How to really put your chickens to work in the garden

I’m very interested in how to use chickens as tools for a better vegetable garden and how to simultaneously give them a better life with plenty of greens and insects. I'm searching for the cleverest ways to do it. After all, we've got great fundamentals to start with: chickens eat weeds and pests, and they produce manure. There are ways of making this come together! But it’s also quite possible to keep chickens without making the most of their garden-enhancing potential.

At the outset, it’s worth stating that letting chickens roam in your garden is not an option. Everyone who has chickens will already know that! They can be very destructive.

So how can we best combine them without actually, well, combining them? I’m curious to explore this further and have some upcoming posts on it.

I got a head start recently when I visited some sustainable gardens in New Plymouth as part of the Taranaki Sustainable Backyards Trail.

In this post I'll describe two gardens that taught me plenty. I’m sure there were more that were worth visiting for new takes on this topic, but I ran out of time to get to them.

Eco-Gran’s retreat

One of my favourite gardens was the garden of ‘EcoGran’. What a great permaculture garden! It’s a compact area that’s packed with food-producing plants (and, of course, chickens).

Tricia keeps her chickens quite separate from the garden and seemed to have at least two coops and runs, which were separated from each other by a little pop door.

One of those runs and the chickens that call it home are her main composting system. All her garden waste gets thrown in there. Here she explains what she does with it.

She told me that she rakes it up every couple of weeks. She also sometimes makes a heap of the smaller stuff that gathers in the run and piles sticks over it, which gives the compost protection from the birds and time to mature underneath it. Aside from that she often gathers the loose stuff that has broken down and decayed across the ground of the run, and has of course been mixed with chicken poo, and uses that directly as compost on her garden.

The pile and one of its workers.

I think the key here is to gather it up fairly regularly, perhaps three times a year. Over the years I have thrown a lot of food scraps and green waste into the coop, but left it too long before gathering it up – as in years, I’m embarrassed to say – and ended up with extremely alkaline soil, as proven by certain crops that fail in it and laboratory soil testing. Some crops thrive in it, though.

One of Tricia's simple but perfectly functional coops.

Korito

If you are interested in permaculture, this garden is to die for. I felt like a fashionista must feel in a high-class shopping mall. It’s a much bigger space than most of us have in town, but oh, productive garden inspiration doesn’t get better than this.

There's a stream and an old patch of stunning native bush at the bottom of the garden.

Owner Dee in her food forest

I joined a tour with the owner, Dee, who showed us the round raised ‘mandala’ beds she’s built. First she built a moveable chicken “tractor” out of lightweight pipe, then she built several round garden beds to fit it!

Mandala gardens.

The coop.

When the crops in each garden are finished with, on goes the chicken tractor and her three hens. The chooks work it over for a while, living and sleeping onsite as they do. Inside the coop are a perch, a water dish (weighted by stones) and a nest box made out of an old lawnmower catcher! It has holes drilled in the bottom of it and straw inside. The chicken tractor has shade and wind protection attached to it, so the birds are protected from the elements. Dee also gives them commercial food each day.

Chickens are always a hit with the crowd!

Inside the coop.

Once the chickens have done their work removing crop remnants, decimating any weeds and their seeds, and adding their droppings, they’re moved away. Onto the garden Dee piles a layer of organic matter such as compost, then cardboard and some hay. She makes holes in this to plant the next crop.
If there’s no work for them to do in the mandala garden, Dee has other greens-filled places she puts them.

The finished product - until the cycle begins again!

Dee's website is at korito.co.nz. Personally I am very keen on doing a weekend course with her.

I hope this has given you some ideas of how to make the most of your birds in the garden. Please leave comments below with any strategies you have!

Lead in backyard eggs: Should we care?

I recently shared a Stuff article about lead in NZ backyard eggs on the Keeping Chickens NZ Facebook page. Since then I've read plenty and discussed the issue with some experts. I specifically wanted to find out for you:
(1) Is this worth being concerned about, or is it scaremongering?
(2) If you're concerned, what should you do?
(3) If your land has lead in it, can you still keep chickens and eat their eggs?

Are these all good?

Is Stuff full of stupid stuff?

