brief update on our chook situation

We lost our two new girls - Sussy and Tja-Tje - on the weekend to foxes. The electric door malfunctioned and they got at the girls while they were sleeping. Nothing left of TjaTje at all, but Sussy's body was left behind.

We're a little shell-shocked and saddened, not least because they were two lovely young girls just getting into the swing of things around the place. And now they're gone. I'm a little frustrated, too, because TjaTje was our best layer, and Sussy was pretty expensive. And because I feel I failed to look after them. So now we're back to the original two with a need for a couple more again.

Also need to look at the security on our 'external' chook house - it's a few years old and falling apart a little. And that's probably part of what ended up being a problem. *sigh* The stitch in time that saves two chooks.

Sussy's remains have been composted in one of the big compost bays, to decompose as she will. That one will probably be left for some time - until maybe Christmas - but I want to turn the other compost bay over.

Real Chooken Keeping: Care & Feeding of your Chooken

0. Real Chooken Keeping
1. Somewhere To Park The Henhouse
2. Care and Feeding
3. Eggs and All That Jazz

Chickens are at once amazingly sturdy birds (from a start in South-East Asia, they survive in just about any climate with a little bit of care) and incredibly prone to disease and sickness when improperly cared for.

We'll start with the sturdy front.

They will eat anything that humans consider 'food' and quite a few things that humans don't consider food. They are not as indiscriminating as goats who will eat literally everything, but they are pretty good with all kinds of human foods. Also: with grass, flowers, vegetables, certain perennials. Additionally, bugs, insects, lizards, vermin.

green things

I said that chooks will pick at any greens they find in reach - including your vegetable garden. No, they can't be taught to differentiate between grass and lettuce. There isn't enough space in that teeny tiny brain for anything as complicated as 'this is something that the great, wise, good feeder doesn't want you to eat'. So they will nibble at everything. Including some fruits and vegies if you let them.

My chooks actually quite love green leafy things. Some green leafy things are more pleasurable than others - you should hear the noises Hainan makes when she gets atop a shrub and starts simultaneously scratching and pecking it to death.

Hainan: 1. Plant: 0.

My garden is set up to use the chickens as cleaners once I've finished growing in a bed. They get let into the garden bed under a chook tractor and may eat whatever I've left in there - along with some things that I tossed down to grow specifically for them: "clucker tucker". I bought the mix of seeds from Diggers Club, but there are options for edible things like oat seeds, dry chickpeas, fennel, fenugreek, coriander, and any number of other 'weed' seeds of which the chooks make fast work. I now have fat hen, among other weeds which will be enthusiastically fed to delighted chooks.

If you don't have that much space or a tractor to put over the top of the chickens, then an option might be to grow trays of green chookfeed: let them nibble it down to the stem, then take it away and replace with another tray. It takes timing, but so does tossing down chook fodder seeds in the garden ready for when the chook tractor is fitted on.

But the green things are just the start.

pecking away the pests

Chickens eat a lot of insects and bugs.

When going through my plants, I collect slugs that I collect on wombok leaves, and grasshoppers I picked off the corn. I feed them to the chooks, along with moth larvae on brassica leaves, and curl grubs that I find in the compost. I feed them cockroaches that our cats catch in the house, and once a nest of mice that I found in a bag of mulch.

Chickens may eat all these things. I cannot guarantee that they will. Snails are out for my four: a couple of pecks and it's more bother than the girls care for. (The snails get left for the blue-tongued lizards that sun themselves out on the pathway until I have the incredible gall to not notice they're there and nearly tread on them while carrying buckets of water around.) But my chooks don't like the bigger slugs - too hard to swallow down in a single gulp - but my white Leghorn (Hainan Chicken) loves it when you present her with a lettuce leaf that has baby slugs on it. She'll pick them off with great daintiness.

Mostly, though, they'll scratch up the soil and eat any pests or pest eggs that they found in the ground. Most of the time, humans can't even distinguish the insect eggs from the soil that surrounds it, but the sharp eye of a hungry chook will pick it up in a moment and peck it up in another moment.

That's one of the reasons that I occasionally run my chickens through the compost pile. One of them likes the worms. The others are more interested in the slater bugs and the little black bugs that are found anywhere that's damp and dark enough. They ALL love the curl grubs, though. And the cockroaches. These days when we find cockroaches, we end up trapping them in plastic containers and keeping them for the chooks.

So, yes, chickens are excellent 'pesticides'.

That said, they will also eat a great many beneficial insects too: lacewings, butterflies, hoverflies, and other pollinating insects. Chooks don't care if the insects are 'good' or 'bad', and technically, the labels of 'good' and 'bad' are marginal: a caterpillar eating my bok choi is easily labelled 'bad', but I do like the butterfly that it grows into if it survives to undergo transformation. The chooks make no such distinction: it's all food.

