Irene Kightley Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design Portfolio : Free-range Chickens : page 1 of 27
Free-range Chickens
Observations of their needs, multiple functions and beneficial relationships with examples of their use in a Permaculture garden design
Contents
• Introduction • Our Chickens • Chickens in the Garden – Reaching a satisfactory equilibrium • Input/Output Analysis - or the Needs and Contributions of chickens • The needs specific to our chickens at La Ferme de Sourrou • The contributions of chickens : specific to La Ferme de Sourrou • Our ways of keeping chickens and how they relate to the Permaculture ethics • Conclusion Irene Kightley Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design Portfolio : Free-range Chickens : page 2 of 27
Introduction
I inherited my first flock of six Rhode Island Red chickens, two Khaki Campbell ducks and two Aylesbury ducks with a house I bought in Theydon Bois in Essex.
They were surprisingly easy to keep, all they needed was food, space to forage, a comfortable and clean home and to be safe at night. They provided me with entertainment and eggs and kept the garden clear of slugs and that's all I asked of them. That was the start of a great adventure and I've kept poultry ever since.
Now, over thirty years later, here at La Ferme de Sourrou, we have a flock of about 40 chickens, a dozen or so Muscovy ducks (Carina moshata), several mixed breed turkeys and six geese.
I still get a great thrill from collecting eggs and having new chicks and spend far too much time watching their antics but after learning about their behaviour and applying how I can take advantage of what comes naturally to them, our poultry make a huge contribution to our farm and I literally couldn't manage many of the Permaculture systems we have here without them. Poultry adding their nitrogen rich droppings to a new hugelkultur bed
In these designs, I'd concentrate specifically on chickens. Ducks, geese and turkeys have totally different personalities, different needs and make their own contributions to a smallholding Irene Kightley Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design Portfolio : Free-range Chickens : page 3 of 27
Our Chickens
Even separate breeds of chicken can be incredibly different from each other.
From exotic show birds to egg producers and birds reared for meat or for company - all have been bred in different climatic conditions, offer different types of yields and exhibit characteristic behaviours.
Individual chickens too have different personalities and surprising talents if you take the time to get to know them. Like many people, I began by fencing my chickens out of the potager, only allowing them in for brief periods in the evenings before they retired for the night. They also had access to the ornamental garden in winter or the early spring period when there were only shrubs and perennials.
Some birds were more prone to damage plants than others, some flew over the fence regularly and some seemed to get themselves into all sorts of trouble.
The Leghorns were flighty, nervous birds who laid a lot of eggs but rarely went broody and I noticed that they had a tendency to spend all day scratching. The light Sussex wouldn't forage much and they'd hang around the chicken shed waiting to be fed.
The little Bantams I bought when I came to France just wanted to have chicks and would sit on even just one egg or even a stone if you let them.
As I became ready to begin killing chickens for the pot, I decided to sell most of our small birds but kept a couple of my favourite bantam hens who were exceptionally good mothers.
As well as having much more and better meat and being truly majestic creatures, heavier birds like the multi-purpose breeds, Orpingtons and Faverolles don't usually fly or jump, they’re are not easily flustered by our dogs or cheeky children chasing them and they're easy to manage in the garden.
So for over the past twenty years or so, I've tended to breed a line of heavier birds for those reasons. Irene Kightley Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design Portfolio : Free-range Chickens : page 4 of 27
There’s one exception and that is our Marans hens who lay beautiful big brown eggs. They look just like chocolate eggs.
They taste exactly the same of course, but what a lovely contrast when you slice open a boiled egg and see the golden yellow yolk and the white against the dark shell.
The hens are good layers and good mothers but I’ve never eaten a Marans chicken, so I can’t vouch for the taste.
I don't intend to describe the many breeds of chicken we've ever had here, some of their individual characteristics may have been due to to their life experience, learned behaviour, housing, feeding or their management and it would be misleading to try to be too specific.
However, it‘s wise to bear in mind that in general, breed characteristics are important when developing Permaculture systems using poultry.
Also, there is no substitute for keen observation. Irene Kightley Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design Portfolio : Free-range Chickens : page 5 of 27
Chickens in the Garden – Reaching a satisfactory equilibrium
When we moved Sourrou, I wanted to experiment more with trying different breeds of chicken and use their natural characteristics to help me develop techniques to maintain a large vegetable garden, a food forest and the shrubs and trees in the hectare around the house.
I'm the only gardener in our family and I tend to use only hand tools and hate using noisy and bulky machines to cut wood or grass.
I'm also very protective of my time and don't want to spend more time or energy than I do now being a martyr to the upkeep of a large new garden.
My objective was to reach an equilibrium with the poultry, so that alone, I could maintain a healthy, beautiful, productive and safe garden in the hectare plot around our house.
