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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Hindsight Celery Soup

Last year I planted celery seeds, it's the first time that I've attempted to grow celery and was delighted with the results. We had about twenty good sized plants of a variety called 'Red Soup', which as autumn gave way to winter, I cut the heads and froze a few pounds of celery.

I have been using the frozen celery in stews and trays of roasted mixed vegetables, but a couple of days ago I started thinking about cream of celery soup and today I decided to have a go at making it.

Now usually I am a pretty good cook, my children and Mr J can all recall the dishes that were disasters and, as there are very few total failures, I think I'm safe in saying that the rest of the meals must be either in the category of passable or jolly nice (or somewhere between the two).

Here's how I made the cream of celery soup.

I weighed about 12 ounces of frozen celery.

I put it into approximately half a pint of hot water in a saucepan.

 Then I added a small pot of lamb stock (because that was the first pot of stock I pulled from the freezer).

Once the celery was soft I whizzed it up in the liquidiser to make a puree and returned it to a large pan.



Then I made a thick white sauce from ghee, milk and gluten free flour.
I added the white sauce.

And stirred it into the celery puree.

So far it all seemed to be okay. Then I tasted it. Hmmm, it needed seasoning.

But also it needed more time in the blender to make it less stringy in texture, so I put it back into the liquidiser and blitzed it for longer. Well that didn't work either, the texture was still bitty and off-putting, there was certainly nothing creamy about it.

Next I thought sieving the soup might remove the bittiness and yes, it did, or at least it did with the small amount that managed to pass through the sieve. 

It didn't really matter though because when I tasted it again I realised that I really didn't like the taste. It looked like stagnant pond water, it smelt like stagnant pond water and although I've never tasted stagnant pond water (SPW), the soup was pretty much how I imagine SPW would be.

So the experimental cream of celery soup was relegated to the food recycling bin and we'll be having baked fillet of fish for supper instead.

This just goes to show that you can't win them all and in hindsight I should have strained the puree before I added the white sauce or perhaps, I should just stick to making cream of leek soup!

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Keeping chickens in UK v USA

I've been inspired by so many people over the years and most recently by a bunch of homesteaders and smallholders via the wonderful magic of the internet. Early in 2016 I started searching online for advice, information and inspiration and found that there are several (quite a lot actually) folks who share their daily working practices, knowledge and hard-learnt lessons online via blogs, websites and vlogs.

We had already decided on the direction and way that we wanted our smallholding to work, to use no artificial chemicals, fertilisers, herbicides, pesticides etc., to raise as much of our own food as possible and to keep chickens and ducks for their eggs. Raising meat birds came as a slightly later decision and as a natural progression of the way we were living.

I made so many mistakes in those early months, I followed completely correct advice and ideas that I had seen online from American vloggers, only to discover little by little that many of those practices are not allowed in the UK.

So I thought it may be interesting and perhaps, useful to look at some of the differences in the practices of keeping chickens between the UK and USA as I understand them. Please feel free to comment below if I am mistaken about any of these differences, it would be interesting to learn more.

Registering your birds.
In the UK we have to register our premises and also our flocks as soon as we have 50 birds, that's not just chickens but all the poultry we keep. When we started keeping chickens I couldn't imagine how we would ever have that many birds, but it doesn't take long to build up to 49 birds, particularly if you are keeping meat birds and hatching chicks and ducklings. I don't know whether you have to register your premises and flocks in USA, perhaps someone could comment and let me know.

Feeding the birds.
In UK we cannot feed kitchen scraps to poultry. It is fine to feed fruit and vegetables from the garden to our birds, but not if they have passed through a domestic or commercial kitchen before being given to the birds. Here's the APHA (Animal and Plant Health Agency) information about kitchen scraps. This also means that we shouldn't feed crushed eggshells back to our birds.

So in our house, cooked food goes into a biodegradable bag (and then plastic bin) and is taken away weekly by the local authority services. As I understand it, the cooked food is sent to processing plants for Anaerobic Digestion producing Biogas which is used as a power source or In Vessel Composting which produces a soil conditioner. Thus reducing land-fill and reducing the amount of fossil fuels required for power. This great little animation explains the processes.

Because we have a good composting system in our garden, we put all of our raw fruit and vegetable kitchen scraps onto a compost heap. 