A couple of FB-followers commented that they don't believe what they read on Stuff. In this case, at least, Stuff's report is valid: it's an accurate report of a paper that was published in December 2018 in the New Zealand Veterinary Journal. A summary of that study is here. It looks like a well-conducted, rigorous study.

Is lead anything to worry about?

One FB follower commented that they'd rather have backyard eggs with lead than eggs with antibiotics from stressed hens. I get that - I am a lover of things natural and homegrown. Our family's food comes as much as possible from our garden and the Farmer's Market. But if I had to choose, give me antibiotics over secretive, damaging lead any day.

Our outdoor pantry.

Our bodies need certain metals for good health - zinc and iron, for example - but lead is not a natural part of the human diet. It is an odourless, tasteless neurotoxin for which zero is the only safe level. It is never expelled from our bodies but simply accumulates. It does not biodegrade. There is an overwhelming amount of evidence that it damages brains and lowers intelligence.

Just last week a new study was released showing an association between high blood levels at age 11 and psychopathology in adulthood. The results came from nearly 600 people who were children in Dunedin in the 1970s.

There's information here from the World Health Organisation on the problem.

But lead is a fact of modern life, and below a certain level of it in our bodies (which is not zero), we seem to be okay. We cannot completely escape the lead that our predecessors put into our environment, not realising that it was harmful, so we'll all have some inside us. We just need to minimize it.

If we have babies and children, it's worth being more paranoid: they tend to ingest more of it and their developing brains are more vulnerable. The effects are thought to be irreversible. So, in my opinion, if you're a parent of little ones, it's not really your "personal choice" whether you care about lead.

However, to put things in context, since New Zealand has tackled the lead problem, modern-day children have a lot less lead in their blood than they did in the 1970s when I was born (although who wouldn't like a few more IQ points ...)

Our family's earliest days of chicken-keeping.

What the study showed

The NZ Vet Journal study showed that all the eggs in their study contained lead. Over half of them had a higher-than-safe level of lead. They also took blood samples from the chickens which, as you can imagine, had similar levels of lead as were found in their eggs.

It's worth noting that this study was conducted in backyard eggs from central Auckland, which is an area with plenty of old weatherboard houses that were likely to have been painted with lead paint. But there are plenty of those all over the country.

The study concluded that higher lead levels came from chickens living outside houses that were:
1) Clad with weatherboard;
2) Built before 1940.

Where lead comes from: paint, petrol, pesticides

We've all seen our chickens gobble cockroaches and worms covered in dirt. Yum. But chickens get lead from the soil in which they forage, and from the invertebrates they eat that live in that soil.

Chickens eat dirty stuff - much dirtier than this.

Sometimes there is lead in that soil, resting there from historical contamination. There is no way to detect it without lab tests, but there are some clues that lead might be there. Before we hand over money to lead-testers, I wanted to find out how each of us can figure out if we might have lead on our land.

I spoke to Dave Bull, a director of Hail Environmental. As we spoke, I realized that if there is anything about lead worth knowing, this guy knows it. And until he had to move house recently, he was a chicken keeper! Perfect. So, what did I learn?

Paint
NZ houses used to be painted with lead paint, and in some cases that persisted until the 1980s. Little ol' NZ was pretty slow to the international lead paint-banning party that was held to celebrate the realization of how toxic the stuff is. Dave reckons that if your house is not brick-clad and was built before 1950, it's very likely to have been painted with lead paint, and in the interim someone has probably sanded it and repainted. The sanding dust sunk into the soil and its lead will still be there.

I adore old houses. Except for the lead.

Most of it will probably be within two metres of your house - or your garage, if you have one of that era, as that was probably also painted with lead paint.

If your chickens are many metres away from your house and garage along your back fence boundary, there is probably less lead there.

Resene does free tests for lead paint - you can just take in a flake or board and give it to them. They can only tell what's on it now, of course.

Petrol
Obviously we have unleaded petrol these days, and by now you know what motivated the 1987 change to unleaded petrol. Exhaust emissions used to contain lead.

If you live on a road that was a busy traffic road before the 1990s, your front yard probably has lead in it. Happily, that lead doesn't spread far, so although it would be a bad idea to keep chooks at the front of your house, the backyard is likely to be unaffected. Dave says that the land within eight metres of the road is the bit to avoid.

