Chooks and chickens
Having grown up with chickens roaming round the yard and the boisterous crowing of the roosters as part of the soundtrack of my childhood, it seemed only natural that we should have some of the feathery fowl.
Getting started was easy enough as my mother still keeps a motley crew of hens. Working through the technicalities has been a little more challenging. Chickens are generally low maintenance, forage for a good portion of their food and offer a variety of valuable by-products including eggs, meat, earth moving, feathers, manure and body heat.
Assuming you have a rooster, their tendency to hatch out large numbers of babies means, for better or worse, the size of your flock can grow very quickly.
In addition to the hens and their loyal rooster we keep 3 Kune kune pigs. This is a small breed, hairy and very affectionate. Their roles are as lawn mowers, soil cultivators and manure makers. Kune kune pigs are unique in that they can survive on a diet of grass and need very little supplementary food unless raising babies.
Over the last few years we have been impressed with how the chooks, young chickens, rooster and pigs all get along in the slowly emerging food forest they call home. They range freely together and at feeding time jostle with each other for access to kitchen scraps and grain.
Our chooks and ducks get fed supplementary grain that has been soaked in water. This makes it softer, easier to digest and because it swells up means they don't eat as much.
One unintentional positive side effect of feeding grain to the chickens while the pigs are present is they inevitably end up eating some of it. Being greedy, they swallow most of it whole and it passes straight through and ends up spread around their territory in the manure. The chickens have discovered this and are very eager to get at the grains embedded in the poo. This results in frantic scratching and disintegration of the pig turds resulting in faster breakdown and absorption into the surrounding landscape.
