How to wash your chicken

The basic procedure is similar to washing someone\'s hair in a sink. Prepare a washing up bowl of nice warm, but not hot, water. Add some soap/washing-up liquid or shampoo. It is important to hold the bird firmly but safely to prevent any attempts at escape. The best method is to hold your chicken by the legs with your index finger between the legs and your thumb and forefinger gripping the legs.

Now that you have your chicken where you want it, you can start washing! Wash the feathers as if washing your hair but use an old toothbrush or something similar to take the dirt off its feet and legs.

You must now rinse your chicken with plenty of clean water. You will probably find that you need a couple of bowls of water to get rid of all of the soap.

Unless you can get your chicken to obediently sit in front of a radiator, towels and a hairdryer are your best bet. Again dry the feathers as if drying your hair. Rub carefully with a towel to get the worst of the wetness out without damaging the feathers. To get rid of the last of the moisture, use a hairdryer as if drying your own hair. Don\'t let the top feathers get too hot as they could get damaged.

Dates for your diary

National Chicken and Egg Day - Febuary 2nd
A day for thought and thanks for both the humble egg and the brilliant chicken. It is traditional to spend a few extra moments with your chickens a chance to reflect on the good times you've shared together.

Take Your Chicken To Work Day November 23rd
Tom Cruise famously took a chicken onto the set of Top Gun (1986) to help him learn some of the moves that his badly cast co-pilot Goose couldn't teach him. So make your chicken feel special and take her into work!

How Is an Egg Made?

Chickens are amazing! When your hens are laying well, they will produce a new egg every 25.5 hours. This is a very short time to create something as complex, as perfect and as tasty as an egg.

An egg is made from the inside out. The yolk is made first, and then wrapped in a layer of egg white, before being neatly and beautifully packaged

 up in an egg shell.

The beginning of an egg is the tiny ova which takes a week to grow into a proper egg yolk. If you cut a boiled egg in half and look at the yolk, the dark rings were

 layers made during the day and the light layers during the hours of darkness.

Strange but true!

When the yolk is ready it is released along the oviduct. The first part of the oviduct is where the egg white (albumen) is added. The egg white mainly consists of protein,

 water and minerals.

Then the egg carries on along the oviduct where it grows two connecting strands at the

 top and the bottom called chalaza, which anchor the yolk to the shell keeping it in the

centre of the egg.

The next stage is for the shell membranes to form around the white. After this the

egg continues down into the uterus where the shell is added. The shell is made from

calcium carbonate, which is also found in marble and chalk. The shell is a great bit of

 design, it is on average only 0.3mm thick but it is incredibly strong.

The colour of the shell depends on the breed of chicken and on the individual chicke

n itself. Some chickens lay dark brown eggs (like Madama Bluebelle) and the Araucana

lays a blue egg, but the colour of the shell doesn't affect the taste

Thank you omelette for your concise and analytical description

Thabkyou also for your interesting picture

Coley :)

My mum helping a baby chick hatch out of it's egg ....

Eggs for sale

please email me at chicken.love@live.co.uk
(eating eggs - fertile eggs will be available again shortly)

My Chickens

You may notice that some of them have girl’s names although they’re boys but we named most of them girls in the hope that they would be (more than one rooster spells trouble – louder crowing and fights)

Incomplete - more chickens + pictures to be added

Ruby – rooster – polish (re homed)

Aurora – hen – old English game

Lizzie - rooster – silkie (re homed)

Daisy - rooster – pekin (died recently)

Pocahontas – hen - pekin

Dolly – rooster – pekin (Daisy and Pocahontas’ son – re homed)

Bella – hen – rescued from a battery farm

Golumn – rooster – naked neck

Peggy I – hen – was born with legs forced out to the side, we splint her legs and toes and she survived (frizzle polish)

Peggy II – hen– the same as Peggy I but died 7 months later during a snowy night as she was much smaller than normal for her breed and weaker than the others. (frizzle polish)

Meeko – hen – pekin

Morgana – hen frizzle polish

Pichacu (from pokemon) – peacock (hatched for a friend then returned when it was old enough)

Princess Jasmine  – Indian Runner duck (will soon be rehomed because she and her sister are too messy in comparison to the chickens)

Daphony (from Scooby doo) – Indian Runner duck

Poodles – hen - bantam silkie

Doodles – hen – bantam silkie

Victoria –hen - Buff Orpington

Ruby II – polish - (died as a baby chick)

Daisy II - Orpington

Millie – hen - orpington

Pickles – hen - barnvelder - died at only three years old - we believe that she was egg-bound

Bonnie – hen–

Lilly -hen - dutch bantam

Chicken breeds

http://www.ithaca.edu/staff/jhenderson/chooks/chooks.html

Really helpful

from Coley :)

Housing

if you don’t intend to free range your chickens (ours have had to stay in the run recently because of fox attacks during the day) then you need to make sure that they have extra stimulation eg toys and extra nutrition eg mealworms, fruit and veg they also need a reasonably sized run (we have an eglu with three extra run extensions).

remember to clean out house every week – chicken house for sale, lovingly painted in good condition, easy to acsess from all angles, easy to clean, foxproof with run and shelter, chicken feeders included.

Love and attention

chickens are sociable and intelligent creatures and in order for them to develop their own distinctive character you need to handle them regularly.

What to do in the event of an emergency

– How to save your chickens life – hatching out of the egg, splinting, attacks on a single chicken