I feel happy now, that, thanks to my little chicken army (Not forgetting the other poultry), I have now reached that state.
Our chickens free range absolutely everywhere – even in the potager - and instead of caging chickens or using a chicken tractor, I cage some of the vegetables. That seems quite logical to me.
My systems are not perfect, I make mistakes or forget sometimes to do certain things and the chickens do sometimes break my heart.
However, in general they have helped me to cope easily with what could be an enormous workload.
They help to keep our gardens and our other animals productive and healthy and give me more time to enjoy just being here. Irene Kightley Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design Portfolio : Free-range Chickens : page 6 of 27
We have hundreds of visitors here at Sourrou every year and their first reaction when they see the chickens in the garden is to ask how I manage to prevent them from damaging the plants.
Also, in the many Permaculture forums where I am a member, the question often arises of how people prevent chickens from destroying their garden.
People want lists of plants which chickens won't eat, or techniques to cover and protect plants at different times of the year but there is no way that anyone can guarantee that for certain gardens, for certain chickens and certain climates that the designs here will work for anyone else.
When teaching, rather than staying in a classroom, I walk outside with students and show them what our chickens are doing. They can see healthy plants with chickens walking alongside them, they watch as well-behaved chickens use the paths. Later, when we have had time to observe the chickens for longer, we might then do the classic “Input – Output” session using chickens as an example and I explain how I use the chickens to maintain the garden.
With that information, students will possibly learn more about keeping chickens but the most important part of this lesson is to develop a detailed functional analysis of how one function relates to the others and examine how those relationships can be used.
Teaching how we use chickens in Permaculture has become a cliché for good reason, their breeds characteristics, needs and contributions are some of the best examples that I know - not only to teach people how to keep chickens - but how to learn to design.
Input/Output Analysis - or the Needs and Contributions of chickens
When discussing animals, rather than saying “Input and output” my preference is to use the term “Needs and Contributions”. I'll use these terms to develop the functional analysis of several of my designs in detail, explaining and expanding each point with relevant photos and examples.
Please bear in mind that our techniques are constantly adapted to changes in our system and are totally unique to our site, based on the seasons and the jobs that need to be done at certain times of the year such as clearing the mulch from spring garden beds to let the sun warm them for planting, mulching, emptying a goat shed or shearing the goats and sheep .
Regular observation of my chickens combined with our activities here at Sourrou has helped me to develop our designs “From pattern to detail”. Irene Kightley Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design Portfolio : Free-range Chickens : page 7 of 27
The needs specific to our chickens at La Ferme de Sourrou
A comfortable, clean, well aired chicken shed
A good, easy to clean chicken shed with plenty of room to house all your chickens and their laying boxes is a basic necessity.
The house should be well- aired as chicken droppings, scratching and wing-flapping causes a lot of dust.
Litter can harbour fungal spores, so the chickens risk having respiratory problems (And so do we !) if there is not enough ventilation.
If space and finances allow, I'd suggest making a shed much bigger that you think you will need and at least big enough to store grain, buckets, water containers and some tools. We divide the inside of our shed into three separate areas :
• The laying and roosting area • The closed space where we keep new arrivals from outside in quarantine and under observation until we're sure that they are healthy and from where they can see and get used to the other chickens without fighting. We also use this area for sitting hens and their new chicks. Once she has started sitting, we lift the nesting box with the hen and her eggs inside into this area where she can sit undisturbed. This prevents other hens from laying late in the same nest and wasting a little life and provides a safe environment for the hen and chicks for about the first ten days of their life. • An area where we keep feed bins and spare nesting boxes and where can also move a hen with chicks if there are too many families in the nesting pen
When making a shed, we also ensure that there is plenty of outside space for cleaning food containers, nesting boxes and filling and moving water containers – which ideally, (Because otherwise they get quickly get very dirty) should be kept outside of the shed. Irene Kightley Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design Portfolio : Free-range Chickens : page 8 of 27
We make our chicken sheds in the woods, simply cutting down the trees inside the shed boundaries and adapt the large trunks of wood for a frame for the shed.
We bury chicken wire in a channel of about 50cms deep around the shed and cover the whole frame with chicken wire, effectively making a huge cage.
Where drafts may chill the chickens or to make the exterior prettier, we cover the wire with wood or with small branches from the trees we cut to make the frame.
The shed roof is covered in second-hand metal barn sides or corrugated sheets. The door, hinges and other fixtures are all reclaimed materials. This 6x4 metre shed cost under thirty euros.
Shelter from the rain and snow
Hens are miserable in heavy rain, so we keep our hen-house open all day to allow them to come and go as they please and enter to safety in the evening. Sometimes hens become disorientated in snow and may need to be led home or they risk sleeping outside and freezing to death or being eaten by predators. Our shed door is blocked open to stop the wind from closing it and prevent the hens from sleeping outside.
