A Poultry Affair
September 18th 2006 03:55
A great discovery
Most self-respecting farm has some form of poultry. Some people used to have turkeys, so that there was something for the Christmas dinner – but they are fairly noisy and have a face only their mother would love, so they are not as popular as in the past. Others swear by (and at) geese because they are better than any guard dog at keeping visitors and snakes away from the household. Others prefer bantam hens – I don’t know why- maybe they just don’t like a full sized egg for breakfast…. However, a majority of farmers want poultry to have “free” eggs so they buy either red, white or black hens.
Apart from the obvious advantage of not having to buy eggs for about nine months of the year, there are other advantages in having chooks. Firstly it is somewhere to put your vegetable scraps if you are too lazy to make a compost heap. They are also good at eating up the weeds that grow in proliferation in any garden. Some people take the risk of letting their chooks roam the garden. The dogs have to be taught to leave them alone and one or two may succumb to a passing fox, but the advantage of this practice is that they eat lots of the bugs and weeds in the garden and fertilize them a bit too. The disadvantage is they scratch up the seedlings.
Another advantage of having laying chooks is that you will always have some free range eggs to take to your friends or wider family when visiting, which will please them immensely, especially if they are living in the city and have to pay double the price for the good eggs. You will really feel quite clever having produced something from your hard work, but remember to warn them to break every egg in a cup before using. Bad eggs have a worse smell than plucked chook and they don’t look good sitting in a cake mix. If your friends are in the country, you can be fairly certain that their chooks or their neighbour’s chooks are laying eggs in abundance at the same time yours are, so check before handing them over – for it could be that another dozen eggs are the last thing they want.
The final advantage is that hens can have great entertainment value. When children come to stay, they love feeding the chooks and finding the eggs. The fact is, your chooks will probably get such a fright after they have been chased around the yard for two hours so that they won’t lay any more eggs for a fortnight after the visitors have gone. But that is a small price to pay for hearing the squeals of joy from a small child when an egg is discovered. It also solves the problem of what you give that child for tea that night!
So, weighing it up, if you can - get some chooks!
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