The first spring after we moved out of London to East Sussex coincided with the first lockdown, and like so many people with access to a garden, I spent it growing crops. As the first tranche of seedlings were ready to be planted out into our new vegetable beds, I received an email from a nearby farm saying our chickens were ready to pick up. We drove them home slowly, listening to them quietly chattering to each other in their cardboard box.
By chance, we’d moved into a house that already had a fox-proof coop in the garden, but we little thought that we’d be spending more time with these four birds than with any other living things as those strange locked-down weeks turned into months.
Four years on, they’re thriving, despite having endured multiple winter bird flu lockdowns and bouts of broodiness, which can cause them to sit down all day, forsaking their wellbeing.
We chose pekin bantam hens as they are relatively small and wouldn’t, we hoped, rampage around the garden destroying too many plants. Chickens need space to scratch around and explore, and the larger the chicken, the more destruction they can wreak. So we opted for a breed that lays fewer, smaller eggs but would be a better fit for our modest back garden. Larger breeds such as the Rhode Island Red can lay eggs almost year round, but a flock of them would need a far larger space than ours to peck around in.
Taking care of hens is relatively straightforward: they need food, water and clean bedding inside a secure henhouse as well as some mental stimulation if they’re confined to their coop for any reason. A cabbage or a bolted kale plant for them to peck at seems to keep them happily entertained. And in return, not only do they provide us with a steady supply of cute little eggs but they contribute to the garden by pecking at weed seeds and aphids.
Plus the chicken poo, mixed, with their used, shredded wood-chip bedding, is the magic ingredient in my compost bin. It creates such fantastic compost that I filled a bag with it for a friend to mix into her bin when its contents had become sludgy and sluggish and needed an injection of lively microorganisms to kickstart the decomposition process.
Fresh chicken poo is too intense to put directly on the soil, but using it as part of the composting process has been invaluable.
While they can’t be trusted unsupervised in the veg patch – too much dishevelling of the beds and eating of precious earthworms – these four hens and their individual personalities have proved a real asset for my at-home growing.