To be opened early in the morning
People often leave hens inside until they have laid but our chickens need to spend a lot of time outside as they are foraging for most of their food. To leave them inside for long periods could mean that they are not getting a balanced diet and they seem to know that because I've noticed that when we have had to leave them inside for some reason, they head straight to the potager and scratch with a vengeance.
Chicken food
We are very fortunate in being completely self- sufficient in animal feed. We grow a few hectares of corn, wheat and other cereals each year for the goats and sheep and the chickens get their fair share. Irene Kightley Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design Portfolio : Free-range Chickens : page 9 of 27
Supplementary feeding
We have planted plenty of fruit and nut trees, shrubs and other plants so that our poultry can find their own food but sitting hens, chicks, confined chickens and older hens all need food regularly and we survey their diet depending on their needs. For the strong young foragers, we supplement their diet with some grain in order to produce big healthy birds and get them used to the idea that when we shake a bucket, it means food is available and they usually come running.
Training chickens to come to you for food can be extremely useful, to move them out of danger, to move them to new forage areas or away from somewhere you don't want them to be and is a good teaching aid when you need to change their habits.
Nesting boxes
We use discarded gunpowder barrels for our hens' nesting boxes. (And lots of other things too!) We cut the lids to retain the bottom layer of straw with enough room to allow the hen to enter and exit easily.
For normal egg laying, the boxes are attached on the perches but once a hen starts sitting, we carry the box with her in it to a separate closed pen to prevent other hens from laying their eggs in with her clutch and losing not only the egg but sometimes the chick inside.
A safe place to bond with and teach their chicks
For the first week or so, when the chicks are extremely vulnerable in the big wide world, we keep the hen and her chicks inside the pen where they were born. Hens won't mind being kept inside if there is food and water available, the space is large enough to have a place to scratch for food, and also incorporates a dust bath with wood-ash and Diatomaceous earth. This is extremely important as a hen who has sat on eggs for three weeks is very vulnerable to a mite infection.
Comfortable, solid perches
Our chickens all roost with no problem, they probably learn to do that from their mothers. We have heavy birds, so their perches need to be sturdy and high enough off the ground to allow plenty of space for our deep litter system, while at the same time allowing us to move around with a wheelbarrow to collect the litter. Irene Kightley Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design Portfolio : Free-range Chickens : page 10 of 27
We use branches for perches and rub off the smaller protruding branches to prevent our hens from developing bumble foot, a country term used for plantar pododermatitis, a swelling on a chicken's foot where bacteria have entered causing a painful abscess. Heavy breeds are particularly prone to this problem. (See photo left)
Straw, hay or other litter material
Plenty of clean material is strewn on our shed floor regularly to keep it smelling sweet and absorb the humidity from droppings. The nesting boxes are replaced regularly and lined with straw.
Water
Chicken keeping consumes a lot of water.
The birds themselves don't drink a lot but their feeders, buckets and drinking containers need to be washed regularly and while they're being washed it's a shame to waste the water, so I use it to irrigate the climbers planted around the shed which provide it with perfume and shade.
Where there's a roof, there's potential for water harvesting, so that's another reason to make a chicken shed as large as you can so that the shed can be totally self-sufficient in water and can be placed where you want it.
Our chicken shed roof harvests about 18,000 litres of rainwater each year.
I use this for the chickens' needs but the shed was placed here especially to also harvest water for the new planting and maintenance watering in the forest garden which is on the bottom of a slope on the south side of the shed, so that we can water using gravity without needing a pump.
An interesting and varied environment
I like my chickens to be free, their activities suit my needs and my love of watching them. When they are outside, scratching, dustbathing and foraging they have a much better quality of life than they have in a bare run. This is the least we can offer these birds who provide us with so much. Irene Kightley Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design Portfolio : Free-range Chickens : page 11 of 27
Perfume
Normally, a well managed chicken house shouldn't smell but when hens are sitting, they will only move off their nest to defecate, drink and eat. Then they return quickly to their eggs. Those droppings smell terrible.
Some of the eggs a hen has sat on may be rotten and burst and as every schoolboy knows, those too have a particularly disgusting odour. Perhaps it's for that reason that mother nature provides a lot of perfumed climbers in flower to coincide with this time of the year.
The windy west side and part of the roof of our shed is covered an evergreen climber, Trachelospermum jasminoides which smells heavenly when it is in flower and provides a nesting area for birds.
The rest of the roof is covered with Jasminum officinalis, Honeysuckle, Wisteria interlaced with several varieties of Clematis and Campsis radicans.
The roof now ties the shed beautifully into the garden and what was once an ugly shed is now completely covered. We can appreciate the different perfumes as far away as the house if the wind is in the right direction.
