Yesterday I showed a friend how to kill, pluck and clean a chicken.

Our missing hen returns with a pleasant surprise for us – four gorgeous little chicks!

A cheap and simple home-made chicken processing station. It also doubles as a very handy outdoor sink for washing vegetables, plant pots and tools.

If you’ve got a broody hen, rather than trying to “break her” why not let her raise a clutch of eggs? It requires almost no effort on your part, and is a lot of fun.

That’s the euphemism for those that don’t like to say “slaughtering and butchering chickens”!

I processed the last two roosters from our first batch of chicks today. We’re keeping the one female from the group to join our layer flock. This photo is from the start of June – I just realised I hadn’t taken any [...]

I was telling some friends at work about our new chicks, and when I mentioned that we were growing them out for meat they asked if our girls – aged 4, 6 and 8 – knew.

To be honest, we’ve been upfront with them since before the chicks hatched. We’ve been clear all along that these [...]

This story has been a bit of a saga.

Remember back when I got Molly the leghorn to go broody and slipped some eggs under her? Well, none hatched. I think it was a combination of inexperienced first-time mother and low fertility rate of eggs. She was sitting on 6 eggs: three exploded in the nest [...]

So, after trying to stop a chicken from going broody several times throughout last year, now I want her to go broody and she won’t!

Late last year we got some new chickens – 4 brahma pullets and a rooster to match. We also acquired 3 unwanted ISA brown layers from a friend. So with the [...]

We have three silkies at the moment, just about to come into lay. They’re named Seraphina, Luciana and Ro (yep, we’re big Barbie movie fans around here!).

We had a rooster named Molly as well (I know, my defense is that you can’t tell their gender as day-old chicks!), but we had to get rid of [...]