Avian Flu Prevention Zone 2018 - Our Action Plan

Yesterday, as soon as we heard about the Avian Influenza Prevention Zone being implemented in England, I started to put into place the processes that we have planned for since the end of the last 'lockdown'.

I grabbed my camera and made a video of our action plan and what we are doing on our little smallholding because although we live in Wales, we are close to the border and I expect the Welsh government to follow suit before too long (as they did last year).

I made a couple of errors in my video and the guidance is that poultry keepers that have over 500 birds have to take additional measures, NOT the much higher figure that I give in the video. Our action plan we hope complies to the rules for those with less than 500 birds.

Last year there seemed to be a great deal of confusion about whether the Prevention Zone applied to backyard poultry keepers or those with just a few pets. This year DEFRA have been much clearer in their instructions and state that it applies to all poultry owners whether kept as pets or livestock.

So far, (as at midday 19th January 2018) there is not a complete lockdown, there are increased biosecurity measures needed, but as I read the guidance of what we need to do, all areas to which birds have access must be enclosed by netting to prevent contact with wild birds - so this surely must include netting overhead or the wild birds could just fly into the poultry areas.

We have spent the year with the chicken pens looking increasingly like a scene from Glastonbury festival, with tented covers billowing around in the wind, but I am comfortable that their areas will be secure enough for them to be able to have some access to outside even should a total lockdown be announced. The pens have been covered from above for a while now.

For full information about the AI Prevention Zone and the latest situation, see DEFRA Prevention Zone information https://www.gov.uk/guidance/avian-influenza-bird-flu#prevention-zone

The Welsh Government have just posted this statement to their site - no prevention zone at the moment. http://gov.wales/topics/environmentcountryside/ahw/disease/avianflu/?lang=en

But as we live so close to England I'm going to work on the basis that wild birds don't actually know about the border between the two countries and continue to get everything covered up.

I'm rather sad to see us have to use the covered runs and all the other biosecurity measures, I had hoped that this year we would get to spring and think 'well all of that hard work was a waste of time', as it turns out it wasn't wasted time, it was work well done. As Christmas came and went and there was no sign of bird flu in Britain I became increasingly cheerful that our bird population were not going to be hit by it.

Anyway, I think it's time for a cuppa!

Good Weather For Ducks and Ducklings

If the video won't play on your device, you can watch it on YouTube here.

Why there are fewer blog posts

I love blogging, but I've realised that I prefer moving images a little bit more. so for now I will still blog but on a less regular basis. I will share my thoughts and ideas and day to day life on our smallholding via videos.

I plan to write additional information, more in depth thoughts and expand upon subjects that I've raised in my vlogs, that way I can share what is going on with you on two levels, the lighter on my vlogs and the more informative on my blogs.

Yesterday I started to feel a little ropey and so spent a quiet day inside, I suspect I have inhaled too much dust from the woodshavings when I mucked out the chicken shed. But I did spend a little time watching the chickens and ducks enjoying the very welcome sunshine.

Here's the video of my time with the birds.

Now of course, a time may come when I am unable to vlog on a regular basis and, should that happen, I will continue sharing life on our homestead on my blog. Please feel free to let me know if you prefer the written word or videos, I'm interested to know which you prefer.

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I also post vlogs daily (almost). You can find my YouTube channel here.

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Women, ducks and chicken

It's International Women's Day and while I was letting the birds out this morning I thought back to the first IWD celebrations that I remember taking part in, all the way back in 1986, over 30 years ago. I was thinking about how much life has changed, how many differing roles I've had in that time and yet, hopefully, I am still true to myself. I thought about some of the amazing women that I've met, that I've been inspired by, watched (and as best I can supported) struggle through adversities and still hold everything together. And I thought about another woman, one who has inspired me the most throughout my whole life, my sister, who if she wasn't my sister, I would choose to have as a close friend.

Over the last year or so I have met a group of adventurous, bold, brave and inspiring women who have chosen to live a life not too dissimilar to ours. Some are pig farmers, others keep sheep, most have poultry and some focus on plant crops, but all of them have a great sense of humour and a level of grit and determination that has allowed them to thrive in their smallholding lives. Happy International Women's Day to every woman everywhere.

Back to our smallholding.