As well as providing perfume, the plants shade the metal roof from the sun, keeping the interior cool and in spring and summer is always buzzing with bees and my favourite co-habitee the Hummingbird Hawk-moth (Macroglossum stellatarum). Irene Kightley Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design Portfolio : Free-range Chickens : page 12 of 27
A cockerel
Hens don't need a cockerel to produce eggs – you probably know that - but it's surprising how many people don't.
Hens do, however, need a cockerel to produce chicks and we want them to produce youngsters for the table, so we keep one or two cocks which we exchange or change each year to prevent the problems associated with consanguinity such as crossed beaks, feet problems and malfunctioning internal organs.
Many people are under the assumption that cockerels have no purpose other than to fertilize eggs and strut around looking gorgeous but if you observe a cockerel regularly, you'll notice that he is rarely at rest and seems to eat less than the girls. A cockerel generally helps his hens to feed, showing them where there are titbits and lets the hens eat them.
His job is to watch over his flock, he keeps his eye open for trouble from all directions. When fights break out between young cockerels or hens, the cock will often intervene and stop them from injuring each other. Some are even willing, like our beautiful Orpington cockerel in the photo above who was killed by a buzzard, to give up his life to protect his hens and their chicks.
Cockerels, especially if they are young and there are too many, sometimes worry hens and their back feathers will show signs of wear. If that’s the case, reduce the number of cockerels or separate the hen into other quarters until the breeding season is over.
Predator – proof hen house, fencing and overhead cover against birds of prey
Hen-house : There is nothing more devastating than discovering your hen house full of dead and injured hens. It's happened to me and it's for that reason we made our hen-house as a huge cage and we close the door, without fail, every evening, so that when the birds go home to sleep, we are absolutely sure that they are safe.
Twice, we've had animals who were shut inside after we'd closed the door. One was a hedgehog who broke and ate eggs for a day or so, then one morning we found some chicks who had had their legs torn off. We found the offending hedgehog asleep in the straw and put him outside, far away from the hen-house.
On the second occasion, I opened the chicken shed door in the morning to utter devastation. A dozen birds had been decapitated and many others were badly injured.
I couldn't understand what had happened as the door was bolted shut but as I was lifting the injured hens, I put my hand into a nesting box on to what thought was a dead chicken, and I touched something warm and furry and, thankfully, fast asleep. Irene Kightley Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design Portfolio : Free-range Chickens : page 13 of 27
I quickly covered the nesting box, secured the lid and moved the box into a separate pen and continued with the gruesome task of collecting dead chickens and called Fabrice to help me kill the others who were too badly injured to survive.
Once we'd finished, we got a live trap and went in to see what was in the nesting box. We put the trap against the box, slid open the lid and a Stone Marten shot into it. There's no point in killing a Stone marten, however angry you are, as they'll quickly be replaced by others, so we released him far away from the chicken shed. Now, before shutting the shed door, I always look inside to see if the chickens seem nervous.
Fencing : As part of one of our projects - the creation of a wetland zone and a tracking and hunting training park – we have fenced 22 hectares of our land.
This zone is enclosed by two and a half kilometres of fencing, two metres high with wild boar-proof netting on the top, sheep netting and chicken wire on the bottom metre and is buried 60 centimetres into the ground. There is also an electric fence around the perimeter.
That should keep the buggers out we said, but no, only last week, we lost a female goose who had been sitting outside on a dozen eggs.
A few days later, we found a poor fox, dead and surrounded by goose feathers, hanging by a paw on the outside of the boar netting. What a terrible way to die.
Our house and chicken shed are inside this fence and obviously it has reduced considerably the number of chickens that the fox, martens and other larger predators take during the day.
However, we are still vigilant about shutting the shed door in the evening.
Overhead cover : Our chickens are taken, killed or maimed by birds of prey more than any other predator. Irene Kightley Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design Portfolio : Free-range Chickens : page 14 of 27
Buzzards can easily take a large chicken (Or even a puppy.) and the smaller raptors attack young chickens and chicks, leaving many of them struggling for life on the ground.
In this part of France, birds of prey are a real challenge to chicken keepers. The birds are protected by law, so there's no point in going out with a gun unless it's to frighten them off. They'll be back.
Apart from covering the area with netting, we sometimes feel that there's not a lot we can do against them but chickens descended from jungle fowl and have survival instincts which they use to protect themselves from danger. It's our job to help them revive those instincts - one of the reasons we keep chicks inside with their mothers is that we train them (Or at least their mother does.) to run under her when they hear that low whistle – which Fabrice does rather well.
We don't clip the wings of our chickens (Although I can appreciate why some people do.) We'd rather that they were able to escape from predators and I've seen a young chicken foil an attack by flying under a tree branch, causing the raptor to lose it's grip on the bird.