Likewise, we can't let our birds scratch through and eat any compost heaps that have kitchen scraps put into them. So I keep one or two heaps that have kitchen scraps in them which the birds are not allowed to access.

The other compost heaps have nothing that has been in the kitchen and the birds have access to these (usually). We make these heaps inside a ring of straw bales - on our smallholding we call these heaps the Circles of Love.

Washing & storing eggs.
In UK (and the rest of Europe) eggs are not washed and are not refrigerated. There is a protective layer on eggs that prevents bacteria from entering the shell, keeping them safe to eat for some time (weeks!). Washing eggs removes that protective layer and means that those eggs would need to be kept cool to stop the bacteria from forming. So our eggs are collected and put into boxes and kept at room temperature. If for any reason eggs do get refrigerated, they need to be kept that way because if they then warm up again there is a risk that bacterial growth may start.

Processing meat birds.
In UK on smallholdings (homesteads), backyards and small farms we have to dislocate the neck of a bird rather than using only a sharp knife, so the killing cones that make dispatch relatively simple in USA (and other countries) are only useful here to put a bird into after dislocation, to allow them to bleed out. Here are the UK government guidelines for slaughter at home. We can only dispatch a limited number of birds per day (70 birds) and larger, commercial farms have different regulations, which I am not familiar with at all.

The lockdown issue.
Since 6th December 2016 all poultry keepers (commercial keepers, smallholders or homesteaders and backyard keepers) in the UK have had to keep their birds under cover, preferably housed, but at the very least completely away from all contact with wild birds. This is because of the threat (and now reality) of Avian Flu H5N8 which has been found in birds as far away as China, India and more recently mainland Europe. Here's DEFRA's latest situation information.

In Europe (and the UK is still part of Europe) steps have been taken to try to reduce the spread of H5N8 which has included the mass culling of birds across regions. Here in UK there haven't been many cases of this strain of Avian Flu, but there have been some and the proceedures that follow an outbreak are heartbreaking for the owners of the birds (all birds on the premises are culled immediately upon confirmation of the disease).

We are heading towards ten weeks of the birds being in lockdown and the current regulations may or may not be changed on 28th February (the date that DEFRA have given for reassessment of the situation). After that date eggs which have previously been sold as 'Free Range' (which is what I think may be called Pasture Fed or Pasture Raised in USA) will not longer be allowed to carry that label. I understand that the majority of eggs in Europe are now Free Range eggs and so the industry could be devastated if the lockdown continues after a 12 week period as this is the maximum time that birds are allowed to be kept inside in a 12 month period and still be called Free Range. We can only wait and see what happens nearer the 28th February.

So there are a few differences between UK and USA in terms of how we can keep our poultry, but when all is said and done, in my opinion the most important thing that we all have to do (on both sides of the Atlantic) is to keep and treat our birds safely and humanely.

Edit - this post is receiving a high volume of views - hooray! Please could you leave a quick comment and let me know where you found the link to my blog and what country you live in, it would be really interesting to see how far and wide it's being read. Thanks!

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

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Vegetable cage Chicken run

I am delighted! This morning I spent an hour or so making the first of the chicken runs that I've been planning (read about our planning thoughts here). It was easy to make and relatively cheap too. This one will have a dual purpose. At the start of the year I will put chickens into it so that they can till the soil in a raised bed and fertilise the area, while they are scratching around in the soil and eating the weeds and last of the crops in the bed.

Then, when the chickens have done their thing I can plant the bed with brassicas and put butterfly netting over the chicken run to create a vegetable cage. This should keep our cabbages and other brassicas safe from the voracious appetites of hundred of little green caterpillars.

To make the frame I used 8 x roofing battens 3.9m long and lots of 5cm (2 inch) screws. The total cost of frame was £25.

The uprights are 90cms long and the cross pieces are 105cms long, this was the most economical way of cutting the wood. So, there are 4 full length (390cm) pieces, 8 uprights, 6 cross pieces, 1 long diagonal and two small diagonal pieces. I will probably add two or four more small diagonal braces to add to the strength and stability of the frame, but it started raining and using electrical tools in the rain is a silly idea.

Here's how I put it together (if the video below doesn't work, you can find it on YouTube here)

The next step is to staple chicken wire around three sides (leaving the end without the cross brace uncovered) and to fix windbreak fabric or debris netting to the top. I will then create an end panel that can be held on with either a couple of bungee cords or small hook and eye catches. The end needs to be able to open so that the chickens can be let in to the run in the morning and out again at night. Once I am using it as a vegetable cage I can use cable ties to keep the end panel on it for the season.

