help on a post?

[tielan]

Okay, so I wrote a post on Real Chooken Keeping and divided the follow-up into three sections:

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"

However in trying to write these sections, I'm finding a lot of overlap. That might just be the way that my brain works, leaping from idea to idea lightly. It makes converssations a pain, because we derail really fast and often end up somewhere completely unexpected which then requires backtracking. My brain is more of a web of ideas, all linked up, and that doesn't make it very easy to write a blogpost.

Also: I've been doing this for a while, if not physically (3 years) then mentally (about 20 years). I had a really clear idea of the functions that chickens were going to play in my garden - and the eggs were really a minor thing in the scheme of things.

So, what would you want to know from each topic if you'd suddenly bought chickens for eggs during these lockdown/isolation time and you didn't know a thing about chicken keeping (except that it was 'easy' and you 'get eggs'?

Comments

[senmut]

Having kept chickens:

One - guidleines for making a home that provides the needed space AND is easy to maintain. (We had three different hutches and they all SUCKED for mucking out properly in winter)

Two - Ideas for enrichment (that don't involve each others' feathers)

Three - if you want to get fancy, talk about how what you feed them affects the egg taste? (Seriously, don't let them eat heavy amounts of onion or garlic related scraps; the eggs get weird flavors)

[tielan]

1. I really want to pinpoint the mucking out parts of the deal, because I don't think people quite understand that chooks shit everywhere and the stuff is not nice and pellet-y like Rooster Booster or the manures you buy in the store...

2. Yep, I was going to talk about growing perennials and 'weeds' for the chooks to forage on.

3. I was more going to talk about medications and supplements, but egg flavour is always an interesting one, especially after we bring home prawn shells and toss them to the chooken...

Thank you!

[lilysea]

Predator-proofing enclosures, both night time enclosures and day time enclosures.

eg foxes; raccoons; cats; hawks; snakes. [in Australia it's also large monitor lizards...]

[lilysea]

How to compost or otherwise process chicken poo so it can go on plants without burning the hell out of their root systems because it's too concentrated.

[deird1]

Proportions of feed would be my big concern. How much of their diet can be kitchen scraps? How much should be store-bought feed? How much can they graze off the garden? And how do you tell if their diet's gone unbalanced?