Love a Happy Ending Lifestyle Magazine August 2013 | Page 63

COUNTRY LIFE
Talking Chickens –
Chick-Lit…?
Country folk have always
had a few chicken
scratching about the yard
and pecking about in the
fields around their farms
and cottages. There really
is nothing better than a
freshly laid egg with a
naturally golden yolk for
your breakfast in the
morning or a clutch of surplus eggs making their way into a cake for your afternoon tea. But
it seems that, increasingly these days, it’s not just those with acres of fields or large gardens
who are keen to keep chickens. According to the Department for the Environment, Food and
Rural Affairs, hundreds of thousands of folk in the towns and cities of the UK are now ‘hobby
hen owners’, which is a huge increase on a decade ago.
So is it the rising cost of supermarket eggs and the recession that’s behind this interest in
keeping a few chucks or an increased desire in the general population for some degree of
self-sufficiency? Have we all decided to embrace The Good Life by taking the leap from
growing our own potatoes and veg to confidently keeping livestock?
Let’s take the recession. If you bought half a dozen free range eggs from a supermarket
these days you’ll probably pay £1.50 – £2.00 for them, so
does keeping hens mean cheaper eggs? Well, that
depends on how much you want to spend on getting
set up as a hobby hen owner. You could go in for
keeping some fancy rare breeds or rescue a few
hybrid hens from a commercial egg farm. You could
choose to house your ‘girls’ in the ultimate of
designer coops or you could knock one up yourself
over the weekend using a bit of wood and a sheet of
shed felting. If you do build your own, you must of
course make sure the coop is both draft free and
ventilated, that it has a nesting box area and a perch
for your hens to roost on. Whether you plan to keep
them in a run or allow them to roam free, you will
need to provide a safe place for them to sleep at
night, locked away from Mr Fox. You can find chicken
coop plans on the internet here.
A simple home-made hen house