Got an email from a lady who was on one of my hen courses recently.  She is proud owner of new hens which she got from a supplier in Middleton.  She bought organic layers pellets for them and was a little disturbed to discover that they wouldn’t eat them.  She even tried mashing them up and adding a little warm water but they still turned their nose up at them!  In desperation she started feeding them mashed potatoes which was somewhat of a pain for her but they (obviously) loved them.  She called the supplier and he clarified that up to time he sold them to her, they were eating regular ‘free-range’ pellets and so they obviously acquired a taste for them.  His advice (and mine) is that she should not feed them anything else and when they are hungry they will start eating the organic ones and get used to the posh nosh. 

Incidentally, in my opinion it’s worth shelling out the extra few bob for organic pellets if you can get them.  They cost about eu17 for a 25kg bag which is still pretty good value and lasts us about a month or perhaps a little longer.  We have 10 birds in total.  Regular ‘free range’ pellets cost about eu10 but of course the name “free range” when it comes to pellets is a guarantee of nothing at all.  With organic pellets you can be guaranteed that the grains in the pellets (usually oats, maize, barley and wheat) are from organic sources so there are no chemical fertilisers or pesticides used in their production which means healthier hens, better eggs and therefore healthier humans!

I’ve just finished a meal that was almost entirely grown/reared on the Home Farm.  I felt so inpired afterwards that I just had to sit down and tell you all about it.  Apart from the occasional omelette (with onions, spinach, herbs etc) it’s been a while since we ate a completely home-grown meal, so it was cause for considerable celebration - we used half a bottle of red wine to make the dinner (chicken in a red wine sauce with new potatoes) and then drank the rest!

During the spring time we’ve fattened up twenty chicks for the table and they are now residing collectively in our freezer following a particularly gruesome morning where they met their demise.  I don’t want to give too much away about the process of rearing and killing them because you can read all about it in my next book (!) Tales from the Home Farm, which is due out shortly (Sept).  But anyway, the dastardly deed complete, we now get to the nub of the issue so to speak - where we get to savour the meat.  Some of the birds killed off at up to 3kg weight which is almost three times the size of the little runty chickens that you buy in the shops - they also taste fantastic, courtesy of the fact that our birds got lots of exercise and they lived almost twice as long as commerical chickens, so they had lots of time to develop muscle etc and therefore have more flavour.  Rearing chickens for the table is a fantastically thrifty, tasty and worthwhile project for anyone who has a little bit of space and the cajones (so to speak) to do the killing at the end of it - we’re pretty pleased with the result, it has to be said.

We use about one chicken a week in cooking, which means we have twenty weeks of meat in the freezer and since chickens take 12 weeks to rear, we can take about two months off before we start rearing the next batch.  This means a nice break from the drudgery of feeding and cleaning out etc.  I don’t enjoy rearing chickens the way I enjoy rearing pigs, because basically these poor birds are reared more or less to put on weight quick and they don’t have much of a personality (or a life) as a result.  I basically just fired in some food to them morning and evening, and kept their house clean, and that was about the height of my interaction with the poor creatures.  So it was no great emotional turmoil to kill them if I am honest, which of course you have to be when your blogging!  We had a gang around to help us and got through the whole thing - killing, plucking and gutting - in about three hours flat which was pretty impressive considering we had to pluck by hand.  It’s well worth your while getting some people around who are expert in these things - some of the little tips that you pick up, e.g. how to take out the innards without breaking anything, how to push back the legs so that they are sitting in to the body as they are when you buy a chicken etc.  These are all invaluable tips for the first-timer.

The day we killed them off is about three weeks ago, and so the trauma has been dulled by the mists of time!  We have enjoyed about three chickens since then - unbelievable flavour, last for ages.  I am particularly pleased with myself that i took the time that morning to joint about five of the chickens before freezing.  Honestly I should have done more of them because it’s really handy (particularly midweek when you don’t feel like a roast) to take a bag from the freezer that has maybe two breasts or the two legs in it. 