We also offer chickens a habitat with a lot of trees and large bushes which they can spend the day under.
We put water containers under trees not only to help feed and water the trees but to give the chickens and wild animals a safe place to drink from.
We hardly ever see our chickens out in the open, they spend most of their time under the tree canopy, hidden from the keen eyes of flying predators.
Insoluble Grit
Chickens don't have teeth, their food goes from their crop to the proventriculus where it is mixed with digestive enzymes and acids, then to the gizzard (Right), where grit accumulates to grind food with the strong muscular action of the gizzard. Free range chickens get enough grit in their diet but hens in a pen need to have added grit otherwise the mass of food putrifies inside them.
Oyster shell or other calcium rich additives
Laying hens need to absorb extra calcium to produce eggs. To avoid soft- shelled eggs like the one on the left, the possibility of a hen becoming egg- bound or even developing brittle bones, we put oyster shells on to the forest paths where they are crushed underfoot. The chickens help themselves. Irene Kightley Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design Portfolio : Free-range Chickens : page 15 of 27
Lots of greens
Chickens need a lot of greens in their diet to keep them healthy. I've found that in a dry summer, there is a risk that they'll start pecking the vegetables, so as well as providing them with all our veg trimmings, I allow a lot of our gone- to-seed lettuces and cabbages to grow to a decent size, then feed them, along with any other spare plants I have to the chickens.
Chickens will eat courgette and pumpkin leaves for a while then give up to go on to better things but leaving a damaged pumpkin, courgette or tomato on a stalk will encourage chickens to peck the remainder and they soon learn that they taste good and might be tempted to start on a whole courgette. I always remove damaged vegetables, chop them up and feed them to the chickens in a place where they don't associate the vegetables with the garden and we rarely lose whole plants to the chickens.
Dust-baths
Chickens use dust-baths to keep their feathers in good condition and to keep themselves free of external parasites.
Dust-bathing can be incredibly destructive in the garden, so we pre- empt the possibility that they destroy newly planted seeds by providing several areas which they can use which are attractive enough to tempt them to use our chosen spot.
A good dust-bath needs to be kept very dry, so we use an area under the eaves of the hen-house. We add wood-ash and Diatomaceous earth to the dust there to help control external parasites.
To be dissuaded from scratching certain areas of the garden
I use many different strategies to stop chickens from going where I don't want them to go, one of these is very dense planting, which also helps to retain the water in the soil.
Planting complementary plants close together can help the plants help each other. In the photo right, the Marigolds and Borage improve the pumpkins' growth and deter pests, the Tayberry and Amarathus protect them physically from north and east winds. Hens like to have space to move and ours tend not to bother squeezing themselves into small spaces as they have plenty of other places to go foraging. Irene Kightley Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design Portfolio : Free-range Chickens : page 16 of 27
The sticks you see in many of my photographs of our garden are another method I use to prevent chickens scratching at the roots of plants.
I also use moveable cages like the one in the photo below, to cover plants when they are young and vulnerable.
When the plants are large enough to withstand the chickens (And the dogs!), I remove the cages and put them somewhere else. I have about five of these cages made from waste wood and odd bits of hen netting and they have lasted a very long time and saved many young plants from total destruction.
I often cover newly sown seeds with a grill made from chestnut or hazel whips which I can leave on top of them for a couple of weeks then use elsewhere. As the grill rots in contact with the earth, I break it and use the sticks to protect the young plants.
Another system I use is a solid frame covered with chicken wire (In the photo below, we used an old tent frame). I've also used greenhouse hoops and we've built frames using long pieces of wood and bamboo.
This space is large enough to work in and the cages can house lettuce, cabbages and anything else the chickens will eat.
There is also the added dimension of height which can be used for Luffas, Cucumbers and other climbers.
In these spaces, I can sow seeds directly into the ground and be confident that they'll be safe and of course self-seeded varieties of rocket, lettuce, tetragon and other surprises can grow on unhindered, to maturity. Irene Kightley Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design Portfolio : Free-range Chickens : page 17 of 27
To learn habits or prevent bad habits from developing
We rarely buy hens, we've had the same hens (Or rather their offspring.) since we moved to the new house 17 years ago but each year we introduce a new cockerel and he's kept in quarantine for about a week inside the chicken shed.
As well as preventing disease in the flock, this also helps him to appreciate where he lives. We apply the same strategy to hens stressed after a fox attack who insist on sleeping outdoors or in trees, or when we want to move hens to a new hen-house.
We sometimes have a hen who will peck and eat eggs, if we leave this habit unchanged, she will pass it on to other hens, so we put the guilty hen into the quarantine pen and remove her eggs as soon as she's laid, leaving only china or plastic eggs. After a week or so, we leave her with her own eggs and she usually stops trying to crack them open. If she doesn't, we eat her.