Yesterday we took a trip out to Stroud in the Cotswolds to buy a secondhand incubator. It's the same as the one we use now, a Brinsea Octagon 20. It will allow us to incubate two sets of eggs at the same time, which means that we can hatch some ducks. 

As if the ducks knew our plans, this morning I found three eggs in the duck house, so all of our girls are now laying. I'll leave it a few days for the new layers to settle into a rhythm and then I'll check for fertility by putting a few eggs into an incubator and candling them after a week to see whether there are tiny embryos developing inside the eggs. As soon as I am sure that they are fertile, I will pop a batch of duck eggs into the incubator to hatch. We have one girl that is smaller and noisier than the others and I think she is a Cherry Valley bird rather than an Aylesbury (although I purchased the hatching eggs as Aylesbury), I don't really want to breed from her, so I will select the larger eggs laid by the other two for hatching and keep the smaller bird's slightly smaller eggs for eating.

Once we have had the first hatch of ducklings of the year (and I've got over the sheer joy and excitement) I will be able to offer hatching eggs for sale secure in the knowledge that they produce good birds. We will grow the hatched ducklings on, keeping a couple of the girls to increase our flock and depending on numbers, sell the other ducks and dispatch the drakes for our freezer. And we will repeat the process throughout spring and early summer to give us a small income and a well stocked freezer giving us some food security for the rest of the year.

We are now getting lots of chickens eggs each day, actually we have way more eggs than I know what to do with. The daily egg count is now in the region of 18 eggs and however much Mr J and I like eggs, even we couldn't eat that many. So I need to find a suitable way to sell some eggs locally. To that end, today I am going to put the feelers out a little more and see if there is a market in the next village for some fresh eggs from chickens that are raised on organic principles. 

I thought that I might do a weekly delivery of eggs to folks who have already ordered them. I would put an honesty box at the end of the lane, but I don't think that there is a safe place for cars to pull over to buy them and the last thing I want to do is cause an accident. I will put a sign out on our lane to show that we have eggs for sale at the farm gate, but securing a regular order of eggs is much more sensible. In an area of lots of smallholdings and farms, selling eggs is not necessarily as easy as it might be, but I hope that there are some local folks who would prefer that their food is raised organically and would like to have our eggs.

Delivering the eggs to the local village would also limit the number of vehicles coming on the smallholding. I am still trying to restrict movements to reduce the risk of the spread of avian flu, although I've put a deep strip of straw drenched in disinfectant in front of our gate which, hopefully, would kill of any potentially harmful microbes from tyres as they drive through it. There's a fine line between suitably cautious preventative measures and utter paranoia about others coming on to the premises. I choose to stay on the suitably cautious side of the line.

I was pleased to see yesterday, that this article in Country Smallholding was published online. I made a contribution to it by sharing my thoughts and ideas with Kim, who wrote the article and by being a case study. You can read it here.

I now need to head outside and tackle some fencing issues, but first I think it must be time for a cuppa!

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I also post vlogs daily (almost). You can find my YouTube channel here.

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Chickens out, spring in

After all the excitement of the last week, a relative calm has descended upon our smallholding. The house is no longer filled with the cheeping and peeping of many little chicks and the cats have once again taken to lounging around in 'relax mode' rather than twitching at every sound of a small bird moving around their small cage behind a shut door.

I have moved the miracle chick together with the other eighteen chicks to the newly reinforced nursery pen in the chicken condo and today is the day that birds are allowed back out into their fields. 

The empty chicken fields have been a slightly sad sight for the last three months while the birds were in lockdown and now that I have completed the required self-assessment form (find info about it here), checked the bio-security measures that we have in place and checked the fields for signs of contamination, the birds are allowed out onto the grass again. We have to keep the ducks and chickens separated, but that's fine, we had done this months ago due to an overly amorous drake (Frederick) and there is now a 35 feet separation zone between the chickens and ducks.

We took the opportunity to use the time the fields were empty to have a think about how best to use the space and we have started to build a walkway from the chicken palace to one area of the field that the Jersey Giants will be using. This will keep the birds safe and also separated from each other because we don't want the breeds mixing unless we've decided that is what we want. 

The Australorps have their own house in one section of the field. The run that I made has been their only access to grass until today and I have now positioned the run so that the chickens can access the run but also their area of the field. Their food and water will be kept under the run, which is covered, so that wild bird poop can't get into their food or water. 

