Grannie Annie's Chicken Keeping Chook Blog

Popular forum member Grannie Annie has been keeping chickens for a while now. Most people start off with 3 or 4 hens but our Annie takes life in large bites. Dismayed by the cruelty of battery hens she decided to start out with some rescued hens.

So she came home with 50 rescued ex-battery chickens. Talk about jumping in at the deep end. It's really shocking how battery hens are treated, I'm sure nobody would eat battery eggs if they visited one of the farms.

Hen Chicks

Grannie Annie's new young chicks keeping warm under the heat lamp on her half acre holding in Lincolnshire

Chickens

These fine birds ranging free and happy rather than trapped in a battery cage.

The minimum legal requirement of space for one bird is just under three quarters the size of an A4 sheet of paper. Terrible!

A New Life in the Country

After years of life in the rat race as a secretary in London, Annie left to enjoy the good life in the wilds of Lincolnshire with her husband, dog Penny and cat Sooty some 5 years ago. They've half an acre of land to play in with three greenhouses and a 24' polytunnel where they grow their own vegetables.

She makes her own wine and jams as well as looking after all those hens.

Now this would be more than enough work for most people, but not for our Annie.

From Chick to POL Pullet

She's picked up some new chicks to grow on and sell as point of lay pullets. Just 300 of them! A pullet, by the way, is a female chicken under one year old.

If you've not kept chickens before then POL pullets is the way to go. These are chickens around 16 to 18 weeks old that are about to start or have just started laying eggs. This way you don't have to wait for your reward of lovely fresh eggs.

The hens are more robust at this age and easier to keep than young chicks.

I'd suggest you might want to just start with three or four rather than 50 or 300 and you might want to invest in a copy of Starting With Chickens by Katie Thear, one of the best guides for the novice around. You can read a sample chapter from the book on here as well.

She keeps a blog about her experiences which is really interesting and well worth a read. There are links to the latest posts in her blog below.

If you're in Lincolnshire and fancy keeping chickens or even just want some real eggs, you know where to go to get started. You can contact her through her blog or via the poultry chat forums on this site.