Kitchen Garden Forum

Any of you thinking of 'having a few chickens in the garden' should definately consider 'rescue' battery hens. Took delivery of our 8 a week after Christmas. A sorry looking lot they were! NOW ... Feathers have grown, eggs continually laid.Not a lot, mind you, but one or two a day. It is so nice to see them wandering all over their run scratching, dust bathing.... being real chickens!
Pigs- middle daughter has two kune kune pigs. Solves problem of composting ground elder, bind weed, in fact anything like that. The pigs love it!!!! It is a wonderful treat for them. Then gets composted as pooh! Chickens and pigs get on well too.

Ah, my heart warms every time I read a story about rescued battery hens being given a new lease of life. Just wish we didn't have a wretched Restrictive Covenant on our garden preventing us from keeping poultry. I just wonder whether any of the neighbours even remember that we have all got one and whether I'd be able to get away with keeping just two or three of them. Does anybody know if these kind of restrictive covenants have ever been challenged?

I'd go for it Primrose. I don't suppose anyone will know.

Our neighbour recently got some chickens in the garden (ex-council house)and I thought there would be no end of complaints especially as he has a vocal cockerel, but no-one seems to mind, so we might follow his example later in the year...

Just a word of caution; I am very pleased to read that your chickens and Kune Kunes get on well, but when I lived on a farm we had a few pigs, we also had a lot of very free range chickens, who often roosted above the pigs. We wondered where the chickens were going and sat out to shoot the culprit, expecting foxes. We were wrong it was our matriach sow, she had aquired a taste for fresh chicken and could jump surprisingly high to catch them.

To echo the word of warning. Our neighbours' pigs were in the same field that their chickens often wandered into. One day one of their sows was rooting. A chicken on the edge of her rooting area annoyed her, so she snapped it up, and so began a liking for chicken. The chickens were actively pursued after that and had to be kept out of the field.

Similar story from me - we used to have a Gloucester Old Spot called Norah Batty ('cos of the wrinkly stocngs) and when the chickens walked along her sty wall, she'd help herself to them!