Category Archives: Hens

GM-free and Organic food for the hens

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Allen & Page’s “The Organic Feed Company” make the Layers Pellets which our hens eat as their main food. The feed is recognised by the Soil Association as organic.

The pellets are a farmyard layers feed which produce a deep natural yellow yolk with fantastic taste because it contains no yolk pigmenters which other feeds use. The pellets are drug-free and are ideal for our hens who enjoy living free range because they are designed for non-intensive conditions. Other types of food is available, they are formulated for high performance diets for intensive or commercial production.

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What are fresh eggs like?

How many eggs do the hens lay?

One of the first questions people ask when they hear that we keep hens in our back garden is ‘How many eggs do they lay?’

Our hens produce an egg each most days, so that makes four every day – just over two dozen a week. Occasionally there’ll be just three eggs, but that doesn’t happen very often.

We thought that we should be expecting around 200 eggs per year from each hen – so between three and four a week. Perhaps our hens have been specially bred to be even more productive than the typically high productive hens that are used by battery farms. Continue reading →

Building the enclosure for the hens

This is a pretty big feat for us, I am a web developer and Annette is a P.A., neither one of us is a handyman, but we now have a big and safe enclosure for our four hens.

This page is here as encouragement to anyone who, like we did in June 2004, is wondering if they would be able to keep hens. You can! We live in Middlesex, just outside London, and even in such a built up metropolitan area, finding and buying supplies isn’t a problem. Continue reading →