And so to our meal last night - Mrs K made a fab red wine sauce and the chicken legs were slow-baked in the oven in this sauce.  Meat falling off the bone.  The sauce had our own shallots in it too, but lamentably the bacon used was not our own (all of our meat from last year’s pigs is long gone and the countdown is on to this year’s piggies being brought to the slaughter) and of course the red wine wasn’t either.  But the rest was - and most importantly the spuds in the dish were also our own - we’ve been harvesting new potatoes from the polytunnel for about a week now.  We are always arguing over whether they are ready or not - I think they could do with a few more weeks but Mrs K is determined to start eating them, They are lovely of course, but they are on the small size.  Never mind.  The meal was fabulous and we got that familiar feeling of euphoria that we always get whenever we can churn out a truly Home-Farm-esque meal.  Incidentally it goes without saying that when you go through what we went through in terms of rearing chickens (or any animal for that matter), you obviously don’t waste a single morsel of the grub.  We’re pretty good at minimising waste at the best of time, but with animals we have reared ourselves we are completely obsessive about it.  As we should be…

Hens don’t fly but they can manage an impressive power-leap when the mood takes them - that means that most fences/barriers/ditches that you put in their way won’t really keep them in if they really want to get out.  A few years back having had enough of our hens laying out in ditches (which meant we weren’t able to find the eggs), I spent a manly weekend building a mini-fortress of 5ft chicken wire which closed them in to an area of about 1000sq ft.  Were they happy with this sizeable plot of land to roam on?  Were they heck… They were used to being completely free range and didn’t like this poultry equivalent of Shawshank prison, so each morning a few of them would fly out over the top of the chicken wire and lay their egg in their favourite little spot in the ditch.  Watching them foil my elaborate fencing job and driven half mad with desire for eggs, I resorted to clipping their wings.

Wing clipping is the most common method of controlling the flight of home-farm chickens - it involves using a sharp scissors to cut off the first ten flight feathers on one wing.  This causes a bird to lack the balance needed for flight and in theory discourages them from trying - it is also temporary because it lasts only until new feathers grow during the next molt (may be a few months in young birds or up to a year for older ones).

Clipping their wings doesn’t hurt the bird at all and it isn’t noticeable when they are walking around since the primary flying feathers are hidden underneath when the wings are folded.  We found that clipping the flight feathers on only one wing didn’t work with some of the more determined Andy Dufraine type characters among our flock and so we had to revisit them and clip the other side too.  If you feel bad about clipping wings (and you will), give yourself a stern talking to - the reason you keep hens in the first place if you are a home farmer, is so that they will provide eggs.  If you can’t find the eggs because they are laying in a ditch or in the neighbour’s garden then you are wasting your time.  Also, it’s your responsibility to keep your flock safe - if they are able to leave the garden at will, you are putting them at harms way. 

Here’s how to do it - you will need an attractive assitant to help you (to hold the hen and keep it calm).  Once you have spent three hours running around after your hen to catch it, spread one of the wings out to display all the feathers.  The feathers you want to cut are the primary flight feathers which are the longest ones towards the front of the wing.  You can leave the first one (the one closest to the scissors in the pic) if you want as it is visible when they tuck their wing in to the body).  Cut the other nine at the level shown in the pic - for most chickens this means cutting about 6cm, to bring them in line with the rest of the wing.  Keep apologising to the hen in the process for the inconvenience you are causing.  Voila - your work is done.  You will need to carry this out again in about a years time after they have moulted. 

Ps - some smart guy will no doubt tell you that wing clipping means a hen is less likely to be able to escape a fox - believe me, a hen wouldn’t escape a fox if it had ten sets of wings and a jetpack.....