Regarding bees: I've never seen the chooks eat bees and most chicken owners I've seen don't talk about whether or not chickens eat bees. I think the bees are pretty canny, and possibly the chooks are pretty canny, too. After all, who likes being stung by their food?

Green things and garden pests are the 'natural' sources of food for chooks; the ones that they had when they were wild creatures living out in the jungle. There still remains the vestiges of

household scraps

We feed our chickens quite a bit of household scraps.

Leftovers gone rancid, pie crusts that my carb-conscious sisters don't want to eat, rice that's been sitting in the fridge too long, chip bits, prawn shells, lettuce leaves, and so forth...

When we go to the family lunch do at Christmas, we take a bucket for the scraps - salads, beans, prawns, meat - anything that people didn't eat, we take for the chickens, and they have a feast of varied food for the next few days.

There are a few exceptions to this, mostly because of danger to the chickens themselves.

1. We (mostly) hold off on chicken itself, because of the dangers of transmissible disease.

2. We try not to give them anything that's outright mouldy - fuzzy mould, or the bright spots that appear on left-too-long dairy, etc.

3. We're wary of small bones that they could choke on. Oh, and chickens can eat things that are considerably larger than what you think they can eat. It's probably a bit like watching a snake swallow something; maybe they don't have the dislocatable jaw, but sometimes you think "she's never going to get that down..." and the next thing you know they're looking for more food.

Generally, things that are too salty are off the list as well. A high salt diet is bad for humans, it's bad for chickens too.

In spite of the warnings against it, I have never had trouble with chooks and avocados. They love the flesh - even when browned and 'off' - and they leave the shell and the pit behind. I often end up with avocado seedlings growing out of my chook compost.

Frankly, chickens will eat everything that humans eat. And what they don't, they'll crap on and scratch over into a great pile of compost which is what forms the soil of my next season's garden. That's the reason why I have the chicken tractor setup over my garden beds; to add fertility to the system, and to let the chooks do what they do - eat, crap, and scratch - to the benefit of my soil.

If that was all that chickens did, then we might leave the matter of feeding there. However, there's the reason that most people get chickens in the first place, which is the eggs.

regular feed

Eggs are a high-energy item. All that energy that goes into the egg - into its contents and production - has to come from the chook. Which means that a laying chicken needs to be fed very well.

Your average commercial layer breed spends about two years laying an egg every day, after which she becomes sporadic and irregular and is generally disposed of thereafter. That's a lot of eggs - and a lot of energy expended on laying eggs. As a result, laying chickens need a goodly amount of food to produce eggs in a solid shell.

Chances are, the green things, pests, and scraps from your table will be insufficient in all the nutrients that a chook needs to produce eggs that you can feed to your family. Maybe if you have a large family with a wide variety of scraps, then it might be a different story, but all the home chicken keepers I know have commercially bought chicken feed on hand in their coops, to give the girls that extra oomph of nutrients that they need to healthily produce eggs. You can buy the standard feed or the organic in pellets or seed crumble, and I don't think it matters very much. Some people will swear by one or the other, and some people have the money to pay that bit extra for organic.

We do a mix of pellets and organic; usually two cups of pellets to one cup of organic. Of course, the chooks often then pick through the organic feed for their favourite parts, and leave the not-so-favoured remains behind, like kids with a mixed plate of food. Then - also like kids at dinnertime - they demand more of the stuff they like.

But they eat it. Eventually.

One Thing To Remember

The reason most people have chickens are the eggs.

The eggs are going to be eaten by you and your household. That means what goes into a chicken also goes into the egg, which means you want to be careful about what you feed your chooks.

Most things that go into food are harmless doses for humans and generally okay for chickens. If humans can eat it without an issue, then usually so can chooks. That said, there are some things that should never be fed to chooks.

Human medications, in date or out. You'd think this would be a no-brainer but just in case. If you need to medicate your chook (see next section on vets and general health), then go to a vet and use what they recommend if they recommend it for your chook.

Things that are heavily mouldy. That white mould on your cheese is not going to kill them anymore than it will kill you. But the point at which it is growing blue or orange or red blooms is the point at which you either need to toss it out, or else scrape off the top before feeding it to the chooks.

Things that have been sprayed with pesticides. Now, this is not always immediately obvious, or easy to identify. Also, some straws and hays have been sprayed with pesticides, so there may be a danger in using them. That said, you can only do what you can do, and so many of the poisons around us in our lives are no longer labelled, so if you keep your chickens on a varied diet from multiple sources, then it should be okay.

