Farming For Self-Sufficiency
(Page 2 of 7)
November/December 1974
Copyright © 1973 by John and Sally Seymour. Introduction copyright © 1973 by Schocken Books. Inc.
Always keep a cock among your hens—hens like having it off as much as we do. Also, all animals thrive better if they can live in their natural social groups, which in the case of chickens means a harem of hens around a cock.
RELATED CONTENT
If you can let the hens run right out into the fields and woods so much the better. You will lose a few eggs from outlaying—but what does it matter? They will be getting so much free food that that will make up for a few clutches of eggs, and surprisingly often you will see a hen, apparently long-lost, come waddling back from who-knows-where with fourteen fine little chicks at her heels. Why go in for incubators and brooders and all that nonsense when hens will do all that work for nothing for you? And they know so much more about it than we do.
If you haven't got much space you will have to have a semi-intensive method of keeping hens. The best I have ever seen was the hennery of Lady Eve Balfour, the founder of the Soil Association. In her garden in Suffolk she kept her hens under the following arrangement. The hens lived in a henhouse. The house was surrounded by a wire fence, and inside the wire fence much straw or other litter was put. Lady Eve claimed that each hen made, with this litter, a ton of manure a year to go on her garden. Next to the straw pen were two small pens planted with grass and clover. Lady Eve used to let the hens into one of these two pens every day for a fortnight. She would then close that pen and let the hens into the other pen for a fortnight. Thus the grass and clover got a chance to rest and recover, and you saw none of that awful scratched-earth policy that you see with most semi-intensive henneries—all dust and holes and old tin cans and bunches of nettles. The hens do all their scratching in the straw yard, for that is where you throw their grain down for them. They thus only go into the grass and clover pen to peck grass and clover. If you had three grass and clover pens I believe it would be even better, for you could give the grass a longer rest, and if you rotated by grazing with ducks, geese, sheep or calves it would be excellent, for you would thus keep internal parasite infection at a minimum.
All poultry need access to grit: insoluble grit such as crushed flint for use in their crops and, if they are not running on limestone or other calcareous land, a calcareous grit such as crushed seashells. It is a good plan to throw your used eggshells in the slow oven of the stove and then every few weeks pull them out and crush them up to powder and feed to the hens. The protein component of the mash can be a high-protein concentrate from the mill, or a mixture of, say, fish meal, meat meal, bone meal and soy bean meal in about equal proportions (although it doesn't matter). Boiled fish offal is excellent, and if you can get plenty of it, or meat offal, this is the cheapest answer. You will get some eggs from grain and household scraps alone, but not many. If hens are really to produce eggs they must have some protein. The eggs of England derive largely from the trawling grounds of the Atlantic Shelf.
Page:
<< Previous 1 | 2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
Next >>