To be kept out of the pig park
This depends on the pigs but some pigs we have kept like chicken very much.
To be kept healthy
This is so obvious that I almost forget to add it to the list. As for any other creature in our care, we have the duty to learn as much as we can about good husbandry and ensure that our chickens are kept in the best of health.
In my experience, if they are kept in a healthy environment they are rarely ill. We have some very old hens here who are in excellent health and still lay an egg from time to time. Irene Kightley Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design Portfolio : Free-range Chickens : page 18 of 27
The contributions of chickens : specific to La Ferme de Sourrou
Eggs and meat
Our chickens contribute a lot to our self-sufficiency in food.
I've kept hens for a long time but it's still a great pleasure, each day, to gather the eggs and bring them back up to the house.
We have two piles of eggs, one for eating and one for chicks, including eggs from certain hens (Or friends' hens) that we want to breed because of certain characteristics.
We keep those eggs until we have enough of them at the same time as a hen who has started sitting, then we swop these eggs for the sitting hen's. That way we can regulate the mix of the flock, choose good mothers, good sitters, certain breeds or egg colours and we can introduce new bloodlines without buying a new cockerel.
Our hens are admired by neighbours and friends and we always manage to sell them when there are too many. We keep the best for ourselves of course. Once the young cockerels start becoming sexually active; fighting amongst themselves and annoying the hens, we keep the best, which we sell and the rest are destined for the table.
Sharing and adopting chicks
Sometimes a clutch of eggs don't hatch at the same time and we've one or two weak little chicks who stay in the nest and are destined to die unless they can join their mother and siblings.
We remove these latecomers and keep them warm, then put them back under the hen in the evening and usually, the next day, all is well. Sometimes a hen will reject a chick but we have some hens who will accept chicks of almost any age and are happy to rear them. (The hen on the left is a serial adopter and currently has 28 chicks)
We also have hens who share chicks, (A useful defence again predators) and we often have neighbours who bring us orphan chicks. Our hens take care of them until they're old enough to fend for themselves and then they can be returned to their owners. Irene Kightley Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design Portfolio : Free-range Chickens : page 19 of 27
Raising other poultry species
Contrary to what we've all read, geese are sometimes terrible mothers and very few of our geese have been reared naturally. Geese make spectacular nests but ours tend to move and make another nest, leave the nest before the chicks have hatched or abandon the chicks while they are still too young to fend for themselves.
Some of our chickens are superb sitters and we exchange their eggs for goose eggs. Once the goslings hatch, the proud mother does a great job, although it's disconcerting to see her running around a pond squawking when the goslings decide to go for a swim.
Building soil fertility
There's no doubt that our chickens have contributed a lot to the fertility of our soil.
Their droppings are nitrogen rich and some plants like blackcurrants and comfrey, who need a lot of nitrogen will even do well mulched with chicken litter straight from the hen house.
We've planted a lot of these at the back of the chicken shed and they are the biggest specimens I have even seen.
Tick and parasite control
Our chickens have a hectare to roam in, in addition to several adjoining fields. When the goats have been moved out of a field, I open the gates and herd the chickens or attract them with treats. (A bucket with stones is a satisfactory alternative.)
In a new place to forage, the chickens help keep the tick population down and the change helps reduce the incidence of their own internal parasites.
I use the opportunity to work unhindered in the potager and plant in peace. Irene Kightley Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design Portfolio : Free-range Chickens : page 20 of 27
The chickens also provide another complementary function in the control of external parasites on our Angora goats.
The Natural Fibre Company, where I send our raw wool to be spun, will not accept fleeces with any traces of pesticides.
Obviously we like our animals to be parasite free and comfortable and to begin with, at shearing time, we removed ticks by hand and started throwing them over the shed wall to the chickens.
Gradually, when the chickens heard the shearing machine, a few of the older hens rushed up to the shed for their treats.
Little by little, we encouraged them to come into the shed and peck the ticks off themselves. (They are much better than I am at that job !)
This part of the process took some time but thankfully, Angora goats are very calm animals and they now stand patiently after they have been sheared to allow a group of chickens to groom them. We keep the goats in for a few days after shearing and each morning the chickens start work on the goats as soon as we open the shed door.
When we have students or visitors here, I often use this mini-design as an example of several Permaculture principles:
Observe and interact
Use and Value Renewable Resources and Services
Produce No Waste
Design From Patterns to Details
Creatively Use and Respond to Change
Integrate Rather Than Segregate
Use and Value Diversity
Use Small and Slow Solutions Irene Kightley Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design Portfolio : Free-range Chickens : page 21 of 27
Preparation for spring planting
The chickens help me to prepare for spring sowing in the potager.
Gardens managed with no- dig and mulching techniques are havens for over- wintering insect larvae who damage seeds and plants such as the wire-worm and Japanese beetle, and chickens love meat.