All the other birds will continue to be fed inside their indoor spaces. The mixed flock have a hanging feeder with a lid that is wild bird proof and kept under their covered walkway and the Jersey Giants had one inside the chicken palace, but they were so rough with the feeder that they tore the hanging toggle dispenser out of it, so today I will be making a new one with a smaller hole in the base, so that although it will dispense food more slowly, the toggle won't be able to to be pulled from the base. You can watch how I made the hanging feeder here 

Tomorrow heralds the start of spring and the beginning of the new growing season, I have done some preparation of the annual vegetable garden, but there is quite a lot left to do. We are still enjoying the harvests of last year's sowings, leeks, parsnips, red cabbage, swede and purple sprouting brocolli are still abundant in the garden and we still have food in the freezer and pantry that I preserved last summer and autumn. 

I put a planting plan down onto paper (and online here) which is a rough guide to what I will sow where, but it is not set in stone and I anticipate having to be flexible because some crops may not be out of the ground in time to plant whatever crop I had hoped to put in the space. But a few of the beds are now cleared and ready for seeds or young plants to go into them and it's all starting to look rather promising.

As I type the sun has come out and is beckoning activity, but it would be foolish to put seeds into the soil today. It has been freezing for the last few nights and a hoar frost this morning gave a hint of just how chilly the ground actually is. I think the average temperature outside needs to rise a good few degrees before I would want to put seeds into the ground. 

I can, however, continue to plant seeds in trays to go into the greenhouse. Last year the kitchen table, windowsills and work surfaces in the boot room were packed with seed trays, but this year we have Monty and Tabitha living with us and offering them what they would interpret as neatly laid out litter trays may not be such a smart move. Tabitha in particular is not terribly fond of going outside to empty her bladder when it is very cold, windy or rainy. We've kept a litter tray on the floor of the boot room since the cats arrived with us in December and I suspect that in the cooler months of each year, we may have to resign ourselves to a litter tray for her use.

Anyway, back to thoughts about the annual vegetable garden. There are tasks that I can continue to do outside like creating the last of five raised beds, laying down pathways and covering them with wood chippings, clearing away abandoned 'stuff' that I meant to put away at the tail end of last year, but didn't because other, more pressing, tasks needed our attention. I plan to move the Swiss chard plants and everlasting spinach into the food forest and then sow fresh seeds for them in the annual garden. I want to keep the older plants as they are useful duck and chicken food, but they don't need to be taking up growing space in the annual garden. 

It still feels a privilege to have so much space in which to grow food and having learnt a little about the soil (or lack thereof), the way the light moves around the garden, the natural flow of water through the area and the prevailing winds, I feel that this year the garden may well be even more productive. Mr J and I enjoyed trying different food crops and have been happy to admit that some things may have grown well, but that doesn't mean we actually like the taste of them. And there is little point in growing masses of something that we don't want to eat!

Except for kales, cabbages and squashes, I will be growing plenty of these this year, tucked into corners and empty spaces, into gaps between other crops and the old circles of love (the straw circles we put down for the chickens to scratch in). These kales, cabbages and squash will be used to feed the birds next autumn and winter. We will cover them late in the year to protect them from wild bird poop and then they will be suitable for feeding to our chickens and ducks during next winter's lockdown should that occur. And if it doesn't, well our birds will still eat well during the coolest months. Winter squashes will keep well for months in cool dry conditions, so I plan to store them in crates in the barn and then they should be available for both poultry and human consumption throughout the winter.

All this talk of food is making me hungry and it's not really a meal time as yet, so I guess I'll just have to make do with a cuppa!

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I also post vlogs daily (almost). You can find my YouTube channel here.

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Chicken lockdown news

Hooray, DEFRA have made an announcement about what will happen from 28th February with regard to poultry being kept inside and under cover. For England they have published an interactive map which allows us to look at whether our poultry are being kept in lower risk areas or higher risk areas. Once we know which area we are in, we can then read their guidelines about what we need to do from 1st March onwards. If you are in England, click here for the interactive map

In Wales, where we live, poultry keepers will be required to complete a self-assessment of biosecurity measures on their premises and we will need to keep our birds separated from wild birds until the end of April. The mandatory self-assessment form can be found here

So for us this means that I need to look again at whether the disinfectant that we have in various spots around the smallholding need moving, whether we need additional foot dips, hand disinfectant bottles etc.

