We have now had hens with us at school for almost 2 years. It seems a long time since we traveled up into snowy Northumberland to dismantle a hen house and bring back 8 hens. We still have a couple of the original flock, they are getting rather old and don't lay any eggs anymore and are hopefully enjoying their hen retirement.
Here is Hero, one of the original hens - she got her name as she survived an attack by a fox when she was living up in Northumberland. We have learnt a great deal over the last two years about keeping hens, what they like to eat, how to spot when they are sick and the sort of things we can do to try to make them well again.
Here are a few more of our flock of 14, we have two cockerels Marius and Ritchie, who get along very well. They don't crow very much as far as I know? Our hens are fed and get clean water every day, they eat layer pellets and a grain mixture which they really enjoy. We also give them greens from our garden, they like eating lots of weeds that we pull up from the veggie beds. We also get damaged and un-saleable vegetables from one of our local supermarkets to supplement their diet. We have found that hens love grapes, beansprouts, apples, strawberries, raspberries, broccoli and other leafy green veg. They will not eat carrots or mushrooms though and don't really like sprouts, which is a bit like our students!
A few of our hens are moulting at the moment, something hens do about once a year. This is Spot 2 one of the young hens we got at the end of the summer term. They lose a lot of feathers and don't lay any eggs - they look a bit cold for a few weeks, but with some TLC they re-grow their feathers pretty quickly and start to lay eggs again. Collecting the eggs remains a popular job with our students, and I will always remember the time a student found a nest hidden behind the nesting boxes containing over 20 eggs.
The white hen is another of our original hens we got two years ago and is either called Foghorn, or Leghorn? The black one you can hardly see is a young hen who is about 6 months old now, she always tries to get inside the feed box to be first to feed. We have a few ex-battery hens, I think we have 4 at the moment.
This is Stobbart one of our ex-battery hens - named for some reason after the haulage company? She has a bit of a wonky beak, which kind of crosses over - it does not stop her eating though. All of our hens are pretty friendly, some of them quite like being picked up by the staff and students. They seem to like people having a bit of a chat with them as they walk past the hen run - we notice this particularly in the summer holidays when things are quiet, they seem to miss people being around and all rush to the side of the run when they hear your keys jangling to unlock the gates.
Another one of the ex-battery hens, although I'm not sure what this one is called. The hen house is given a good clean out about once a week, surprisingly this also is quite a popular job with some of our students who don't mind getting their hands dirty. We have a ready supply of manure for our veggie beds.
So what's next? Well our garden is going to be a lot bigger next year, so we have lots of work to do. Hopefully when our new area is established and the vegetable beds have been moved we will expand the hen run, giving our hens a bit more room to run around in. There is a bit of interest in maybe keeping a couple of turkeys next year? And we plan to have a go at hatching some eggs in the spring.
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