Pesticides
I hate the passion-vine hoppers sucking the life out of our citrus and beans! Insect pests have been a problem for a long time, and many of our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents sprayed them, especially if they were growing crops for a living. A commonly-used spray was lead arsenate. Apparently it was brilliant at controlling all sorts of insects: grass grub, codling moth in apples, and aphids on roses. But it left lead (and arsenic) in the soil.

The ever-present annoyance of insect pests.

It's impossible to know how people gardened on your property in the past, which is a worry. But if your land used to be orchard land or market gardens - and several towns in New Zealand have expanded their housing over old horticultural land - it might be worth testing for lead.

Old industry
There are some industrial land uses that have left a legacy of high lead levels in soil. There was once a battery factory in Onehunga, for example, that has left behind lead to within 100 to 300 metres of its site.

But what about lead in commercial eggs?

Commercial eggs have been tested for lead, and the lead was below detectable levels, which is much more desirable than the studied Auckland backyard eggs. This result is from a 2016 Ministry of Primary Industries "New Zealand Total Diet Study" (see page 173 - I'm guessing these are battery cage eggs, not free range).

How do I find out if our eggs have lead?

Firstly, unless your chickens have very high lead levels, they may still appear healthy - but the levels can still be worryingly high.

If you have an old house, or keep your chickens close to a busy road, or live on old horticultural land, or have young children, it might be worth having some testing done.

You have two options:
1. Take at least one of your hens to a vet and ask for a blood test for lead. I've been told by a lovely vet at Cambridge Vets that the test will cost $100 plus the consultation fee to take the blood. She advised that a trip to the vet and the blood sampling is likely to be stressful to your hens, and more expensive than the next option:
2. Send an egg or eggs to Hill Laboratories in Hamilton (confession: my husband works there, although not in the food section! But this recommendation comes from the study author. I am not even sure there's another commercial lab in the country that can do it).

At Hill Labs, the cost is $66+GST per analysis. You can ask for that to be an analysis of one egg, or you can ask them to mix together the content of several eggs (three would provide a good average) and do one analysis on that combination. You can also ask for each egg to be analysed individually, in which case each egg will cost you the $66+GST. Just be very clear in your instructions, they tell me!
Package the eggs very carefully so they won't break when you send them. To encourage the courier to treat eggs as fragile, write FRAGILE! EGGS! on the package. You'll need to accompany your eggs with a filled-out version of this form. Contact them with any questions.

How high is too high?

In eggs, if the result is more than 0.1 mg/kg of lead, it's too high. The paper authors say that:
"There is no maximum permissible level for lead in eggs in New Zealand ... the Ministry for Primary Industries advises that lead concentrations in eggs should be ‘as low as reasonably achievable’. In the edible portion of eggs, this is a target of 0.002 mg/kg or less, based on the 2009 New Zealand Total Diet Study ... ". In the NZ Vet Journal study, all the eggs had more lead than that! Instead, they treated the maximum level as 0.1 mg/kg, which is the maximum permissible level for lead in meat, according to the Ministry for Primary Industries.

What if our eggs do have a high level of lead?

This is the toughest question to answer. I'd be talking to the people at Hill Labs about having soil testing done. Contaminants such as lead tend to be patchily distributed, and there may be low-lead parts of your property that are better suited for chicken-keeping. At that point you would probably need to get new chickens, because lead will have built up in the old ones (although see the comments from Lena, below).

If your whole property contains lead, here are some recommendations for reducing lead uptake:
- keeping new chickens away from soil on paved surfaces (you could add straw), possibly elevating the coop;
- not allowing them to free range where they can access soil and invertebrates;
- keeping them on grassed areas with no bare soil (they'd still get contaminated invertebrates, though);
- never feeding them their eggshells (buy oyster-shell grit for them instead) - and don't compost the eggshells;
- provide uncontaminated soil, ash or sand for them to dust-bathe in.

Dave Bull of Hail Environmental is a consultant who can help you figure out anything you want to know about contamination with lead or other substances, including just how worried you should be. He tells me he spends quite a lot of time telling people that the problem isn't as bad as they think.