Ultimately, it's unhelpful to get too hung up about the dangers of what you're feeding your chooks. I know, it's difficult. In times of stress, we want to control everything around us however we can. But my best advice is be wise and make sober judgements, but don't get uptight about it.

General Health

Two very important things that you need to know about chooks.

1. They stop laying in winter.

Some chooks - the heavy laying breeds, like Isa Browns or Hylines - will lay all through winter in their first or second year. But most chooks take a break over winter, because of the length of days, colder weather, conserving energy, etc., etc., etc.

This is normal, particularly as chooks get older. Yes, there are stories of ancient hens (8 or 9 years old) still steadily laying without fail, but mostly they'll slow down laying in winter. As they get even older, they are likely to stop entirely.

Chickens are lean, mean, everything-eating, egg-laying machines when they're young, and then they get older and they...ease up. Or wind down. Or just can't keep up production. And, the chances are that the heavier the laying breed, the faster

2. They moult.

Moulting is that thing that they do when they lose their last year's feathers and start growing in new ones. Sometimes it happens a few feathers at a time, sometimes it happens in great big chunks. They'll have bare patches on their skin, look rather scraggly, and worryingly cold. Just make sure they're getting enough feed and proteins so they can grow the feathers back in, and they should look okay with in a month.

However, bare patches on a chook may also mean that a chook is being bullied by the others around her. Chickens are hierarchical in a flock. They have a very literal 'pecking order', and some jostling and pecking will happen in order to maintain the rank and status.

More about pecking orders and chook behaviours later.

Health and Vets

So, we've been through the 'chickens are basically avian garbage bins; they will eat anything and everything, even things that may not always be entirely good for them'.

Now for the down-side of chooks.

There are a great many things that can go badly for a bird of very little brain that is willing to eat everythingwhile in a constantly pregnant state.

The most common and easily-solved issues with chooks are:

1. Mites and fleas, which can be dealt with through the chooks' regular act of dustbathing. Read up on it, there's no shortage of information about how to help chooks deal with the little itchy things under their feathers and against their skin.

2. Intestinal worms, which should be regularly dealt with through wormer medication - every four months or so. Again, read up on it. There may be a 'withholding period' where you probably don't want to eat the eggs the chooks are laying because of the medication in them. Just crack the eggs into your compost and cover it over so it doesn't stink.

3. Calcium shortage, which will result in thin-shelled eggs that crack very easily. This is a known issue for certain breeds of hens - for instance, our Isa Brown has a regular issue with thin eggs, such that we have to add calcium supplement to her water. The Hyline (another commercial breed) has no such issues, even without the calcium supplement. But the calcium supplement is good for her bones and feathers, too.

Those are the simple, you-can-do-this-at-home side of things.

If your chicken's health or behaviour is an issue for some reason, go to google and look up the symptoms that are concerning you. Some of it is just normal chook behaviour, but some of it may be more serious.

On the 'well, this is a bigger problem that we've got here and there's no home remedy' front there's vet advice and assistance.

But aren't vets for pets?

One of the decisions that should be made early on - by the whole household - is that status of these chooks you are keeping.

Are they simply a home-based production line for eggs? Are they pets? To what degree are you willing to take care of them, ensure that their life is lived well? Because the answer will determine what you do when it comes to their specific health - and also, what happens to them when their eggs run out (as they eventually will).

Chooks can be pets, like a cat or dog, who few families would consign to a slow and painful death because they can't be bothered paying a vet bill. Or they can be production line creatures, which means when they no longer fulfil their purposes, they need to be disposed of.

Few people in our society like to talk about death, or the management of the end of life. We're squeamish about blood and guts and the actual 'having-to-watch-something-die' part of our food chain. But death is a part of life, and it's important to have an idea of what your chickens mean to you and your family. Also, to have a plan for disposal of their bodies. I know some people who took their geriatric chooks and basically let them loose in the bush. I don't actually recommend that strategy, in part because the chooks go feral, but also because I think that treating chooks like a convenience to be banished from sight when they're done isn't a good thing for us to do as people and part of creation. I'm not saying you need to be prepared to kill, clean, and cook your end-of-lay chooks, but knowing what you will and won't do is a good idea.

The next post will be about eggs, and all that jazz...

resilience in food chains

A slightly broader post, posting about concepts and ideas rather than the practical.
Illustration by Brenna Quinlan.

The full post is here on FB and it's an excellent read

It's a good point that agribusiness is hierarchical and chain-linked, but the social network of a resilient system is connected around people and community-oriented works. The milk doesn't have to be poured out, the pineapples don't have to rot for want of a buyer. The abattoir workers don't have to go to work when they're sick, and we can find other ways of doing things.

