04/05/2026
We’re still here and ticking on (I’m just absolutely useless at updating the page!).
I get a lot of questions about how we keep our chickens, so I thought I’d pop a post here with some pictures…
We currently can’t take on anymore egg customers as our ladies are struggling to keep up with demand, but we’ll have some hybrid point-of-lay hens that will be ready in a couple of weeks.
Our chickens have 24/7 access to around 1/3 of an acre with a small orchard of fruit trees.
We have a main chicken barn that has an outside undercover area designed so that panels of netting can be fitted if they need to be housed for any reason (works in their paddock or bird flu restrictions for example).
We have fenced and gated the barn area from the paddock as occasionally we put our sheep in there to mow the grass down! There are special chicken sized passage ways so they can still always access the paddock - big enough for a chook, but too small for cheeky lambs!
We have 3 other sheds/coops in this enclosure, we use these for isolation for new hens, poorly hens, broody hens or chicks. We also have a large pen in our barn which we use for chick rearing and when customers come to collect hens.
The whole 1/3 acre chicken enclosure is fenced with galvanised deer fencing that stands over 6ft, on top of this we have a line of barbed wire, at the bottom we have rabbit wire attached, this is dug into the earth around 100mm and then skirted out around 200mm, leaving a rise on the fence of around 500mm - this protects from predators trying to dig their way in, whilst leaving very small holes so nothing can squeeze in!
On top of this we also run three lines of hot wires around the whole perimeter - One at ground level, one at fox nose height level, and one at the top.⚡️
We built the enclosure 11 years ago and we’ve yet to have any problems, even if we did raise some eyebrows when we were building it, one passer by asked if we were planning to house elephants! 😂
Chris designed and build the main chicken barn around 5 years ago, after many, many years of trial and error we now have the perfect space for our ladies!
We have big double doors and the roosts that raise via a pulley system for ease of cleaning.
We collect water via the roof into an ibc tank, which is clad to stop the sunlight getting to it, so fresh daily water change is simple.
We have 2 rows of roll away nesting boxes, so collecting eggs should be simple, but, a fair few of our ladies do prefer laying at ground level - egg hunts are a daily occurrence!
All our laying hens stay with us forever, we hatch and buy in new stock/bloodlines every year to replenish, but we don’t sell or cull our older ladies - we keep one laying flock, so we realistically don’t know which birds are laying and which aren’t - not a great business move, but ethically this sits well with us. Two of our ladies are as old as the farm and have been here since the beginning, making them 11 yrs old!
Xx