One follower of the Keeping Chickens NZ Facebook page found out her chickens had high levels of lead, as did her soil, and shared this excellent information about her experience:

"The problem then was that I could treat them - you can inject a solution that binds lead and encourages them to excrete it from their bodies - but as soon as you got their levels down - which you can do in some cases if their load's not too high - they would reingest lead from our contaminated soil. I loved those little lasses (they were ex-battery so they'd had a tough life already) so I went as far as researching how to remediate soil. I put down matting in an area that covered their coop and run and got fresh topsoil (one garden supplies shop was able to supply guaranteed clean topsoil from a farm in the Far North). My plan was to try and rehome them but one died from egg peritonitis some months later and the second's levels kept going up (possibly from eating worms or other dirt-dwellers around the coop area).

"And then the saddest part - they excrete the lead, so their pee and poo recontaminates, or contaminates other areas."

You can read the rest of her helpful comments underneath the original Facebook page post.
_________________________

Thank you to all the experts who helped me gather this information: Professor Brett Gartrell (Massey University), Graham Corban (Hill Laboratories), Dave Bull (Hail Environmental) and Cecilia van Velsen (Cambridge Vets).

Help, my chickens are fading!

Actually, ignore the first part of that title - I don't need help. But my chickens are definitely fading.

This is a normal part of ageing for brown shavers and Hy-Line Browns. They become less brown and more blonde as they grow older.

At two years of age, this girl has become more caramel than cocoa (in real life she looks  lighter than this)

This beautiful friend of mine, for example, was quite cocoa. Then she lost a lot of her feathers in a thorough moulting session over a few weeks, and when they grew back she'd turned into caramel!

The other two haven't moulted as comprehensively, but you can easily tell which feathers are the new ones. They are a now a camouflage-like combination of chocolate and caramel (yum!).

My two dappled browns.

Their legs fade, too, becoming fairer and fairer with the years.

So in the same way as you can tell a horse's age by the length of its teeth, you can get an idea of a brown chicken's age by its degree of paleness. Except, of course, that due to natural variation in feather colour, some are pale to start with, so don't go placing any bets on the basis of colour ...

A chicken's favourite pastime

Most of us chicken keepers are keen to give our birds what they really, really want.

Well, this is what chickens love to do:

I love their total enthusiasm for kicking aside the leaves and rapidly diving in, beak first, to peck up whatever little insect or spider was hiding underneath. They'll do it again and again and again.

How do we know it's so important to them? In the wild, this is what they do for most of the day, and clever experiments have shown they'll work to get access to litter so that they can do it:

Life's sad for a chicken with nothing on the ground to scratch and peck at. At heart they're still junglefowl, so when you're creating an environment for your birds, think about what it's like at the edges of jungles (junglefowl hang out at jungle edges, not in the deep dark depths). Think piles of leaves, preferably with the deepest levels starting to decompose to feed a wealth of insects underneath.

If your birds are free-range, they'll find their own favourite places in your garden to scratch and peck. Anyone who's mulched their garden and been thrilled that it now looks like a bought one will testify to this: give the chooks 10 minutes in the garden and they'll kick aside that pretty mulch.

If your chickens are contained in a run, it can be hard work to maintain the ground to their liking. Whenever you weed the garden or sweep leaves or produce almost any vegetative matter, chuck it in their run! Throw them some spadefuls of compost. At the very least, dig over the soil in the coop to loosen it for them so they can move that around - it gets compacted quickly, especially in rainy weather, and then becomes useless for them to scratch at.

Notice in the video above how the ground level is raised. This was not intentional - it's just a result of years of throwing organic matter in there! Together with our chickens we have created a mound of goodness.

The case of the bald head: why pecking isn't always aggressive

It's easy to assume that when one hen pecks another, it's an aggressive act. "Ah, the pecking order," you might think, and feel sorry for the victim.

And sometimes it is like that, but often not. And the good news is that by setting up your chicken-keeping arrangement well, you can prevent at least one type of pecking happening.

Gentle feather pecking

Recently I witnessed something I've never seen in my birds. One hen stood over the other, delicately plucking out the feathers from either side of and behind her comb. The 'victim', who looked slightly uncomfortable, stood and allowed it to happen. You can see it in this video.

There was no aggression. The pecking was so gentle that the victim's skin was clear and unmarked. She was unattractively bald, but there wasn't a patch of blood or even pink skin.

What's more, these two birds are pals. They hang out together, and dominate their flockmate quite aggressively.

