Double the investment...

Not since I was a child have I seen a double yolker and, on Tuesday, we got one each. Now that's what I call a return on the investment.
Needless to say, they were bloody lovely, and gone in seconds!

Co bylo pierwsze kura czy jajko?

Well, for us the chickens came first. We picked them up from a guy in Leyland who carried them over to the boot of the car by their legs, puffing on a pipe, his big gold earring glinting in the weak sun. They won't lay for two weeks, he said, but it was almost four before I found a small, perfectly egg-shaped egg on the floor of their hut. I was amazed and excited and rang Agnieszka to tell her. She had it for breakfast the next day.
Having chickens is really nice. Whenever you go out the back door they rush to the end of the run, expecting grain or other treats. When I try to get into the run, to replenish their food or water, they all make a break for it, to chew on the pathetic-looking broccoli or to trample my salads. Most worrying is their obsession with the rhubarb, which they try to demolish before I can move them on.
So far two of them are laying, with the third just wandering around scratching and making a mess. They have completely ignored the purpose-built sand-pit I gave them to dust bath in, choosing instead to eat the sand and crap on the roof. To bathe they have dug a pit in the corner of the run and flick soil over everything.
While I argued with myself that they have enough room, I am still not wholly comfortable with their accommodation. I would like them to have more room, a bit of grass to play on, somewhere they can wander about in. However, I am also trying to learn about them and their needs so that, when the time comes that we have a nice big garden, I know what I am doing.
We still haven’t named them, though. Nothing seemed to come to mind when we got them and, now we have had them a month, there’s still not been any inspiration. They’re known collectively as ‘students’ because, after they are let out in a morning, they have a drink and some breakfast and then go back inside (and presumably to sleep) for a couple of hours before emerging again some time later in the morning.
One thing I have realised is how tied we are now. If we can’t find anyone to look after them we are going to struggle with time away from the house, even for a weekend. It’s one thing reading how tying animals are, and quite another to have it hit you when they arrive. I’m glad I am finding this out now and with chickens, rather than later with a cow or two.

Kury domowe

As I write this, great goose feather flakes of snow are falling on to the car park outside the window. The view to Scout Moor is hidden by driving snow backed by grey cloud and the general feeling in the office is one of great excitement as well as a hope that tomorrow may be a ‘work from home’ day.

Luckily it wasn’t like this on Saturday when we barrelled over to Reaseheath College for a beginner’s course on keeping poultry. Living in the Greater Manchester urban sprawl certainly doesn’t have its advantages when you want to do outdoorsy things, which is why we travelled for an hour to sit in a classroom at Cheshire’s agricultural college to learn how to keep poultry, with a general focus on chickens.

There were twelve of us there, eager to learn. Two women already kept chickens and, as they reminded us throughout the day, knew pretty much all there was to know about the birds. Except where the nose and ears were, as I heard her asking while we were outside. We got to learn a lot over the course of five hours: housing, feeding, breeds. The instructor was an ex-farmer who had been drafted in to take the course and, unfortunately, it showed. His idea of how much food they needed (‘Oh, a kilo a day per bird should be ok’ – it should be 130g) was off, as was his vague notions about housing. Disease weren’t mentioned, except for a brief nod to Newcastle disease. His excuse was he liked classes to be informal, but I think his experience of hens was on a large scale where feeding is done by the bag, not the handful, and hens are left to get on with it, ill or not.

The best bit of the day was when we got to go outside and get down with the birds. While they don’t have a big poultry unit at the college they do have meerkats, a valuable addition to the average agriculture student’s knowledge base. Agnieszka was torn, therefore, between looking at the meerkats, and watching me chase scraggy arsed hens round a muddy plot.

Having never held a chicken before, let alone caught one, it was good experience as now I know I can do both. Whether I can wring its neck, should the time ever come, remains to be seen. What the day did teach us, was that we are capable of keeping them and I am really looking forward to getting our own for the yard, while I know Agnieszka is looking forward to me moving the hen house out of the front room to somewhere more suitable.