At the start of the lockdown I put a bale of straw on the ground outside our front gate and soaked it with Virkon S, a DEFRA approved disinfectant and we have foot dip bowls outside each of the chicken and duck housing. We have the birds in their condo and palace and the ducks in their run, covered and inaccessible by wild birds and some of the birds have covered runs to give them access to grass. All this will continue, but we really need to create some more covered pens on the grass so that the birds can access to more fresh air and to be able to eat some grass, scratch around in the soil and get a better variety in their diet. 

The difference that having access to grass makes has been surprising. I took this photo while cooking breakfast this morning. The egg on the left is from the condo and covered run where the girls have had no access to grass since 6th December and the egg on the right is from the chicken palace where the birds have had access to some grass (although they razed it to the ground fairly quickly and since then they've only had little green shoots as the grass has regrown). The eggs from the birds that haven't had grass are decidedly watery in texture and the yolks are much lighter in colour and less rich.

Luckily I have had areas of grass covered to protect it from wild bird poop for some time, so I will be able to use these areas for the girls (and boys) to forage on. I learnt yesterday from reading the self-assessment form that the N5H8 Avian Flu strain can remain active in wild bird poop for up to 50 days, so only grass that has been covered since the start of January will be okay to use immediately. I wish that this had been more widely advertised earlier during lockdown, I could have covered more grass as early as December if I had known that the grass would need to be covered for so long to ensure it's safety for the birds.

Still, it is what it is and we know for next year and will cover areas of grass from early October onwards so that if a lockdown happens (and I suspect it will) at the end of 2017, we will be prepared for it and the birds won't have such a prolonged period in a restricted space.

Mr J and I have started to create a permanent walkway from the chicken palace towards one of the chicken fields. Working on the basis that protecting the birds overhead all year round may become the way forward for us, we are making another walkway, much like the one we created from the stable (read about it here). Unlike the previous walkway, this one is more or less free-standing, it is fixed to the palace wall at one end but there isn't a nice long supportive side wall to attach it to, so we will have to find an alternative way to ensure it doesn't get knocked down by the wind that whistles across this site. 

We will also need to build several gates into this new walkway as it will pass across our natural pathway from the Food Forest to the chicken's fields. Now gates are not our strong point, so I think I will probably buy either a tall pre-made gate or use pre-made poultry pen panels and strap them together with cable ties to make a gate as I have done on the chicken palace front door.

Poultry health update
Thankfully all of our birds have remained healthy throughout the lockdown period. The young Jersey Giant chicks that hatched in November have never been out on grass, so I am looking forward to moving them into the chicken palace with the other Jersey Giants and seeing them experience grass for the first time.

The seven chicks that hatched at the end of January are growing rapidly and all look very healthy. One of them (an Appenzeller Spitxhauben) had splayed legs, but I took advice from folks in an online poultry support community and treated the problem which now seems to be completely corrected.

The next batch of chicks are currently in the incubator and are due to hatch in a week's time. These eggs are a mixture of white Jersey Giants, Silver Laced Wyandottes and eggs from the girls in the chicken palace. They may be white Jersey Giants, they may be Australorp (although I doubt it as I don't think the males were active until very recently), they may be a cross between White and the Australorp girls or White and Dieselette (who is hybrid cross with some bantam genes). Dieselette is only in the chicken palace as she is the best friend of one of the Australorp girls and when I tried separating them, they both became impressive escape artists and found their way back to each other. Anyway, it means that we will have some chicks that we are sure of their breed and others that will be a surprise.

The ducks are healthy although very obviously highly frustrated at being confined to their covered pen. Mr J and I will be digging a pond and then covering it with a netted pen so that next time they are confined we can at least offer them access to a pond that we are confident has had no wild bird poop land in it. To date it is still only Mrs Warne that is laying eggs, she goes through phases of laying daily and then a week or two of laying every other day. We are still waiting for the young ducks to start laying eggs, I imagine that they will start in the next month. 

Anyway, as I type it sounds as though there may be a break in the rain, so I'm heading out to collect any eggs that have been laid and of course, as I will have to walk past the kettle, I was also make a cuppa.