It's just not easy or convenient.

But then, neither is our current system.

There's a joke in a book I read, where a cop says something to the effect of: "When God threw Adam and Eve out of the garden, he made Adam become a farmer. Probably because it's a shitty job, hard work, nobody thanks you for it, and because cops hadn't been invented yet."

Farming is one of those jobs where they have to weather the costs - the costs of production and care, the costs of the corporations who buy their produce who take every opportunity to push back. The costs of the consumer who doesn't care where it's from so long as it's cheap and convenient. So much of the expense of our lives is hidden: buried in the ground, transported out of sight and put out of mind, barred off from the public by the plastic curtains into the loading zone, over the dusty, drought-ridden hills and far, far away...

I think this is earth care (so a patch of earth sustains more people resiliently), people care (allowing us to care for the lives and livelihoods of others in our local communities), and fair share (everyone has the chance to benefit).

links: a solar food dryer

Under the Choko Tree: Nevin Sweeney makes solar food drier.

A similar link in Mother Earth News

I should like to make one of these for next summer.

Real Chooken Keeping: Living Conditions for Chooks

0. Real Chooken Keeping
1. Somewhere To Park The Henhouse
2. Care and Feeding
3. Eggs and All That Jazz

We All Need Our Own Place To Live, Not Just Somewhere To Park The Henhouse

First post on Real Chooken Keeping is...keeping them.

Let's do a quick lesson on the ethology (behaviour) of chickens.

Biologically, chooks are birds. Originally, they were jungle birds, accustomed to living among the leaf-littered forests of South East Asia and flying up into the low branches to perch every night so they'd be safe from ground predators.

They can fly, but not very high. They love scratching up the ground looking for bugs and worms and creepy crawlies, as well as for entertainment. They hang out in small flocks - maybe a dozen or two dozen birds. They have a literal pecking order, where there's a top bird (usually the rooster) and then a set hierarchy of birds. They are omnivores, like human beings; they will eat just about anything edible you put before them: meat and grain and green things and dairy, and their bodies can process it. (That said there are things where you should limit how much your chooks get. More about that in the next post - care and feeding.) They lay their eggs somewhere dark and 'safe', where they can get comfy while popping an egg out their oviduct.

What does all this mean for us humans as chook keepers?

It means chickens are best off somewhere where they can:
- scratch up the ground and pick at green things
- roost at night
- lay eggs
- safe from predators (including overenthusiastic 'helpers' of the small human kind)

This is pretty easy, right? Just put them in one of those chook coops and they're all good!

Well...not quite.

Let's talk about the chickens who lay the cage eggs you get in the supermarket.

Cage Eggs

They're laid by a hen who's been bred to lay every day, some 320-350 eggs in a year of 365 days. The instant she starts laying regularly, she's shoved into a small box in a factory, amidst thousands of other chooks in small boxes, where she's fed as much food as she can handle, and left to lay eggs and shit all day. Her food is heavily medicated, because the conditions under which one keeps thousands of chooks in very small boxes never letting them out is not hygenic, and while their poop is carried away to be turned into 'rooster booster' or some such product, it still gathers flies and breeds infection and disease.

When she's about two years old, she'll stop laying. At that point, she's toast. I don't know precisely what happens to them because the egg companies don't tend to tell you. A handful (maybe 0.5% of the total) are rehomed to people who don't mind a hen with no social skills who lays occasionally rather than every day. But the rest of them? Well, let's just say it's not a nice retirement in a shady orchard with all the worm-infested fruit that they can handle. I can pretty much assure you of that.

This is the life of a battery hen. You are not seeking to emulate it.

Or maybe you are. Maybe you don't care how chooks are cared for (or even if they're cared for) so long as you get eggs? While it's not a view I personally hold, it's one that many people have to take because they need to feed their families and eggs from caged birds are cheap and convenient.

But you are here reading my blogpost, and I believe that we have it in us to define 'better care' of a chicken as rather more than merely "better than a battery hen".

What about Free Range eggs from Free Range chooks?

So, Free Range chickens, by definition 'have access to' an area where they are free to range.

This is good, right? Like, if a kid's been kept in a small room all their life and suddenly they're in a house with a backyard that they can go out with, it's all okay, yeah?

Before the COVID-19 travel restrictions, how many kids did you see randomly out 'free ranging'?

Chickens are a bit like kids in some respect; they're creatures of habit and instinct and there's not a lot of reasoning up there in the brain. Your modern kid has access to the great outdoors...but they'd rather be inside, sitting on their devices.