Three new purebreed hens joined Kelly’s Fancy Fowl Retirement Home this week.  Up to now we have had five hens but the supply of eggs has been rather intermittent of late because some of the hens have passed their sell-by date when it comes to laying.  There’s nothing worse than feeding up hens with the best of grub only for them to fail to live up to their end of the bargain and not produce an egg.  Most people will tell you that a post-lay hen should end up in the pot, but I am far too soft for that malarkey and so we have an ever-increasing number of well-fed, contented freeloaders around the place.  If they are reading this:  I know who you are. 

Most of the laying hens in gardens around Ireland (including ours) are hybrid or crossbreed birds, usually hybrids based on the ubiquitous Rhode Island Red.  They are bred for their ability to pop out eggs like they are going out of fashion (sometimes as many as 300 a year) which makes them perfect for the egg-a-day-is-ok home farmer.  Pure breed hens on the other hand are stingier with their largesse but perhaps this situation is closer to how nature intended it.  The ancestors of the modern hen would lay and incubate just one or two clutches of eggs a year.

So this week when it came time to extend our flock we opted for purebreds: a Rhode Island Red and a Buff Sussex who will lay about 260 eggs a year each; and we were also smitten by the beautiful brown/green/black feathers of a Barnevelder which will lay a miserly 200 caramel brown eggs a year.  The Barnevelder was named after the Dutch town of the same name which was the centre of egg laying universe in 20th century Holland. 

The birds cost me about 15 euro each which is about double what you will pay for a hybrid but I reckon their sheer beauty and grace makes up for it.  They are tiny compared to the grisly veterans in our flock and at only 14 weeks old are still technically called “pullets” (a hen before her first egg).  It will be another three to five weeks before they will lay their first eggs.  Eagle-eyed readers may recall that when we got our very first hens two years ago, Mrs Kelly fooled me in to thinking we had our first egg by putting a yellow table tennis ball on the straw in their nesting box.  I won’t be caught so easily this time. 

For the moment the new arrivals are being kept in a separate coop to the main flock (God I love that word flock).  The trick here is to introduce them to their peers gradually so a new pecking order can be established with the minimum of fisticuffs.  Yesterday I let them out of the coop for the day and they seemed bold enough, wandering around the garden pecking and scratching in the grass as if they have been doing so all their lives (which of course they haven’t).  They kept away from the others but I am hoping it’s only a matter of time before these two rival factions will integrate.  Apparently the best way to do so is to wait until the middle of the night and then put the new ones in to the house with the old ones - hens are unlikely to get in to a kerfuffle in the middle of the night and by the morning time they will have forgotten that they are supposed to hate each other.  That’s the theory at any rate.

Our Sussex Cockerel and lothario-in-residence Roger has been completely blanking them which is a surprise as I expected him to gratefully add to his already considerable harem.  It may be that he knows they haven’t reached point-of-lay yet and so isn’t bothered with them just yet.  Or perhaps the old boy just has enough on his plate and is hoping the new arrivals will go away if he ignores them long enough.

I sent in a press release to the local papers thinking we might get a handful of people interested and couldn’t believe it when my phone started ringing and then kept on ringing!  Bookings came in thick and fast, so much so that we had to run the courses over six weeks in total and I have a waiting list of people too.  Just goes to show you the phenomenal level of interest there is out there in THE GOOD LIFE. 

We are roughly half way through the summer courses and I think it’s fair to say we’ve both been busier than we expected.  I thought it was going to be a very relaxed, informal affair and therefore wouldn’t be at all stressful.  I was wrong - it takes alot of work and preparation to appear relaxed and informal!  There is an enormous amount of prep work in terms of getting the content ready etc and the day of the courses themselves are just frantic busy.  Up at the craic of dawn baking and cleaning etc...!  Head chef Mrs Kelly has also been very busy for the summer God love her - more so then she would like to be I am sure (she thought she was on her holidays!).  Another fine mess I got her in to. 

There has been a huge mix of people from all walks of life on the courses - men and women, young and old.  People with loads of land and people with none.  Mostly people who just want to keep a couple of hens in their garden for eggs and just do not know where to start.  There was a lady on the first course who used to keep hens when she was a young girl but hasn’t thought about them in 40 years.  At the other end of the scale, there was a young girl (8-years-old) there with her mother - amazing to think that she might be inspired to keep hens as she grows up. 