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I also post vlogs daily (almost). You can find my YouTube channel here.

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If you'd like to receive my blog posts direct to your inbox just enter your email address in the box below and follow the instructions. You'll probably need to confirm by clicking a link in your email inbox and then you will receive my blog each time a new entry is published. You can, of course, cancel your subscription at any time.

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Choosing chickens and ducks for 2017

 

Hatching season is upon us, well sort of. We certainly know that our first clutch of eggs will hatch by the end of the week, but it's a little early to expect to see the girls going broody and sitting on eggs in the nesting boxes. But I have no doubt that it won't be too long before I have to find ways to entice a couple of the girls off the nest or decide to put eggs underneath them to hatch.

Last week I popped a few eggs into the incubator, they are the little eggs laid by the young Australorp, Jersey Giant and Cream Legbar girls to test for fertility. This means starting them to incubate and then candling them after a few days. Candling is the process of shining a light through the egg shell so that you can see what's going on inside the egg. Nowadays people don't usually use a candle, they use a bright torch light in a darkened room. Neither the Jersey Giant nor Australorp eggs were fertile and only one of the two Cream Legbar were fertile. I will test again in a couple of weeks and then, once we know that the eggs are fertile I start incubating them to hatch.

I have loose orders for some Cream Legbar chicks, but before I hatch any chicks I will confirm the order and take a small deposit because the last thing we need is to raise more Legbar chicks and then be stuck with them if they aren't bought. Over the course of the year we will be reducing our Cream Legbar flock to just two girls so we may well offer two of the girls to the person who's placed the order and then she has the choice of chicks or girls who are laying.

Several people have also expressed in interest in having Australorps and again, I will confirm the orders before hatching too many Australorp eggs. Having said that, our preferred meat birds are Australorps and Jersey Giants and to supply us with a regular source of meat, we will need to raise quite a few birds. This year we were effectively experimenting, finding out how long it took to raise a bird to a size that gave us more than one meal, whether I could dispatch and prepare birds for the table and whether we thought it was worth the time, cost and effort to produce our own meat.

We have decided that it is indeed worth the effort, that we are prepared to wait for the months that it takes for an organically raised bird to get to a good size and in comparison to a shop bought bird, the cost is similar (see my blog post about the price of raising meat birds).

Our hope for this year is to raise enough meat birds to provide at least one bird per fortnight, this should give us ample meat for a varied diet.

In addition to the Jersey Giant and Australorp chickens, I am keen to raise some La Bresse Gauloise chickens, which are white birds that grow rapidly and produce meat that is considered to be of the best taste.

As we also have duck eggs to hatch and the ducks are ready for the table much sooner than chickens, I think we will probably hatch as many ducks as chickens to give us an even wider variety in our diet. 

 Yesterday I put a duck egg into the incubator so that we can also check the duck eggs for fertility. Frederickson, the young drake is certainly enthusiastic in his attention towards the three girls, but as yet I am unconvinced that he has perfected his technique, so we will test fertility on a regular basis until we are sure that the eggs are fertile and then I can set up the incubator to hatch a batch of duck eggs.

I am very happy with the breed of duck that we have, the commercial Aylesburys are pretty to look at, grow fairly quickly and although they flap their wings each morning and night, they are too large in the body to be able to lift themselves off the ground and fly away. The three girls are from completely different flocks with no known connection, which should allow us to build a healthy flock and the young drakes will provide us with a good source of meat.

In December I dispatched five of the drakes, three of which were given to friends and family for Christmas. Once again this year, we intend to give duck as gifts, but we can also take orders if people would like a duck. 

The couple who owned our smallholding before we did have asked for three female ducks to join them at their new smallholding and so, once we have hatched some ducklings and confirmed their gender, we can let them have the girls that they'd like.

In the incubator at the moment are a mixture of Light Sussex, Appenzeller Spitxhauben, Silver Laced Wyandotte and some of our own hybrid eggs (for pictures of these breeds see this blog post). I am hatching these because I'd like to have more variety of colour in our laying flock and our own hybrid birds should be olive egg layers which will add a new colour egg to the mix of egg colours that we have now.

If you'd like to pre-order hatching eggs from our smallholding, please get in touch.

I'm still having fun making vlogs about our day to day life and here is yesterday's offering - Chickens, carpentry and compost.

