Grow Your Own Vegetable GardenKeeping Backyard Chickens
Although Grow Your Own Vegetable Garden is specifically aimed at growing vegetables, fruit and berries at home, we also keep bantam chickens. We thought you might like to see a little bit about them as they are an integral part of our gardens. Follow this years chick hatching here
We have two roosters, Junior as shown above, and Cornelius, his father. All our chickens (known as chooks in Australia) are Bantams, or small sized breeds, about half the size of a normal full grown chicken, like a leghorn or Rhode Island Red. This makes them just that little bit easier to keep as they eat less and take up less room. Cornelius lives in a coop with 3 hens. We bred them in February 2008. We also have 6 Rhode Island Red Bantam hens, one of which was broody (ready to sit and hatch eggs) so she sat on some of the eggs from Cornelius and his hens. Three weeks later she hatched the chicks you see below.
Of the seven chicks that were hatched, we kept Junior and 3 hens. One fawn coloured and two "salt and pepper" coloured that you see here. So how do they fit into the Vegetable Garden? Well, as romantic as the notion is, of having chickens free ranging through your vegetable garden beds, it really isn't practical in the height of the growing season. Chickens, in their search for tasty insects, readily scratch seedlings out of the soil and will devour others. Once established, we allow our birds, those that live closest to the vegetable garden beds, to free range. However, in the lower seasons, the chooks are excellent at lightly tilling the soil, keeping pests under control and are a great help scrounging around the bottom of the fruit trees. They also provide us with a small amount of manure and are great at devouring weeds we pull from the garden. PLUS we get fresh eggs, often far more than we can eat. Want to follow this years chicks?It's early Spring here and one of our hens has gone broody early, so we'll be raising another clutch of chicks. If you'd like to follow the sitting, egg test, hatching and development of our new chicks, join the Members' group and get access to all the other Vegetable Garden, Fruit tree and Berry information as well.After a false start.......
Well after a false start, our first broody hen got off the nest halfway through the incubation, so within days another younger hen went broody and successfully sat the full three weeks. This is the first young chick only 15 mins out of the egg and the second is already tackling it's shell. 
Now three weeks on, we had 5 chicks hatch successfully in one brood and 3 in another a few days later. Return to Vegetable Garden Homepage |
