WAT CAN WE DO?

Healthy chickens need an outdoor run and a weatherproof hen-house of roughly 30cmx30cm per hen. You can buy a hen-house (see Country Smallholding) or if you’re the least bit handy, you can make one. The house will need dark, private nest boxes (4 birds to one nest box), perches to roost on, a door for the hens, and a larger door for cleaning out. It must be secure from predators and shut up overnight. They can have the run of the garden, as long as they can’t get at your vegetable plot in the growing season. You need to put hay in the nest boxes, and hay, straw or sawdust as bedding in the house. This should be changed every week, with the old bedding added to the compost heap.
You can feed them your food scraps, along with a couple of handfuls of grain and layers’ mash or pellets (special feed with the minerals and protein chickens need to produce eggs) per day. They need a constant supply of water – from a ‘drinker’, which gravity-feeds water as they use it; they need small amounts of grit (to help grind their food) and oyster shells (to provide calcium for the egg shells). All this can be purchased from agricultural suppliers, or ordered online and delivered; it doesn’t cost much compared to the value of the organic
free-range eggs – chicken feed, you might say.
Black Rock hens scratching around outside their home-made hen-house
Ducks love water and they are better off with a pond rather than just a bucket; in a pond they keep the weeds down, add fertiliser and keep the edges sealed by their paddling. They don’t need a nest box or perch, but do need a fox-proof shelter: 1 m2 is adequate for 5 birds.
Geese get 80% of their food from grazing, so they’re cheaper, but require more land (5 birds per 1/8 hectare). They don’t produce many eggs but provide delicious meat are hardy and live longer than ducks or chickens; they also make good guard dogs.
If you’re vegetarian, skip this paragraph: you can kill, pluck and gut birds for the table, but if you’ve never done it before, you should get someone with experience to show you how. After chickens have finished laying (1 or 2 years) they won’t have much meat, and it will be a bit tough, but they’ll make a good curry.
You can breed chicks if you have a cockerel, but chickens will lay well without one, which is just as well if you have close neighbours, as cockerels can be noisy.