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I also post vlogs daily (almost). You can find my YouTube channel here.

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Happy Duck Dance Day

I've had a very quiet day, after the push to get the chicken walkway completed I am tired, so taking things slowly and gently seemed a sensible idea.

Thankfully yesterday I had the energy to dispatch a chicken which we had for lunch today. The Jersey Giant boy was almost 27 weeks old and although there was the potential for the meat to be a little tough, it was succulent and the best tasting of our own meat chickens that we have had to date. We both agreed that we'd like to raise more Australorps and Jersey Giants this year and that perhaps the answer to raising the meat birds is to keep the boys together in their own space and just have one male in each breeding pen at a time. With a little moving of houses and building covered runs (in readiness for the next lockdown), we can keep the male meat birds in a good sized space of their own.

The chickens are now laying well and I've been gathering eight to ten eggs a day. In the nesting box of the chicken palace I found a full size egg. It would probably be an extra large egg if I was buying it in a shop. I think it was the older of the Australorp girls' eggs and over lunch Mr J and I discussed that it is heading towards the time for us to separate the Australorps and Jersey Giants. We have a house and a covered run that we can move the Australorps into and then a couple of weeks after that we should be able to incubate some of our own Australorp eggs and some Jersey Giant eggs knowing that they will be true to breed chicks.

As the sun went down today I wandered out to put the ducks to bed. I had left the water on that fills their little duck pond and it has spilled out onto the ground. The ducks seemed very happy with the resulting muddy mess. I filmed them as they were dibbling and Frederickson did a happy duck dance. This made my day!

In case the video won't play for you, it can be found on YouTube here.

In the spirit of having a gentle day, today's blog is short (but hopefully sweet), so I think it's time I put the kettle on for a fresh cuppa!

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Homestead Vlog Tour January 2017

Hooray, I've finally done it, I have made a vlog tour of the smallholding! 

Well, actually it's not a complete tour of all of the smallholding, but a brief stroll around the annual vegetable garden and an introduction to the chickens and ducks.

If clicking on the image above doesn't work, you can also find my vlog on YouTube here.

I think it's going to take me a little while to get the hang of editing a vlog and to come out from behind the camera more often. I've always been a production team type of person rather than an on-stage person, so seeing myself on a screen is a little unnerving.

Anyway, if you like the vlog, please hit the like button on YouTube and subscribe to my channel, that way you'll receive a notification each time I upload a new vlog.

If you like the music that I've used, it's by Kafkadiva, it is taken from their album Big Toes & Fingers (Explicit) and is a track called Breathe. 

You can find it on Amazon (via my affliates link) below.

For more information about my affliates links, please see the Small Print and Disclosure section.

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Positives of the lockdown

However frustrating it is that the poultry has to be kept inside and under cover, I have finally started to see some positives of this enforced lockdown.

It has given us time to have a really good look at all of the birds close up. I usually spend a bit of time each time day in the chicken field observing them, making sure that they are all healthy, happy and watching their relationships with each other. And, most of all, I just enjoy watching their funny chicken behaviour. 

Since the lockdown I have been able to watch them from close up rather than at the far end of the field and have noticed relationships developing that I hadn't seen before.

It has given us a chance to discuss what we might do in the future and which birds we really value. 

In the Chicken Condo
Much as though we like having blue eggs, the Cream Legbars offer little in the way of entertainment, company or work. They keep themselves to themselves, don't really mingle with the other layers or us and do very little in terms of tilling the ground. They are the first to bed and last out of the hen shed in the morning, they haven't laid an egg from September until one was laid on 6th January (and none since). So I think we will probably reduce their numbers to just two, so that we still have some blue eggs (when they finally start laying regularly again), but our plans to sell hatching eggs of Cream Legbars may just be set aside. The Cream Legbar that sat on a batch of eggs last year will stay with us, she was an excellent mother and having one girl that is a known broody bird is a good idea.

Jack and Diesel, the girls that we got from my daughter will stay, they were our first birds and will have a home with us for as long as they live and with them we will keep a couple of hyline birds that have proved to be regular layers. For now we will also keep the hybrid birds that we have hatched, two white ones with black flecks on their feathers and a cross between Jack and Big Red, who hopefully will lay olive eggs when the time comes.