So sometimes the chooks who produce the Free Range eggs that you buy in the supermarket have access to The Great Outdoors...but they don't know what to do with that terrifying open sky and that long green stuff, and that big place where...look, it's just safer being in the barn with the other thousand chooks on the free range farm. Also, because of the nature of chickens - being highly hierarchical - in the earlier days of 'free range chook farms' a lot of birds were debeaked so they couldn't peck each other to death while trying to find their position in the pecking order. Like someone pulling out your kid's fingernails so they' can't scratch the other kids when they go out and get into fights.

Now I don't know if that's the case anymore; public awareness has moved on a lot, but the gist is that 'free range' egg production may be better than 'cage' egg production, but it's still not really recognising that chooks are chooks.

There are free range farms that have 'chook cams' these days, so people can see the treatment of the chickens. I approve. I am also highly cynical by nature, so I question whether the chooks that are being viewed on camera are necessarily the chooks producing the eggs that end up in the cartons on the shelves. But that's my own suspicious nature, don't mind me!

Free Range egg farms are considerably better than Cage egg farms, but the simple fact remains: it's a commercial process. They're looking for maximum eggs out of minimum effort.

Maybe that's what you want, too: maximum eggs out of minimum effort.

I submit that if you want maximum eggs from minimum effort, just buy the eggs in the supermarket. Remember how I said it was easier in the series base post? It is. Seriously, it is so much easier. Even if you sometimes go to the supermarket and there are no eggs on the shelves, it is still easier to buy an occasional carton of eggs from the supermarket than labour through keeping chickens to get a dozen eggs.

But back to the keeping of chooks - and specifically, the housing of them.

The Basic Recommendation

The basic recommendation is:
a) a coop (location where they can roost at night)
b) a run (location where they can wander by day)

There are stats on how much space per chook, and details of the best types of perches and all that. I don't need to reiterate those.

What I'm going to mention are the things that a lot of sites frequently gloss over: the other things that chooks do apart from eat and produce eggs.

The Bad, The Worse, And The Stinky

They eat everything green that they can reach. They eat the grass. They eat clover. They eat your vegetables, and sometimes the new growth on trees if they can reach them. They love lettuces and Asian greens and brassicas, because the leaves are just soft enough for them to snap off with a clip of the beak.

They scratch up the soil in search of creepy crawly things. if you have mulch on beds, they will go for that. If you have vegetable beds, they'll dig around there. They're looking for bugs and earthworms, flies, slugs, grubs, and larvae, as well as insect eggs. Digging into the ground is the way they do that.

They make noise. Not crowing like roosters, but certainly loud enough to be annoying to neighbours who might like their quiet, or who might want a reason to dislike you. There's the steady clucking with a squawk of outrage. There's the loud 'where are you, we're bored' clucks that can go for an hour or more. There's the 'puff and ruffle' of hierarchy assessment and assertion.

They poop. In rather large quantities. It's smelly and stinky and sloppy and slimy. It attracts flies by the bucketload if it's left around. And if you want it for the garden...well, you have to let them into the garden, first. If you're not prepared to deal with chicken manure, don't get chooks.

Basically, chooks do a lot of things other than lay eggs, and those things are an integral part of their nature. Trying to suppress them will mostly cause you angst and frustration and mess.

In short, chickens are living creatures that happen to produce eggs. To most people, a chicken is there to provide eggs and maybe a meal at the end of its life. The things like scratching up the lawn and garden, eating the leafy greens it comes by along the way, and the dollops of chook poop that lie randomly scattered across the ground are inconveniences that most people put up with in order to get the eggs.

That's the part that most people who've bought chooks for eggs haven't taken into account, and it's the part that's going to catch a lot of people unawares.

How do you deal with these things?

Well, you can take the 'caged chicken' view of things, and just shut them up somewhere where they get fed, lay eggs, and are bored. And once again, I say: if all you want from the chooks are eggs, then just buy them from the store.

You can let them out and deal with the hair-tearing frustrations of stepping in poop every time you walk into the pen, of having your garden dug up and your mulch relocated, of finding dusty, barren patches all over your lawn where the chooks have decided to dustbathe.

Or

The alternative is setting up a regular area for them to run around in, dig up, dustbathe, and generally do their thing.

Did I mention that chook keeping wasn't easy? This is the 'not easy' part of it.

Your garden will not be the pristine one shown in the Pinterest and Instagram pics that are used to sell chooks or chook products. It will be a mess. It will be a delightful mess if you love watching creatures being creatures, but most suburbanites want that nice clean lawn, no flies or insects, no poop all over the place, and no unsightly dust patches in the green.

Keeping chooks manifestly involves these things. There's just no avoiding it if you want happy, healthy chooks.

