Page 14 - ALG Issue 1 2017

Feature on... Chickens
An alternative means of feeding grass. Foot massage for free! The hens enjoy exploring, but watch for damage to your veg!
Tales from the hen house... Part Two
Last time I covered the basics of setting up for hen-keeping. This time I want to cover feeding and housing. Next time I’ll cover egg production.
Our ‘Ladies’ are perfectly happy eating layers pellets which we buy
in 25kg sacks. We supplement this with some grit – oyster shells are good. However, we’ve learned to buy the coarser type as we think the ner type (for budgies etc.) may get absorbed too quickly and may be the cause of shell defects – see the next instalment! They love coming out of the run and exploring, picking up grubs, worms and having some grass. But don’t let them out into the allotment when you and your neighbours have spring greens coming up or you risk losing a crop!
We have grass on the allotment so when I’m mowing it I usually throw a couple of handfuls into the run for the hens to graze on, especially when they’ve denuded the ‘natural’ grass in the run and we are using straw to keep them off the mud. This straw gets well manured and is a great base for raised beds; just throw it on your compost heap and let it rot for a year or so, if it is too strong to use ‘direct’.
You can supplement the commercial feed with other things; ours love boiled potatoes, rice, pasta and stale but not mouldy bread. In the winter they sometimes get a treat of pasta and porridge-oat mash which is boiled until al dente and served warm on frosty mornings. Of course they also get the veg trimmings direct from the plot. If runner beans get too big because we’ve been away at harvest time, they get par-boiled and frozen for feeding in the winter. BUT it’s important to point out that DEFRA rules say nothing must be fed to farm animals (and by extension to allotment chickens) that has been in a kitchen where meat is also prepared. However, you CAN feed them scraps that are produced from a vegan kitchen. This is part of the regulations on ‘animal by-products’ (ABPs) as feed. Even when the material you are feeding is not an ABP itself, the risk of cross contamination from
a shared-use kitchen is such that it is banned. So if you want to feed scraps etc legally, become (or make friends with) a vegan family – or boil up whatever you want to feed them outside of a kitchen (I have
a camping gas burner on the allotment). For further information, see http://ahvla.defra.gov.uk/documents/surveillance/diseases/backyard- poultry-guidance.pdf and the links in it.
Constant clean fresh water is essential for your chickens. We use a large water dispenser and in the winter we put a heavy bowl of water within the coop, which helps if the outside water gets frozen; even if you break the dispenser ice in the morning, it can re-freeze by lunchtime in the narrow channel at the base of a dispenser. However, if the bowl is kept in the coop, it is slightly warmed by the hens overnight so stays thawed. But it needs to be a heavy bowl with a good base that won’t get knocked over, trodden in or spilled, and must be kept clean.
For the laying ‘stall’ we use shavings bought from the feed supplier in a big compressed bale which lasts us about six months. We
CONTACT DEFRA FOR THE LATEST INFO ON AVIAN FLU
change this at least once a week but more often if it gets soiled. If the birds roost on battens that form perches within the coop and only use the shavings for laying, it stays pretty clean. Perches should be square or rectangular section, not round dowel as the edges help a hen’s feet to grip. We do sometimes have to ‘coax’ new hens onto the perches, they prefer the easy life of sleeping on the shavings
at rst. It’s quite comical to watch a couple of newbies learning to balance on the perch whist the others roost nonchalantly!
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