The pecker reminded me of an overly thorough cleaner who just couldn't bear to leave behind a speck of dust.

Severe feather pecking

When I was studying for my PhD with chickens, I saw something far nastier. Again, the pecks were not aggressive, and the victim did not dodge the blows. The pecks were directed not at the victim's head, but at the base of her back, above her tail. However, the 'cleaners' were not gentle, and the victim's back was bleeding.

When this happens, the instinctive blood lust of chickens takes over. They are omnivores, after all! They tend to hone in on the victim and ramp up their pecking (mmmm - flesh!), and it gets very ugly. It turns into cannibalism.

If this happens, the victim will have to be removed until she heals, or even put out of her misery.

Give them litter!

Giving hens access to litter to peck and scratch at is vital for preventing this type of bad behaviour. In fact, it's not bad behaviour that's the problem, but a bad environment.

Chickens naturally spend the majority of their day pecking and scratching at loose litter under their feet. This is not optional depending on whether they are hungry or not, although it is a food-seeking behaviour. It's just what they must do, in the same way that a cat must sleep a lot, lick its fur and seek warm places to sleep in winter and cool places in summer. It is their nature.

But I had done my birds a disservice. I'd gone away for five weeks during a wet winter, and my husband had no inclination or time to care for their run the way I would have. Let's just say that keeping food in their hopper was challenge enough. The ground was bare and muddy. The autumn leaves I usually collect and spread in their run in winter had gone into the neighbours' green bins (horror).

A bare ground is abhorrent to chickens, especially if it's wet, and they turn to a readily available source of something that seems a bit litter-like: their flockmates' feathers.

You can hear more about this here, in a short educational video from the University of Edinburgh. You can't see the whole thing unless you enrol in the course, but what you can watch is useful.

It's hard to fix - but I was lucky

I only noticed the obsessive little behaviour happening in my backyard because the victim became sick (this was the foxglove poisoning episode - in fact you can even see the gnawed foxglove plant in the background of the video above!). That fact alone shows that I wasn't caring for my birds very well, otherwise I would already have noticed the bald head.

I separated the sick bird, but I expected that when she was returned she would again be plucked. I did indeed see one more plucking episode. But then, strangely, her feathers began to grow back! Now she has a new crop of feathers, and no further problems.

The new feathers are a little bit crimped.

The new feathers are also slightly more ginger. I like redheads.

These pin-like feathers beside her comb are fortunately no longer proving irresistible to the pecker.

A solution

Once this type of obsessive pecking begins, it can become an entrenched habit. It can even be copied by other birds. So always give them something to peck at that is not each other!

If you see feather pecking happening, top up their run with weeds, leaves, compost, fresh soil - whatever you can get your hands on.

Separate the victim if necessary (and definitely if there is any blood).

You can cover the area being attacked with a repugnant solution known as coal tar. This is an old-fashioned remedy for humans, and used on irritated skin in conditions such as psoriasis. It smells really, really strong, and I can hardly imagine how it must taste.

If you have some in your medicine cabinet or can find a strong version at a pharmacy, you could spread it on the victim's skin. In spite of its smell, it is a healing thing, so it won't hurt the bird, and it should repulse the pecker.

You can buy a poultry-specific version here.

Aggression is also a problem

Aggressive attacks happen. They are how hens establish and maintain the social order, and in those cases you'll see that the peck is fast, hard and aggressive, and the victim cowers and moves away, often with a cry of what sounds like fear. This happens a lot when you first mix new birds together.

Often if you keep the birds together from a young age, with no newcomers, there is no obvious hierarchy or aggression. Sometimes there is, though. Once everyone knows their place, the attacks become rare.

When new birds are mixed in with a flock, the attacks can be brutal and frequent, and draw blood. Even your most beloved, placid hen can turn into a monster in this situation! I find that the best solution is to provide:

•  Plenty of space to escape.
•  More than one source of food and water, spread apart, so the bullies can't dominate these resources.
• A situation where the new birds outnumber the existing ones.
• Age parity - birds that haven't started laying (because they are pre-pubertal) are less able to defend themselves than sexually mature birds.
• Time - it will probably take at least two weeks for things to settle.