Now, note the 'if' clause in that statement. A lot of people won't care if the chooks aren't happy and healthy - after all, they're just dumb animals, right? Well, I reserve for such people the same blank stare that you would reserve for someone who bought a beautiful collie dog and kept it cooped up all day, never taking it out for a walk and shouting at it when it wanted attention. Or for people who fostered a kid and then treated them like an unpaid servant rather than a member of the family.

You have taken a creature into your household; that means you have taken on the responsibility of caring for it and seeing that it's not only physically looked after, but that it's life is as good as you can make it.

Am I a bleeding heart about animal care? Yes. Yes, I am. But people say that like seeing a creature bored and frustrated and wanting better for them is a bad thing.

The way most people who are aware of chook needs deal with the scratching, pooping, etc. is either to have the chook house within a chicken yard. That is, a place where the chickens can run around and scratch things up. They dump kitchen scraps and leaf mulch and grass clippings and woodchips into the chicken yard, and the chooks go to town on it. And every day or couple of days, the chooks are let out to go around the garden and yes, cause a bit of damage. Every couple of months, the chook roost and the chook yard are cleaned out and all that scratched-up and mulched compost matter is put on the garden beds.

You do you.

Thinking outside the box

I do...something slightly different.

As I said in my introductory post, I have been planning to get chickens for years. And I planned my ownership of them around the things that would have been frustrations to many suburbanites: the manure, the digging up, the relentless nibbling of every green thing in reach.

Based on Linda Woodrow's The Permaculture Kitchen Garden, I based my ownership of chickens such that the things that would otherwise be frustrations were part of the design.

This is a map of my backyard with the elements relevant to the chickens coloured in.

The orange section is the chicken coop or house, where the chickens lay their eggs and sleep at night, and sometimes get fed and watered depending on the season and the garden setup. The coop is also a shelter in the rain, although they don't always use it and don't mind getting wet.

The green sections are the annual garden beds where I grow vegetables.

The blue sections around the edge of the garden? Those are tunnels that connect the chicken coop to the garden beds.

Most of the time, the green sections - the garden beds - are not available to the chickens. But when I want the chickens on there (after I've finished growing things for a season and want to clean up the soil, bugs, remnants of the plants, etc), I put a 'chicken tractor' - a large wire-covered cage-like frame - over the top of the garden bed, and open up a little gate in the side of the tunnel so the chickens can come through and dig that area up to their heart's content. The beds are the exact size of the chicken tractor, and provide a space for them to dig, sit, scratch, and feed that is more than just the coop space.

They eat the spent remains of the vegies I planted there (most of which I have harvested).

They pick out any bugs that have been left in the area.

They poop onto the bed and then scratch it into the dirt.

They till the soil ready for the next planting.

We toss them food scraps from our kitchen, I add grass clippings from the front lawn and the neighbours, and oaten hay from the pet store. They scratch that around, digging up the ground as they do so, and not only aerate the the soil, but create a lovely surface mulch that keeps the moisture in once they're moved off.

When the garden is eaten and dug up and pooped and mulched...I close up the door to the tunnels and take the tractor cage off, and I have a bed all ready for planting: fertilised, weeded, and tilled.

The tunnels around the edge are there for several reasons. I wanted a way for the chooks to move from the coop to the chicken tractor that I wasn't going to have to climb over (the original layout involved wire tunnels stretching across the yard), and then I wanted a way to keep the grass and weeds from the neighbouring properties from invading. Putting the chook tunnel next to the fence to deal with that was a perfect solution for both.

It takes effort and planning, yes. But the effort is relatively small and I'm prepared for it - rather more prepared than some new chook owners are prepared to deal with dusty patches in their lawn, scratched up flower borders, and shredded vegetable gardens and shrubs.

Yes, this is a specific setup with a specific purpose. I've set it up so that it works for me. You don't have to slavishly follow it - in fact, it's probably better that you don't. Work something out with the time and energy and effort that you have. But it's an example of how I'm using the properties of chickens that might usually be negatives for a suburbanite in a positive way.

I don't know what your setup is; I don't know if you planned for a 'setup' or if you just thought it would be eggs all the way down. But this post is to give you a slightly broader view of chooks - of the things they do simply being, and not just as egg-producers.

There are ways to manage the behaviour of chooks that will be less frustrating on you and won't condemn them to a life of boredom. Finding a system that works for you may take a while, though, so expect some upsets to your life.

And if chook keeping is not for you, there's no shame in saying so, and re-homing those chooks to someone who's prepared to give them a good life. My recommendation is to find a local FB gardening group and make inquiries about re-homing. There are people who'd be willing to add to their flock; indeed, I know a number of people who are just waiting for all the new chook owners to realise chicken keeping is not for them and who'd be glad to take chooks. Think about it.