I am really rather pleased with my handiwork and even though it has meant that I have been able to do little else today and I hurt all over, it was worth it. I had fun making something that is useful, that allows us to put the chickens to work without them having a free-for-all at their favourite 'all you can eat buffet bar' (our annual vegetable garden).

Projects like this are good for the confidence and spirit. There is something highly satisfying in being creative and when I can make something that is multi-functional, it is even more pleasing. This evening the plan is to have a hot soaky bath to soothe aching limbs, but first of all, it's 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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Planning poultry pens

 Mr J and I are so pleased with how well the chicken walkway has worked for us (and the chickens) that we have decided to build further runs in the chickens' fields and to that end I have ordered some more of the roofing battens like those that we used for the walkway.

 Rather than runs that use a building as one wall, the new runs will be freestanding, well not exactly freestanding as they will be anchored into the ground, but they will have four sides made from posts and netting.

Our thinking is that we could create a series of large runs that, during lockdown, will provide covered areas that the chickens can use and for the rest of the year we can leave the doors open for them to access the runs or remainder of the field.

The runs would allow us to keep family groups together which would be especially useful when we want to ensure that a set of females are breeding with a particular cockerel. The downside to this plan is that I will be back to cleaning out several small houses instead of using a deep litter bedding system in the chicken shed. But that seems a small price to pay for being able to ensure that the correct male is with the girls that we want to collect eggs from.

When we made the walkway it was very much a hit and miss affair, we didn't have a firm plan of how we'd do it and just felt our way through it. For the next pen or two, we will have a clearer idea of how to put the wood uprights and cross piece together to make the structure that we want.

The only part that we really struggled with, when making the walkway, was making a door or gate that fitted the allotted space. Making it the correct size was simple enough, but to stop it from twisting out of shape was more tricky, not helped I think, by the uprights each side of the door not being a) completely perpendicular and b) not being completely in line with each other. It's something we will work on for the next pens.

Once the new pens are completed I will section off an area inside each one that the chickens will not have access to and I will grow some vegetables in it. Then when lockdown happens next year, there will be some cabbages or other green leafy vegetables that I can feed to the birds by opening the restricted area a little at a time. And of course, even if there is no prevention zone order next year, the chickens still will be fed the leafy green vegetables during the winter months.

We haven't decided as yet whether the new pens will have a gently sloping roof like the chicken's walkway or a pitched roof like the duck run (above). I think the gently sloping roof option will be easier to build and as neither Mr J or I have advanced construction skills, the simplest option may well be the best.

The other design of run that I will build from this wood is a mobile run about four metres (13 feet) long and one metre (just over 3 feet) wide with handles at each end to help carry it. It will be a low run about 90cms (3 feet) high. This will fit on top of the raised beds in the annual vegetable garden and once lockdown is over, will allow me to put the chickens to work on the raised beds. They can eat the weeds and any crops left in the bed, till the soil and add manure to it. A few chickens should be able to make light work of the bed preparation in a couple of days and each evening they will be allowed to return to their usual house for the night. 

This was fairly successful last year when I made a makeshift run and now we have the opportunity to make sturdier and mobile raised bed chicken runs I am keen to have them ready for the chickens to go into once the lockdown ends.

The raised bed chicken runs will then be used to cover brassica crops to protect them from cabbage white butterflies and cabbage moths, both of which did substantial damage to the January King cabbages and red curly kale. Having dual purpose mobile runs means that we won't need to find a place to store the runs when the chickens are not in them.

The local builder's merchant have just delivered the wood and I'm heading out into the chicken field to do some measuring up. Although, I'll have to walk past the kettle on my way, so perhaps first of all, I should have a cuppa!

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A Day Off

On Sunday I woke up to find not only had it rained all night, but that the weather report said it was going to rain all day too. It's winter, what did I expect? Well, so far the winter has been very mild, a couple of storms, quite a lot of fog and a few frosty mornings followed by days that haven't defrosted the crisp whiteness, but nothing really wintery. On days when it's simply too soggy to spend much time outside, I find it is better to resign myself to a day indoors or to find things to do under cover. 