The common strand is that everyone who has come along so far is interested in growing/rearing their own food.  Highlight of the course according to the feedback is always (a) the lunch and (b) when they get to pick up the hens!  There was a chef on the course last weekend who told me has been working with chicken all his life, handling it almost every day - but has never held a live chicken in his hands before.  How cool is that? 

The most interesting part for us is the lunch (seasonal of course!) - getting to talk to people about the projects they have tried in their gardens, what has worked and what hasn’t.  One of the women for example has been brewing elderberry wine for years and when I told her that I have been threatening to try homebrew wine for years, she very kindly dropped me up a bottle that evening!  Looking forward to tasting it.  I love that idea of a network of people who are interested in the same things, exchanging ideas and produce.  I am toying with the idea of setting up something more formal in Waterford - a Food Grower’s Network.  More on that anon.

Another woman on the course on Saturday keeps bees and we had a fascinating discussion about the precarious state of Irish hives - imports of foreign bees having a massive impact on the hives, bringing in viruses etc.  Her queen bees have not been laying this summer and she reckons she won’t have much honey this year.  They say if bees become extinct mankind has only two years left on the planet - “they” have been wrong before of course, but it’s depressing stuff nonetheless.

Anyway, point is it has been a fascinating process for us - incredibly hard work - but very exciting and great to meet so many like-minded individuals and feel that we are not alone or ploughing a lonely furrow in the area.  Seeing them heading off afterwards full of the joys of spring and fired up about keeping hens is fantastic. 

There was a lovely English couple on the first course who went off that very afternoon to make their own house, using a picture I have in the course handouts of a home-made hen run as a blueprint (a dog kennel with a run attached).  She sent me an email yesterday saying that she got four hens a few days ago and sent a pic of the newly constructed house (see above) - her dogs sit and watch the new arrivals all day long apparently, so much so that she has starting calling it Chicken TV!  The house is far more professional than my own pathetic DIY efforts.  Mrs Kelly keeps asking me am I not embarrassed to be bringing people in to the garden and showing them our crap hen-house - but she should know by now that I’m not at all proud!

A putrid, gut-wrenching stench assails your nostrils as you clean out the dung-covered sawdust and straw from their house. They peck your hands when you try to feed them. You have to lock them in at night and let them out in the morning. And all you get in return is an egg a day. It is often said that a hen will always die in debt (i.e. you will spend more on food then you will get back in eggs). So why bother?

A battery reared hen will typically spend most of its life sharing a twenty-inch square wire cage with four other birds. The cages are stacked in tiers six high in a room with no natural sun light. Their homogenised food is treated with antibiotics, artificial yolk colouring and medication. The hens are understandably frustrated in this environment so they peck at each other, pulling out feathers and causing injuries. Some battery hens end up almost entirely bald, and many die. Eggs from these hens will be labelled “Farm Fresh”, “Country Fresh” or “Naturally Fresh”. If the plight of these hens doesn’t bother you, then the quality of the eggs they produce, should.

If you have an interest in being a small holder or are just in to decent, natural food, getting some hens is a great toe in the water. You don’t have to have a lot of space or be too fancy with their housing. Hens have pretty simple needs. I found a design for a coop on the web and decided I’d try and build it myself. It made me feel all manly but took weeks of hard labour and cost a fortune. I used so much wood in the construction that the owner of my local DIY shop was able to hire some extra staff and pay off his mortgage early.

The house is a triangular shape, about four foot long and three foot tall. One side of it opens out on a hinge to allow you to get at the eggs. Inside, there’s a nesting box (for them to lay their eggs in) and a roost (a small horizontal bar a foot off the ground where they sit at night, discussing how crap the house is). I spent two hours building a little ladder for them to climb up to the roost. My friends laughed a lot at the house. But they reserved special mirth for the ladder.

