With all the craziness in the world at the moment, there have been some exciting little things happening - like getting our own backyard hens! When the panic buying started in Melbourne, we began to appreciate how reliant we, and just about every other urban family in the neighbourhood, are on the supply chain. Not just toilet paper, but fruit and veg, eggs, grains, sweets - everything!
We're lucky to have a farm and a veggie patch in which we can grow our own veg. Currently we've got zucchini, silverbeet, capsium and tomato patches providing a nearly daily haul. We’ve also been sprouting our own seedlings of snow peas, sweet potatoes, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, parsnip, leek and onions. So we thought, why not try and grow more of our own food and as much as we can? Eggs are a household staple and Christian can be seen often eating up to four or five eggs worth of scramble some mornings. After seeing the state of our supermarket egg shelf, I thought getting a few of our own hens would provide us with a little more food security and also some fresh free range eggs, where we know that the hens that laid them are being treated well.
By keeping our own hens, we leave a carton on the shelf for those who don’t have the chance to raise some themselves.
My mission to find chickens at this point in time proved incredibly difficult - it seems like everyone else had the same idea, and hens were being bought up faster than I though possible around Melbourne. On Saturday however I managed to secure a coop and two “beginner” hens that had been used for laying but were past their peak productivity and therefore less valuable to the egg industry and to be sold off.
Meet Daisy and Delilah, our resident Isa Browns.
Isa Browns are the most common breed on the market as they were bred to be high yield layers, nearing an egg a day. Today we drove with them down to our farm, where we’ll we staying for several weeks to hopefully wait out and see where this pandemic is going. With a foreseeable lockdown coming on in our cities, a farm seemed to be a nicer place to stay put and with plenty to do. In the mild afternoon sun I put the coop together by hand, layered the flooring with wood shavings and lined the nesting boxes with hay and rosemary. We haven’t had any eggs yet as the hens have been in a high stress environment (causes by a changing environment as well as my ever-curious and slightly murderous dog). This will be their first night in the coop, and hopefully they will still be safe and secure come morning.
Hopefully we’ll be waking up to farm fresh eggs tomorrow!
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