Since Thursday evening we have had the joy of new chicks in the house and I moved five of them into the nursery pen in the chicken condo on Saturday afternoon. You can see how I prepared the nursery pen on my vlog The Chicken Nursery

Early on Sunday morning I assessed the three youngest chicks that were still in the incubator and came to the sad conclusion that one was struggling beyond hope. It was unable to put any weight on one leg and each time it tried to stand upright, it fell forward, banging it's beak. So I did the kindest thing that I could do and put it out of its misery. 

Then I took the two chicks that remained in the incubator to the nursery pen to join the other chicks. So we have seven chicks and last night as Mr J and I watched them exploring their small secure cage, we saw that the little Appenzeller Sptixhauben chick possibly has splayed legs, we decided to wait another 24 hours and observe whether it really does have the problem of splayed legs or whether it was just trying to 'find its feet'.

Being the last Sunday of the month, a local fish and chip shop had its gluten free food session and as it's a while since we had some, Mr J and I chose to have a lunch that wasn't prepared in our own kitchen. So we sat in the van, balanced the packages of hot food on our knees and ate chips and onion rings while looking out at the not-so-scenic view of the back of a supermarket, all the while the rain poured down from the sky. There was a time when I would have wanted a beautiful view to look at while I ate, but nowadays I am happy just to be with Mr J and to enjoy the simple pleasure of someone else having prepared the food.

Following that we drove the few miles to my sister's home and spent a couple of hours catching up on all of each household's news, drinking tea, sharing laughter. I love my sister, not only because she is family, but because she's such a nice person. If she wasn't family, I'd choose to have her as a close friend. Her husband is equally great to spend time with. Both of them are grounded, humble, smart and caring, they are generous, adventurous and witty, all in all, they are good eggs!

When Mr J mentioned that we ought to head home to put the animals to bed, I realised that for the first time in over 12 months I had switched off from homesteading so completely that I had forgotten that we had a time constraint and needed to be back before dusk.

So despite having done some chores in the morning and evening, I felt as though I'd had a day off. This morning (Monday) I have woken feeling relaxed, happy and raring to go again, but before I start the morning chores, I think it's time for a cuppa!

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Hatchwatch 2017, first chicks of the season

As the temperature is dropping outside I am less keen to spend a lot of time in the garden and I now have the perfect reason to stay inside and keep warm. The chicks are about to hatch!

At the tail end of last year I chose which breeds I would hatch for the first batch to add to our ever-changing flock (read about my choices here) and the next forty-eight hours should see the arrival of our first chicks for 2017.

I will update my blog as the hatch progresses, but I'll post more regular updates on Twitter, so if you want to see the news as it happens, please follow me on Twitter @Liz_Zorab or search for my hashtag #hatchwatch2017. The link on the right hand column of this blog should work (but with all things technical, I can't guarantee that I've set it up correctly!).

I wasn't expecting to see any progress today, they aren't due to begin hatching until tomorrow, but as so often happens one little chick seems extra-keen to enter the world and has already pipped. As I understand it, chicks need to break a hole in the membrane that is inside the egg, they then have a little air to breathe while they break a small hole in the shell. Often this appears as just a crack, but it seems to be enough to allow air into the egg for it to breathe (this is what is called pipping). Then over the next day or so it makes more and more holes in the shell in a line that eventually splits the eggshell into two and with some shoving and heaving it manages to push the two sections of shell apart and ta-da, it has hatched.

Sitting in the kitchen over a cuppa and slice of cake with Alison (from Alison's Animals) I could hear faint cheeping noises, so I knew that at least one chick was making a bid for freedom. If I'd thought more carefully about it, I could have invited Alison to come for a cuppa tomorrow so that she could watch them hatching too. For anyone who isn't familiar with the name, Alison is a well-known animal cartoon artist, you will probably have seen her work on placemats, calendars, cards and mugs. I am very impressed by folks who can draw as my hand/eye coordination is dreadful and so I appreciate what a great talent it is to have (and Alison is certainly very talented).

I'm sure that the temperature has dropped again this afternoon. As I was giving the birds some corn (I was wrapped up like a Michelin Man yet again) and the tree surgeon arrived with another trailer load of well composted wood chippings. Hopefully the weather will be warmer in after the weekend and I will be able to move some of the compost to the raised beds. In the meantime, I plan to spend as little time as possible outside and as much as possible sitting in the kitchen watching new life emerge from little eggshells. And to that end, I think it's time to put the kettle on and make a cuppa!

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