I attract the chickens to the patch, scrape off the larger remnants of mulch and BRF left on the earth to reveal the dark top soil.
The chickens wait patiently to begin searching for food and as they work, turn the soil into a fine tilth perfect for sowing seeds of for putting in plants once the spring sunshine has had the chance to heat up the dark earth several days later.
As they work, they contribute their nitrogen-rich droppings, helping the soil to recover from the nitrogen robbery effects of the mulch which I add as the seeds or the plants develop.
Here are two photographs which show the “before and after” effect of a soil cleaned by the chickens, planted with a few pumpkins, then thickly mulched to keep the sun and wind from drying out the soil. The chickens still have free access to this patch but tend to leave the plants alone. Irene Kightley Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design Portfolio : Free-range Chickens : page 22 of 27
Colour and excitement in the garden
Chickens can be incredibly beautiful. There's nothing nicer on a drab winter's day than to see a group of healthy, brightly coloured young chickens produced from the same clutch of eggs rushing around excitedly looking for adventure and food.
I sometimes prefer chickens to flowers.
Cleaning paths
Our main vegetable garden is on a slope with a goat shed at the top.
After shearing, when our goats and their new kids are doing well, we move them to new pastures in a valley where there is another goat shed (Which also is on a hill above a vegetable garden.)
Each year, once the goats have moved, we empty the litter out of the shed, into a big heap at the top of the garden.
This period also coincides with early spring planting and mulching and although people say you should never put fresh manure on to a garden. I do. Goat manure consists of small, dry, round pellets of compressed food with urine and the litter is dry, sweet smelling and relatively pleasant to work with.
We have Angora goats and to keep their fleeces clean and the goats comfortable, we're very generous with the bedding straw. In spring and summer it's unlikely that the goat pellets would break down and burn the plants. Rather like seed bombs, they lie in wait for a good rainy season to begin decomposing and that usually happens in the autumn and winter at exactly the right time when the garden needs to be nourished. Irene Kightley Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design Portfolio : Free-range Chickens : page 23 of 27
The chickens love this time of year. When we start to empty the shed, they come in their hordes to help. They usually have chicks and their mothering instinct is to scratch frantically to find food to offer to the chicks.
As the work is heavy and boring (And we risk stepping on a chicken), we usually work for a couple of hours and then leave the chickens alone to work, scratch and clean meticulously around the shed.
Emptying the shed usually takes us about a week but we're in no hurry as the work coincides with the time when I want the chickens to leave the garden alone, having spread mulch and planted summer vegetables.
When the chickens are diverted by their activity in the goat shed, they are not in the garden destroying my plants.
After about two weeks, they are usually satisfied that they have cleaned the shed thoroughly and they turn their attention to the pile of litter outside. As I take away wheelbarrow loads of litter, they start to scratch each newly revealed area.
Before we put up the sheep netting to contain the pile, the chickens spread the manure all over the first terrace and continued to scratch at the manure and my Irises and Rhubarb in the process. They made a real mess over and around the pots which I keep nearby, as I use the earth here for potting compost.
So we put up the netting as a type of filter and now only small pieces of straw and manure can get through.
I noticed that as the chickens scratched in the pile, the compost naturally made its way downhill and conveniently stayed between the paths on either side of the raised beds. So I cleared all the debris from under the shade of the oak tree - pots, cuttings tools and so on and left the area clear to see what would happen.
Our paths a relatively clear because we walk on them regularly but I did sometimes have to trim edges to remove brambles and other unwanted plants but I no longer have to do even that.
Our paths are kept clear now by this compost "river" which descends down the slope naturally, Irene Kightley Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design Portfolio : Free-range Chickens : page 24 of 27 gradually moved by the chickens who scratch in it looking for insects and possibly just because they are totally obsessed with scratching. When there's enough compost on the paths I use the beautiful soil for potting up plants or spread it over plants in the raised beds and as the soil underneath is revealed, the chickens once again come to scratch and clean the path.
I've now started keeping more piles of compost further down the garden especially for path cleaning.
As almost all of our garden is on a slope, the paths around the fruit trees and soft fruit bushes lower down behind our second chicken shed are now starting to have the same sort of mature compost paths around them which makes them very comfortable to walk on and considerably reduces the amount of work that I need to do to keep them clear.
It will be interesting to see if I can use this technique on all the paths in the sloping areas behind our house. Will the number of chickens necessary to do this job be too many for the number that the garden can support and destroy the equilibrium that I have now ?
Obviously, as the trees and shrubs in the forest garden grow larger and become self-mulching, the paths will naturally develop as we walk on them - just as they do in a forest - but it will be an interesting experiment to see what happens until that stage is reached. Irene Kightley Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design Portfolio : Free-range Chickens : page 25 of 27
Feathers
Almost every time children come here, they gather feathers. We've made some super head-dresses and a lot of dream-catchers. Feathers are magical things and a great resource for creativity. They're also good for adding fertility to a garden.
