Copyright © Louise Bostock 2007-2013. Please give credit where credit is due.
The chicken and the egg
Eighteen degrees. The baby-pink sunrise has given way to hazy sunshine.
A big day!
Our first home-grown brood of beautiful Bionda Piemontese hens has started laying.
A couple of years ago, a neighbour offered us the use of a piece of land with some flat bits (quite rare around here). And we decided that the flat bits might be large enough for a chicken house and a couple of girlies.
Today, there is a grand palazzo of a pollaio (that’s a chicken coop to you and me), and at the last count 17 inhabitants, almost all home bred in the Artifical Hen. Numbers rise and fall : as the number of chickens in the coop falls, so the number of chickens in the freezer rises. Cruel, you say? Delicious, I reply.
Apart from supplying us with eggs, meat and great stock, the chicks also serve another vital purpose in our home. They devour much of the food the kids reject.
If you have children, you need chickens! Pasta, bread, baby formula, cake, cheese rinds, vegetarian baby food of any kind, biscuits, porridge and all sorts of cereals. They come running from the furthest corners of the garden at the merest glint of the stainless-steel chicken-treat bowl. Between the compost, the chickens and the cats, we throw away almost no foodstuffs at all. And that’s great when the rubbish depository is 100m down.
While with two little ones and no baby-sitter, walking half a kilometre uphill in a rainstorm to feed them is less fun than originally anticipated, I like keeping chickens.
I never thought I’d like keeping chickens. I never thought I’d keep chickens – strictly city, that’s me.
But you know what? Useful, tasty and productive as they are, chickens bring one further benefit.
They make me laugh.
Kids not eating/sleeping/behaving themselves?The chicks make me laugh.Husband away too often and too long on business?The chicks make me laugh.House an inch thick with builder's dust again?The chicks me laugh!
Copyright © Louise Bostock 2007, 2008. All rights reserved. Please ask first.
The chicken and the egg
Eighteen degrees. The baby-pink sunrise has given way to hazy sunshine.
A big day!
Our first home-grown brood of beautiful Bionda Piemontese hens has started laying.
A couple of years ago, a neighbour offered us the use of a piece of land with some flat bits (quite rare around here). And we decided that the flat bits might be large enough for a chicken house and a couple of girlies.
Today, there is a grand palazzo of a pollaio (that’s a chicken coop to you and me), and at the last count 17 inhabitants, almost all home bred in the Artifical Hen. Numbers rise and fall : as the number of chickens in the coop falls, so the number of chickens in the freezer rises. Cruel, you say? Delicious, I reply.
Apart from supplying us with eggs, meat and great stock, the chicks also serve another vital purpose in our home. They devour much of the food the kids reject.
If you have children, you need chickens! Pasta, bread, baby formula, cake, cheese rinds, vegetarian baby food of any kind, biscuits, porridge and all sorts of cereals. They come running from the furthest corners of the garden at the merest glint of the stainless-steel chicken-treat bowl. Between the compost, the chickens and the cats, we throw away almost no foodstuffs at all. And that’s great when the rubbish depository is 100m down.
While with two little ones and no baby-sitter, walking half a kilometre uphill in a rainstorm to feed them is less fun than originally anticipated, I like keeping chickens.
I never thought I’d like keeping chickens. I never thought I’d keep chickens – strictly city, that’s me.
But you know what? Useful, tasty and productive as they are, chickens bring one further benefit.
They make me laugh.
Kids not eating/sleeping/behaving themselves?The chicks make me laugh.Husband away too often and too long on business?The chicks make me laugh.House an inch thick with builder's dust again?The chicks me laugh!
Copyright © Louise Bostock 2007, 2008. All rights reserved. Please ask first.
Eighteen degrees. The baby-pink sunrise has given way to hazy sunshine.
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