Sunday 31 October 2010

Chicken Run

Well our 10 (not so) little chicks and mum have gotten a little bit too big for the arc that they were hatched in, so last weekend I fenced off a large area of the garden and wired up half of the old shed for a coop.
We moved them in on Friday night, after clipping their wings , and they love it! Running round scratching in the leaves and grass while the mother hen clucks away. Trouble is it looks good now but by the end of the week I'm sure it will be like a mud bath! Never mind, its a more natural way for them to live and they should be big enough to eat by January so we should have grass back in the spring, unless we hatched another batch...
The sad thing is, at six weeks if these were Ross Cobs then they would be killing weight now and end up as the cheap chicken in the supermarkets! Mine have got another couple of months yet, to grow at the speed that nature intended them to. It's ridiculous that they still allow chickens to be reared so fat and so fast.

1 comment:

Julie Alviti said...

My word the chicks have grown. I think the lawn could be a mud bath soon though!