In the Chicken Palace
Big White will stay, for now, as the White Jersey Giant cockerel as will his three girls, but when the two young birds, which we hatched ten weeks ago, are older, we will replace Big White with one of them if they are males (which I think that they are) as they are a different bloodline to Big White.

There are two Australorp males in the chicken palace together with two females from different bloodlines and a hybrid that is best friend of one of the Australorps and they seem inseparable. We need to decide which of the two males will remain with the girls fairly quickly so that we can separate them and have them as a small breeding flock to increase our own flock numbers and offer hatching eggs for sale.

In a separate house and run are one youngish white Jersey Giant cockerel and one other young Australorp cockerel, the Australorp male that we reject from the chicken palace will join them in this house and run. These are our meat birds. In yet another small house is a Cream Legbar cockerel. Until yesterday he was with the Jersey Giant and Australorp cockerels, but he has been aggressive and injured the young Jersey Giant. So as we know that he will be dispatched before the weekend, we will keep him separate until dispatch.

Having created a secure space in the stable (the chicken condo) and adapted the outbuilding (the chicken palace) that was going to become my garden room and potting shed, there is no point in undoing the work when the lockdown is lifted. We have also invested in a new duck run, which will stay in place when the ducks are allowed to roam their area of the field again. So now we have three secure areas for the birds and we have had a little bit of time to look at how the field is used, we have an opportunity to assess whether we want to return the birds to the whole of the space that they did have or whether we want to use part of the field in a different way.

We could, for example, create pens in the field over the summer so that the birds have plenty of space to run about, but are areas that we could cover if next year there is a lockdown again. This could give them a better lockdown environment if we can find a way to make a runway from their shed and stable to the pens. This seems like a good idea, but it means that the chickens will be less a part of our overall plan to develop the site. 

Another option would be to build several mobile covered runs that are easy to move around and in early autumn move them to places that we want tilled and fertilised. Then if lockdown happens again next year, we can put some of the birds in each covered run (with a henhouse attached) and they will be able to work the land even during lockdown. The downside to this is that I will have to clean out several small houses on a regular basis rather than one larger shed.

Now that the Australorp and Jersey Giant girls are coming into lay, we don't need as many hybrid birds as we have at the moment, so the lockdown has been useful to allow me to observe the hybrids and find out which ones are laying most regularly and which lay little brown eggs and which lay huge pale eggs. The hybrids that we don't need will be offered to friends, they are still good laying birds, but we don't need to keep nine of them in addition to Jack, Diesel, three girls that we've hatched, a couple of Cream Legbars and the rare breed birds.

The four ducks we have now sleep in the cycle store shed that we converted in the early autumn and each morning they walk through a short covered tunnel into the new duck pen. It's not ideal and in readiness for a potential lockdown next year, I want to create a better tunnel that I have access to and can walk through. It is likely to not look terribly attractive, but we could grow climbers up the outside to soften the look of it.

I've been able to watch how the ducks are interacting, the young drake is just starting to tread on the girls. His technique looks pretty awful, but then, I'm not sure that I could balance on a moving object that isn't terribly keen to be stood on, so perhaps I am not giving him enough credit for his persistence in trying. It seems clear to me that although there is plenty of balancing going on, there is no 'action' as yet.

We have already decided that we want to raise more ducks this year and earlier in the year than we did in 2016. That way we can fill the freezer and I don't have the rushed job of dispatching half a dozen ducks in the fortnight before Christmas.

When the ducks can run around outside the pen once again, we will be able to use the pen as a safe and secure place for the ducklings to grow until they are large enough to join the flock for a few weeks.

I have also been able to spend some time assessing the land, making notes of the areas that the ducks have dibbled so much that they've worn the grass away completely, the places where the rain doesn't drain away very quickly and the young hedging plants that didn't survive the summer.

Having the birds safely tucked away meant that when Jane and I planted a new hedge along part of the western boundary of our little smallholding, we were able to move around freely and didn't need to keep opening and closing gates behind us. Likewise, when we planted a new hedge along the edge of the chicken field, we were able to easily without upsetting the chickens.

So even though having the birds in lockdown isn't much fun for them or us, I thought it was important to remind myself that even in a bad situation there are some positives to be found.

If you have found any other positive side effects of lockdown, please leave a comment below.