If you're still on the page, the next post is 'care and feeding' - mostly about things to feed them (or not feed them) and a light skim of some of the things that can happen to them.

(And this time I will try to be a little faster with the next post.)

Real Chooken Keeping - a series

0. Real Chooken Keeping
1. Somewhere To Park The Henhouse
2. Care and Feeding
3. Eggs and All That Jazz

So, in the sudden world-wide shortage of eggs you went and panic-bought chickens?

Congratulations on joining the ranks of chooken owners the world over!

What next? Now that you've added these lovely feathered ladies to your flock, what next? Roll around (metaphorically) in all the eggs that you're going to be swimming in? Toss them a handful of food and scraps? Sunny skies and endless rooster booster?

I hate to be the bloody unhatched chick in your morning omelette, but...you've just taken on the care and life of another living creature. Like adding another member of the family, whether baby human, four-footed, or other fauna, you have taken on the responsibility for another living being. The chickens you have acquired will give you eggs, yes, but you have a responsibility to these lives that you've taken into your household and given your protection. As the adult human with brains and logic and presumably empathy, you have resources to think and consider and plan ahead as the small human and the furry pets and the feathered friends do not.

Chicken-keeping is fun, delightful, rewarding, and enjoyable.

But it is not 'easy'. It's not as 'easy' as getting in your car, going to the supermarket or greengrocer, and pulling a dozen eggs off the supermarket shelf and coming home with them. Clean, sterile eggs, with no poop or blood smears on them. Eggs that you didn't have to fish out from under a broody hen, or in between the cracked shells of eggs that weren't hard enough to keep together when an errant hen stepped on them. From chickens who you didn't have to watch to check that they don't have any infections, worms, broken eggs in their uvula, infected scratches, calcium or vitamin deficiencies, and were getting enough good food to produce solid eggs.

Those sites that told you that chicken-keeping is easy? Well, they were half-right.

Is it easier than full-scale agricultural farming? Yes.

Easier than keeping pigs, cows, goats, geese, ducks, or any other farm animals? Yes.

Easier than backyard semi-sufficiency? Yes.

But it's not 'easy'.

If you're not already, say, an organic gardener dedicated to composting your scraps in worm farms and compost piles, with an eye to how much plastic you use, and the ups and downs of the intersection of politics and environment, then I suspect that whoever told you it was 'easy' has a definition that does not look like your version of 'easy'.

And anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something.

I am not trying to sell you something. I'm thinking of all those chickens who've just been sold to suburbanites who are woefully unprepared for the newest members of their household, and are going to get a rather rude awakening in the coming months and - if they have the grit to stick it out - years.

I knew a lot more about chickens than many people seem to, and I still had a few things I wasn't prepared for.

my bonafides

I've been planning to have chickens for twenty years. Two and a half years ago, I finally had the opportunity to get two.

I bought them and their coop from Rentachook, and 'the girls' were just at point-of-lay. Since then, we've had regular eggs from the Isa Brown, and semi-regular eggs from the Leghorn. Today, they're happy, healthy girls who still regularly lay, scratch up whatever parts of my garden they can reach, eat like they've been starved since last Tuesday, and crap like it's going out of style.

The soles of my outdoor shoes are covered with chook poop. My entire garden has been rearranged to manage their input (every green thing in the garden, and every bug that lives under the roots of every green thing in the garden) and their output (did I mention the crap?). We've wormed them, dusted them for fleas, probed them for eggs broken inside the egg canal, collected blood-stained eggs with concern, muttered over rough patches on shells caused by tract infection, exclaimed over soft shells and bought hundreds of dollars worth of calcium supplements to fix the problem, poked holes in plastic drink bottles to give them toys to play with, locked broody hens out of the laying boxes, and built whole chook runs for them to scratch around in.

Has it been fun? Satisfying? Rewarding? Yes. Absolutely yes.

Do we get eggs? Yes. Sometimes. Most of the time.

Do we get more out of the chickens than we put in? *waggles hand* Questionable on an economic rationalist mentality. Fun and enjoyment don't feature into late-stage capitalism, only the satisfaction of ownership, value-added, and productivity. So maybe the care and maintenance of living creatures shouldn't be measured in economic rationalist terms: inputs vs outputs.

What you will get out of keeping chickens is a new appreciation for agriculture and farming, a lesson in the cycles of life, an education in the complexities of nature, as well as an appreciation of exactly what it takes to produce the volume of eggs that our society consumes. (Let's not even go near the amount of chicken meat that our society consumes; that maintenance, keep, and upkeep is a whole other level of complicated.) You will get several members of the household who telegraph their every thought because they don't actually have that much brain in their head, but who will also recognise you and greet you with delight and interest (mostly because when you turn up, so does the food - Pavlov's dogs have nothing on chooks).

