’ve made mistakes and, on the whole, learnt from them. Chickens are a great pet to keep. You don’t actually need…
