Hainan: a chook perspective [guest post]

Hi! I'm Hainan the Leghorn, and I'll be taking you on a tour of the garden I live in today...

The first picture there is me (aren't I pretty?) with my companion Honey Soy, an Isa Brown, in the background.

Here's a better one of Honey:

We run around in a moveable chook 'tractor' which we scratch around in most of the day, connected to our coop/house by a series of tunnels:

Our chook tractor is made without a bottom so we can dig up the soil. Our droppings combine with the straw and other clippings that are tossed in, and they fertilise the ground which can then be planted out with seedlings.

Here you can see the patches which have been planted out - the first one with corn and tomatoes, the second one with corn and pumpkin, and the third one waiting. We're not allowed into the planted out patches, which is really unfair! I love sitting on a plant and scratching it into submission while pecking at the leaves and destroying the plant! It's one of my favourite things to do when I escape!

This bed, with the corn, cucumbers, and tomatoes, is the first bed that Honey and I were set to scratch out - look how well it's doing after around 6 weeks!

More corn, and pumpkins. Although, as chooks, we're supposed to love pumpkin seeds, Mummy tossed us a whole heap of seeds and we didn't end up eating them! So they lay in the compost until our chook tractor moved on to the next bed, and then they sprouted. But Mummy is keeping them. (Maybe she shouldn't keep quite so many of them - one vine grows quite long!)

And this is what a garden bed looks like after the chicken tractor is moved off:

Lots of space for planting things!

At night we get locked up in the coop away from cats and foxes and other urban predators, and in the morning we lay eggs and make very noisy clucking sounds to let everyone know what we've done! It's a hard-knock life for a chook.

more chooks

How much happens in only a matter of weeks!

The girls are still with us, still scratching away, a lot bigger.

We had a dip in egg production for a while - Hainan laid three eggs - one with a weird 'soft' shell, one that came out crushed and bloody, and one that was normal. And then she stopped. And Honey stopped egg production, too. For about a week, I was worried at first that they were egg bound, and then I was worried that Hainan had torn something up inside her laying that broken egg, and then I was worried that I'd hurt them or injured them while checking that they weren't egg-bound...

The local vet where we take our cats was very helpful. Right in the middle of fretting about it, I called the vet and the tech there was so helpful and lovely and encouraging. I needed that - to know I wasn't a failure at chook management. So I'm feeling a bit better about it all now...

Anyway, we got back into egg production about three days ago, and yesterday we had a breakthrough: TWO EGGS! (Okay, so one was weird and long and was shaped like those really smooth river/sea stones, but still...an egg!) Hopefully we'll see another two today. They've sure been swallowing the curl grubs down something fierce...

They sat on the 2nd bed for 2 weeks, happily picking and scratching and grumping and clucking back and forth, although I think at the end of the two weeks they were getting a little bit bored with the space - I haven't managed to grow much inside or around the cages as yet, you see. So it's a bit of a wasteland beyond grass and dirt and the mulch I throw in semi-regularly.

So I moved them on from the 2nd bed on Sunday, but I've found the grass isn't as torn up as I'd like, and I'm thinking I probably should have left it there for three weeks at a time, rather than the standard two. But what's going in there will mostly be corn and beans and cucumber and fruiting vegetables.

One of the things about the chook run/pen is that it's pretty small and rather low. It's not easy to climb into and fix things, and it felt kind of poky. So I added another 'level' to it.

Behold Casa de Chook, now about 1.5m tall, with a lot more airspace (even if no more floorspace) and the potential for perches and wing flapping! I can also climb into it without catching on anything, which will be a relief. Fewer scratches (we hope)!

I finished it just last night, and while it does need a little more work on it to neaten things up, I'm pretty happy with it right now...