Why have backyard chooks? Fresh eggs to keep you through an apocalypse? Manure for prize-winning roses?
The Queen Mother at 100: I got the most gloriously long chatty letter, the kind one chook fanatic writes to another.The love of chooks transcends social boundaries. Thirty years ago, I received a most expensive envelope in the mail. It was from the Queen Mother. I had written to her office, asking if it was true that she had brought back the Buff Orpington breed from near extinction.
Chicken is perhaps the cheapest meat around now, and eggs are plentiful − but not good eggs. They are ‘OK eggs’. The secret of my lemon poppy seed cake is that it’s made with eggs that are no more than two days old. My stuffed eggs are from fortnight-old eggs – very fresh hard-boiled eggs are impossible to peel. And you need duck eggs for the world’s most exquisite sponge, though day-old hen eggs are almost as good.
Treat your chooks like elite athletes. The better they are treated, the more eggs and years of companionship you’ll get. Insulate the chook house to ensure it is not freezing cold in winter or blazing hot in summer. Grow deciduous vines over the hen run, like roses, or grapes, for summer shade and winter sunlight.Eggs taste of what the chook had been fed on. Feed them too much leftover fish or gone-to-seed cabbages and your eggs will taste ... interesting.