No matter what you do, it's a very unpleasant situation, and I try to avoid it. An all-in, all-out situation is ideal when you change flocks. That way no newcomers have to run the gauntlet of existing birds that bully them aggressively.

Does the victim mind?

To figure out what kind of pecking problem you have, ask yourself firstly whether the victim seems to mind. If she stands there and takes it, it's feather pecking, not aggression, and you probably have a litter problem. Sort that out first. In fact, sort that out right now so that the problem never occurs.

I firmly believe that the most important knowledge for chicken keepers is not what this sickness or that sickness is, but how to avoid problems in the first place. Give your birds litter, as much space as you can, a private nesting spot and a perch to sleep on. Those fundamentals will go a long way to stop you having to look up what's wrong with them, because they will be healthy and lovely!

How I poisoned and choked my chicken - and she survived

This week I have three vigorous, healthy hens. Only one is giving me eggs, but these are only year-old birds, and I know that as the days lengthen, their egg-laying hormones will switch on and omelette time will be with us again.

But last week I was ready to dig a big hole and bury all three of them. One was mysteriously sick, one was obsessively plucking the sick one's head, and the other was just coming out of a severe moult.

I had been away from home for weeks, and they had lacked the extra TLC I usually give them over winter. There were even a couple of days when their Grandpa's Feeder was empty. Woops.

The poisoning

After my return home, I spent a sunny few hours weeding the vegetable garden and tossing the weeds into their run. It was paradise for them, as they nibbled and pecked and scratched! I love their happy, busy sounds at such times.

I also threw in a foxglove plant. Those things come up like weeds around our garden. The plant got well chomped by at least one hen, and looked like a bigger version of this:

A common foxglove plant in winter. They like to grow in sunny spots.

The next day, I noticed one of the girls was sitting still and hunched. At one point she moved quickly to get some chickweed I threw them, and she stumbled and fell.

The health inspection

I haven't had to deal with a lot of chicken sickness in the eight or so years I've been an urban chicken keeper, but I checked her for what I know to look for:
- her vent - but it was pale pink and clean.
- her throat area - but it was not fluid-filled, and no liquid came out of her when I tipped her upside down.
- her legs and feet - were they red, swollen or broken? Nope.

I did notice she had a bald patch on her head. The exposed skin was perfectly clean and undamaged.

Mystery upon mystery.

The realisation

On day 4 she looked so miserable that I decided I had to put her out of her misery. She was skinny and still. Her feathers were fluffed up and her tail pointed towards the ground. Her comb, however, was very red and pert, which confused me. At the last minute I decided to check with Dr Google about sick chickens with no other symptoms.

There it was: digitalis poisoning. I had known foxglove contains digitalis, from which the heart drug digoxin is made (or modelled on these days, possibly). But throwing foxglove into the coop? This apparently used a completely different part of my brain. Doh.

Digitalis alters heart muscle contractions, in a way that can help if you are a human with heart failure or an ineffective heart rhythm, but in a way that is very unhelpful in the wrong dose to a creature or person with a normal heart.

I had poisoned my hen.

Fortunately, one helpful message board said that it would take a few days to clear her system, and that she should be separated from the others and kept warm.

Nursing the sick hen

Each night I brought her inside, sitting her in our roadside recycling bin lined with barley straw. I covered the bin with an old woollen jumper with the corner folded back to provide an air hole. This cover made it dark for her, and therefore kept her calm (she wasn't well enough to jump out, but I didn't want to frighten her).

The night-time hospital bed.

I sat her just inside our back door, because although beside the fire in the lounge is warmer, I decided she wasn't used to such temperatures and it might be too hot for her.

During the day I put her in a pen next to her friends to keep her happy. Sometimes sick birds need to be completely separated, but her illness wasn't contagious, and hens like their friends. She had food and water on offer, but barely touched it. She got skinnier and skinnier.

Recovery and a terrible near miss

After a week I noticed she was eating a bit and producing a bit more poo. Next day, I took her outside in the morning, and before I put her down I offered her some of her regular pellets from my hand. She was hungry, and ate!

Then things went wrong. Her head twisted to one side, and soon she started twitching. I put her on the ground and she lay on her back spasming. Her eyes were closed. I was sure she was dying in front of me.

Oddly, my brain kept working calmly. She had been getting better - she was hungry - she ate a solid pellet. Could she be choking?