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Why raise meat birds?

I've seen quite a lot of discussion on social media recently about whether raising one's own meat birds is worth it, so I thought I'd share my somewhat limited experience.

From the point of view of knowing that what I'm eating is good quality meat that comes from birds raised in a free range situation (except during lockdown of course), that have been able to express their natural behaviour and been fed only organic food, then yes, it's absolutely worth it.

It is worth it financially?

Chickens.

If I had a fast growing breed of bird that raced to it's maximum weight, then I guess the following calculations would be very different, but I don't like the idea of birds growing so fast that their bones can't keep up with the weight of the muscle on them. I prefer to have slower growing birds that have time to gently develop their muscle, so I dispatch chickens from around sixteen to eighteen weeks onwards and I'm still trying to work out the optimum age for dispatch for each breed. But for the purpose of these calculations I'm going to assume dispatch at twenty weeks old.

A bag of organic feed costs us £15 and lasts about a week. We're feeding around thirty birds, so that means it costs us 50p a week per bird. I also give them organic mixed corn which I estimate costs 17p per week per bird. As I grow vegetables to supplement their diet, there are no other feeding costs apart from the apple cider vinegar that I add to the water on a regular basis, so I'm going to call that 3p per week. Total input cost is 70p per week x 20 weeks = £14.00. The bird that was dispatched this week weighed 1.965Kg (approximately 4lbs 8ozs), plus the giblets which I use to make stock and then feed the heart and liver to the cats (who are very appreciative of our minimal waste policy). 

To allow a reasonably fair comparison of prices, my chicken cost £7.00/Kg.

Today I checked online for organic chicken prices.

Tesco £6.50/Kg

Riverford 2Kg = £7.73/Kg

Combe Farm Organic = £8.79/Kg

Planet Organic = £10.24/Kg

Marks and Spencer = £6.30/Kg

Eversfield = £8.65/Kg

There may also be a delivery charge for the organic chicken purchased online.

So at a quick glance it seems that raising my own chickens is probably costing me no more than it would to purchase one online and if I add the delivery charge in too, then it is financially worth raising our own meat birds.

Ducks

We have commercial breed Aylesbury ducks, bred to grow fairly quickly to a decent size in just a couple of months or so. Ducks can be dispatched at eight weeks, but for our first season we waited until they were fifteen and twenty weeks old. In the future I will dispatch at twelve and a half weeks as this is plenty large enough a bird for our needs.

Feeding costs of our ducks is similar to that of the chickens, but they reach a good size in slightly less time, so each duck will cost around £8.75 to raise.

The value of a home-raised organic duck is even better, especially as we now don't need to purchase eggs to hatch as we have three layers to fill our incubator with eggs. Our fifteen week old ducks weighed in at a little over 2Kg each, so I assume at twelve and a half weeks they will weigh around 1.8Kg. This would give a cost of £4.87/Kg.

These are the prices that I found online today.

Graig Farm = £13.60/kg
Rother Valley Organics = £6.70/Kg
Beech Ridge Farm= £6.60/Kg

So from a purely financial viewpoint, it is definitely worth raising ducks for meat.

Obviously I haven't included the cost of their housing, bedding or runs, but we would have those costs whether we raised meat birds or pets.

But, finances are not really the reason that we raise our own meat birds, it's about the taste, the knowledge of where are food has come from, what it's been fed (and not fed), food miles and food security.

We enjoy their company and we would keep ducks and chickens even if we decided not to have them as meat birds. We find a huge amount of pleasure in hatching our own eggs and watching the young birds grow into healthy adults.


When not in lockdown, the birds help to tackle the pest population in the garden, till and prepare the soil, fertilise the ground and do a superb job at turning the compost heaps (although they are kept out of the ones with kitchen scraps in them). They are an integral part of our gardening system.

On top of their gardening skills, the birds provide us with eggs. Not only do we have a good supply of fresh eggs for the kitchen and to give to our family and friends, but also we plan to soon start selling some of them as hatching eggs. The small income from the sales will help to pay for the birds' feed, making them even better value.

All these calculations have left me thirsty and in need of revitalising, which means it must be time for a cuppa!

Please note that my photos were taken prior to the Avian Flu Prevention Zone order and our birds are now kept inside as required by law. 

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