Biodiversity
Unless they adversely affect the sanity of their owners, chickens in a Permaculture site can be a good thing.
But biodiversity isn't just having collections of everything you can lay your hands on. It's an incredibly complex mix which needs keen observation, the management of change and the dimension of time to settle into a series of patterns.
There's no point in buying a dozen chickens and expecting them to settle into an established equilibrium in a few days. Apply self-regulation & accept feedback then re-experiment.
Keeping grass short and weeds under control
Chickens are great at doing these jobs. In a good Permaculture site they should be released from pens with nothing but bare earth and put somewhere where this trait can become useful.
Deter snakes around the house
When we digging the foundations for our new house, we cut some trees and pushed their roots to the back of the site. Soon, we began seeing vipers coming out of the roots and we had to be very careful, especially for the dogs.
After we fenced the land and the chickens arrived on site, I saw them killing vipers regularly and with amazing skill.
Interestingly, we've never lost a chicken to a viper bite.
Once snakes knows that there's danger, they tend to keep out of the way and it's very rare that now we see any snakes at all in or around the house – before the chickens came to stay, it was almost a daily event in summer.
I'm glad about that, because I don't like killing animals and I don't want to smash dishes I'm carrying when I scream in shock, lose a dog, or spend afternoons in the vet’s surgery with a huge bill at the end either. Irene Kightley Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design Portfolio : Free-range Chickens : page 26 of 27
I haven't seen a viper in our garden for a long time but there has been a huge increase in the population of grass snakes (Natrix natrix) since we started clearing a lot of dead trees and making huge hugelkultur piles from the branches.
The snakes can be seen often, sunning themselves on top of the piles, keeping well out of the chickens' way.
Spreading straw mulch
When I'm mulching over a large area, I dump the straw in a pile and by the time I've arrived with the next wheelbarrow load, the chickens have spread the first lot. They have also spread their own manure, (Which helps replace the nitrogen robbery of the straw), removed the wheat or barley seeds and they've mixed the straw with some earth which helps speed up the decomposition of the straw.
Education and ethics
I suppose by now any reader of this document has reached the conclusion that I'm against factory farming chickens. I try not be fanatical but I do stress the point to anyone who willing to listen that it's inhumane to treat chickens as merely cheap food.
That message seems to be getting through and I'm pleased to be able to help teach any new chicken owner how to care for them and how they can be useful in and around the garden. Chickens have taught me a lot, about myself and about Permaculture and I'm very grateful to them for that.
Our ways of keeping chickens and how they relate to the Permaculture ethics
Earth care
Our chickens cost us nothing to keep, their sheds are made from left-over, reclaimed or natural materials found on site. Their feeders and water containers were all given to us or were bought second-hand. The water for their maintenance is harvested rain water. They have improved our soil, improved our food production system and contribute to our income without the need for external inputs.
People Care
In the spirit of “people care”, I've tried to make this text as easy and as interesting as possible.
The chickens contribute to our nutritional needs and help us contribute to the needs of our friends and family. We often use eggs as a form of exchange or as gifts, building community and improving resilience within our close network of family and friends. Irene Kightley Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design Portfolio : Free-range Chickens : page 27 of 27
They work for us in the garden, enabling me to save my energy (And my back.) for other tasks.
They also help us in our role of educating and encouraging people to keep their own chickens or to buy meat and eggs from farmers who use humane methods. That helps diminish not only the cruelty to the birds but also helps reduce the number of people who are forced to do the humiliating and dehumanising work of factory farming.
Fair share
My system of keeping free-range chickens has been seen and discussed by thousands of people who have visited our farm at Sourrou or have seen my photographs and articles in blogs and messages in forums on the internet.
I've have used my chicken designs to introduce the basic Permaculture principles to schoolchildren, college students, members of the public, the Colibris movement and many other associations and collectives.
In doing so, not only do I share my knowledge and time with people, I also hope to achieve a better understanding and respect for the chickens.
Conclusion
In some of my examples, I've mentioned how certain of my actions use the Principles of Permaculture for their success but I've not done that in every case because I felt that it would interrupt the flow of the text.
I have tried to make it clear that observation, evaluation and the application of the principles of Permaculture form the basis of each mini-design and although these designs will not work in all gardens, anyone with poultry can experiment with some of the basic ideas.
There are photographs of our chickens, turkeys, ducks and geese in this album in Flickr :
www.flickr.com/photos/hardworkinghippy/albums/72057594059621254
and more photographs on using chickens in a permaculture site in this album :
www.flickr.com/photos/hardworkinghippy/albums/72157615288270606