We keep a few hens for the pleasure of having them and for the fantastic fresh eggs. It would not be what one would describe as a profit-making venture, but it is a bit of fun. Hens are without a doubt the first animal a small-holder should choose for keeping. They give a good supply of eggs, you can breed replacements and use the occasional spare bird for the pot.

We keep a few different breeds and shall probably try to restrain ourselves to what we've got at the moment. They are housed separately as we let the cockerels run with the hens. There is a description of the housing in the woodworking section.

Brown Leghorns

We have three Brown Leghorn hens - we sold the cockerel at the local agricultural show as this summer we will need to introduce some new genes to them. These hens lay white eggs and they are excellent layers—yielding around 18 eggs per week between them. We also managed to get them lay for one winter, but they gave up last year. Perhaps next winter, we shall experiment with lighting the house.

The Brown Leghorn is a fairly specialised egg-layers and are small hens. The cockerels in particular are handsome chappies with that multi-coloured Kellog's corn flakes look. The hens are a more subdued dappled yellow-brown.

Barnevelders

We have six Barnevelder hens and a cockerel to match. These are regarded as dual purpose birds but we haven’t tried to eat any yet. We bought these at six weeks and they went through most of last summer before they started laying. The eggs are particularly delicious with brilliant yellow yolks.

The Barnevelder is a black bird with either a green or brown hint to its colouring. Ours have the brown hint. They are a good size - especially the cockerel who is a lot older than the hens.

Mabel Pearman Burford Browns

We have recently incubated and hatched 14 eggs acquired from a cousin of Jo's.  Having seen Mabel Pearman eggs available in the supermarket in Witney a bit of research led to Clarence Court and www.legbarsofbroadway.co.uk.  The breed was developed by Jo's Grandfather's Aunt and is being maintained by her grandson.

They are a medium to heavy bird with the darkest brown eggs.  Check out cousin Philip's website - they have a hen-cam which is so cool.

Hybrids

As most of our hens fairly much gave up laying altogether last winter, we bought in three Golden Comet hybrids just to keep ourselves in eggs. This was probably a mistake as the flavour of their eggs is very much inferior to any any of the pure-breeds. We won't breed off these but shall keep them going for a couple of years until they reach their sell-by date. Meanwhile we shall experiment with some alternate methods of ensuring winter egg production. I have a cunning plan involving dismantling some solar garden lights which may fool the hens into thinking that the day is a bit longer.

Hen Equipment

We have designed and built our own housing for the hens. I have lots of info on the henhouses here, so there is no need to go into too much detail on the construction methods here. We use wood-shavings to keep the houses reasonably fresh and change this every couple of weeks although we do allow houses with droppings boards go a little longer. We move the larger houses on rollers - otherwise known as fencing posts (or paling posts). I used to mess about with the lawn tractor for this, but it isn't really worth the bother.

Each hen house has a feeder and a water container. We use purpose-designed waterers as these keep wild bird droppings (and hen droppings) out of the hens' water and also prevent them from making a mess of the water by walking in them. We have found that window boxes for flowers make excellent feeders and use these. We will probably eventually buy proper feeders if we see them at a show but these aren't strictly necessary.

At present, we don't have an incubator or heat lamp and rely on borrowing these from my parents when necessary. We hatched our last lot of eggs in my parents' house as our shed was just too cold and damp in the winter. My latest hen equipment project was to construct a hatchery unit for use in the shed.