I'm no breeder, and I've only been doing this for a couple of years, but my chooks are happy and healthy - such that when my sister took them for checkups, the vet was very pleased with how happy and inquisitive they were. Which tells me that she probably sees a lot of chooks who aren't doing so well. Some of that is because chickens are very susceptible all kinds of infestations (worms, lice, fleas) and illnesses. And some of that is just because people got chickens for the eggs and didn't think about the rest of the bird, too.

Ultimately I am not here to tell you not to get chooks, or to chastise you for not thinking about your decision to get chooks. Okay, maybe I'm going to be a bit hard on you if you didn't think this 'get chickens, yay eggs' thing through.

But. BUT. BUT.

I am willing to lead you down the path of Real Chooken Keeping from someone who lives in the Sydney suburbs and has been keeping chooks for long enough to have learned a few things, but short enough that she remembers the early days of learning.

So, if you've read this far, then either you're a sucker for my writing or you're really interested in being better informed about looking after the new feathered members of your household. I'm hoping it's both, but I'll take 'wanting to be better informed'.

This series is going to be at least three posts made this week, focusing on three aspects of chicken keeping:

One. "we all need our own place to live, not just somewhere to park the henhouse"

Two. "care and feeding of your chooken"

Three. "eggs, and all that jazz"

There may be an FAQ. And an exam. (Okay, I'm kidding about the exam. Your 'exam' will be the life of your chickens; and that'll be something else you'll have to deal with.)

If you're interested in my entries on suburban chicken keeping, then the chooks label (tag) will give you my wisdom over the last couple of years of chicken keeping, as well as how my methods have changed. That said, although the methods of keeping them have changed, my perspective hasn't; from day dot, these animals were going to be a part of our household, and I'd factored that into their keep and upkeep. And it's kind of fun to go back and see where I started and where we are now.

For those of you willing to do your own research, I'm putting in an entirely separate post on my personal chicken-keeping resources - the ones I start with when I have a question to hand.

Chooken-keeping Resource List

Jackie French's Chook Book
Yes, this is 'Diary of a Wombat' Jackie French. Her Chook Book is helpful about principles and methods for those of us who still like a good hold-in-your-hand resource to read through.

Jackie French's Backyard Self-Sufficiency
She has a whole section on 'small barnyard animals' in which chickens are briefly mentioned. But the whole book is a good introduction to planting and eating more from your own garden.

Linda Woodrow's Permaculture Kitchen Garden
The author who first made me realise that I could keep chickens in the garden and how to make the 'downsides' of chickens an 'upside' for the garden. The downside is that she focuses on the method she uses in the garden, not the principles. That said, the concept of using chickens as not just egg-layers but as mulch-makers, manure, food scrap processing, insect and pest control, and garden clean-up was revolutionary to me, and broaded my perspectives in so many ways. The book is some twenty to thirty years old, but the concepts are very relevant all the same.

The Google.
Yes, you get a lot of results, but you can refine searches. I'm in suburban Australia, so I prioritise those who live in other parts of urban and suburban Australia. Good for general information about things before you get down to the specific. Also, lots of videos from people (mostly homesteaders) who have ideas about chicken coops or advice on how to integrate chickens.

Special mention to Self Sufficient Me whose video on chicken bullying I just watched as advice on how to integrate our two new chickens (the New Shanghai) with the old ones (Original Recipe).

Pinterest
Yes, it's full of pretty pictures and glorified stories of happy clappy chooks and their perfect pristine pens. But there are some gems in there, if you're willing to read up. All knowledge is worth having.

Local gardening groups.
I'm the current president of Permaculture Sydney North, and an active member of Crop Swap Sydney/ My garden was in the Virtual Sydney Edible Garden Trail this year. These are all local groups to me, and important knowledge networks - people who have done this before, or who are having the same problems, or who might have solutions to your problems that you haven't thought of yet.

Facebook Groups
There is almost certainly a group for your locality or area.

Mine are:

• Backyard Poultry
• Growing Good Food In Your Aussie Backyard
• Earth Gardeners

A small matter of courtesy
Join a local group, by all means. But please don't just barge in and ask your question. Start with a search - for Facebook there should be a search box either at the side of your screen (desktop) or along the top of your screen (mobile app). Chances are, other people have asked the question before and received many helpful answers. Read through them all, look at the arguments and think about how they do or don't apply to you. Sometimes it helps to ask a similar or related question on the same post, so whoever comes along afterwards can find all their answers in the once place.