There is a 10-ft run attached to the house. Usually we leave them roam in the garden but if we are going away for a day, we leave them locked in the run in case a fox gets them. The house is portable enough that it can be moved every few days to fresh grass or you can put bark down to stop them wrecking the lawn.

When we got them first I was surprised at how attractive they looked. I had assumed they’d be kind of scrawny, ugly things but in fact they are quite proud and aristocratic looking. They have a shock of rusty feathers which they keep very clean. Rain doesn’t do them any favours whatsoever. When it rains the feathers stick to them and they look, well, scrawny and ugly.

Initially we kept them in the coop most of the day, letting them out for an hour or two. But now we pretty much leave them out all the time. They do make a bit of a mess in the garden with their incessant scratching. Hens hate the dark and always return to their house when the light fades, so there is no “rounding-up” to do in the evenings.

We feed them organic layer’s pellets. There is no doubt that the eggs taste better when the hens are out scratching in the grass for worms, slugs and spiders. I’ve discovered they absolutely love berries, any rotten fruit from the kitchen (especially Kiwi) and even some mashed potato (especially if warm).

It took about two weeks for them to settle in and start laying. I would practically run out each morning to check on progress and return disappointed. When the first egg finally came, it was indeed a moment to savour. The first three or four were a little small, but after a week or so all four hens were laying one a day and they are as big as you would buy.

We get nearly thirty eggs a week so I expect I will keel over with clogged arteries any day now. We give a lot of them away (I have a good barter arrangement going with a friend who gives me fresh fish and some sweet apples). We eat lots of them of course. Boiled, poached, scrambled. Omelettes. And they do look and taste spectacular. The yolks are a vivid bright yellow colour, so much so that my sister thought the egg was gone off the first time she cooked one. My cholesterol is probably off the charts but I hope the joy I get from keeping hens is enough to offset the damage.

Hens love to get their exercise. The first thing they will do when let out of their coop is run off, flapping their wings furiously. It’s the equivalent of you stretching when you get out of bed in the morning. That still makes me smile. A hen has a wingspan of about thirty-two inches which is a ruler-length longer than the cage in which a battery hen will spend most of her life. Hens look really stupid when they run. It’s as if running draws attention to the fact that they don’t have arms. Try to imagine what you would look like if you ran with your arms by your sides.

In the summer, if they get too hot, they will dig a little hole in a flower bed and give themselves a dust bath. This is a strange thing to behold if you don’t know what they are up to (which I didn’t first time round) but basically it helps them to cool down by dissipating the heat and also helps clean their feathers. When a battery hen gets hot she will often try to emulate this action and will lie down on the cage floor, scratching herself against the wire. You can imagine how that works out.

They also keep our dogs amused. We were a little worried about how they would take to them initially. The first day we got them they were practically wetting himself with delight. I couldn’t decide whether it was delight as in “hey new friends!” or as in “hey! DINNER!” The hens strutted confidently around our springer Ozzie and all was fine until one of them flapped her wings and he grabbed her in his mouth. I thought we had our first casualty but he dropped her again as quick. Since then he’s been fine with them. There was a curious incident one day when I went out to discover all four hens sitting on top of the hen house, a load of feathers on the grass and Ozzie sitting there looking guilty. I will never know what happened but suspect he was somehow involved.

A battery hen doesn’t get any exercise and so suffers from skeletal and muscular weaknesses. By her second year her egg laying capacity will drop to about a quarter of what it was and she will be slaughtered, probably ending up in a stock cube. I haven’t been able to get a definitive on how long our hens will live (depending on who you ask it can be anywhere between four and ten years) but most agree they will keep laying for three or four years.

It’s hard to love hens individually but collectively, they have given us lots of happiness. My niece named one of them but we are not sure which one it is to tell you the truth. They are likeable animals without being really loveable. They run inquisitively after you as you walk around the garden. They follow me around in the summer when I am cutting the grass and make me feel like St Francis. But most of all - they produce those eggs.