I picked her up and held her upside down, head first, gently rocking her repeatedly downwards. She stopped spasming and became very still. Sadly, I laid her down on her patch of dry barley straw. Her eyes were closed and her head and beak lay flopped on the ground.

Then I noticed she was breathing hard. She took huge, laboured breaths as if she had suffocated and was recovering. I think she had been choking, and it had cleared.

A few hours later she was wandering around, tail perky, pecking at things as if nothing had happened!

There is nothing wrong with me now.

Today, she is wildly healthy, and I suspect it's her giving me the daily egg. Her head feathers are growing back. That was another mystery I solved - she had been at the mercy of her flockmate's beak - but I'll save that for another post!

Have you dealt with digitalis or other accidental poisoning before? Does foxglove grow in your garden? When it's flowering, which is in summer, it looks like the image below. Bumblebees love it, and I think it's beautiful. But it's also terrible.

Thanks to TERRAIN.net for this image.
They have more photos, and good close-ups of the leaves: click here for their full report. 

The foodie who keeps chickens: pavlova and omelet

Sometimes as I beat eggs I imagine an alien watching the process. Wouldn't he/she/it be amazed that a simple egg can be transformed into something so unrecognisable and delicious - and into such a range of dishes?

It's something we take for granted, but I love to look at things as if I came from outside our culture in order to get rushes of pleasure from the many wonderful things we see as ordinary, just because we see them all the time.

One of those things is the ability, even on small urban sections, to keep feathery livestock and grow our own fruit and vegetables. The part of me that is still a little girl sees that as a fairy tale opportunity, and longs to do that when she grows up. The part of me that is turning 45 this year hears that child, and gets out there to tend the chickens and plant the seeds to make sure I make the most of the opportunity afforded to me, even when there a million other things to do in this busy life. Some things I just will not compromise on!

Chickens for the Foodie

I'm also unable to compromise on good food. I am a thorough food lover and cook, and this works well with a bit of urban homesteading. Yes, I may be eating plums for the 20th day in a row, but they are only ripe on the tree for a few weeks, taste far better than anything you can buy in the shops, and I'm going to damn well make the most of them!

Our Luisa plum tree today

Last weekend I made a large pavlova (with our own eggs) for a neighbourhood barbeque, and topped it with our own sliced deeply red and flavoursome Hawera plums. I forgot to photograph it, but the top photo of this post shows a little extra one I made for my family at the same time, so we could enjoy it the next day. It's decorated with our homegrown blueberries. I'm a bit of a pavlova queen, and use Nigella Lawson's recipe in How To Eat. I'm sorry I can't share a link to it; it's not one of her online recipes. I'm sure your local library will have the book. She has more elaborately flavoured pavlova recipes on her website, https://www.nigella.com/, but I haven't tried them.

My daughter, niece and nephew taking turns beating the
Christmas pavlova last year, under my instruction.
It was one of my favourite parts of Christmas!

Top tips

My top pavlova tips are to beat in the sugar thoroughly, just a tablespoon or so at a time, and to use somewhat aged eggs. You want them to be at least a week old - not a problem for supermarket egg buyers, obviously, but a matter of management for chicken keepers.

Another thing to think about from a fresh perspective: how about those electric beaters, eh? Aren't we lucky? Our grandmothers used egg-beaters, the muscle-powered kind! I once made a pav like that, with a couple of other women taking turns beating, because the electric beater was nowhere to be found. All agreed that it was the best pavlova we'd ever had.

My next use-up-eggs recipe is to be the Buckwheat and Cherry Cake recipe here. It comes from the January 2017 New Zealand House and Garden magazine. It's basically a classic sponge cake with buckwheat flour instead of cornflour and plain flour - a bit Black Forest Gateaux-ish. I'll use our homegrown berries instead of cherries.

The perfect omelet

The omelet - something so hard to spell correctly, I find, but so quick to make to use your backyard protein source. I pack my omelets with vegetables, herbs and cheese for a great lunch. Mine aren't overly photogenic, but after just reading this article on bite.co.nz, I think they're about to get better. I hope you find it inspiring, too.

Eggs = good food

So, from my tastebuds and stomach, I say each day as I collect eggs from the nest box: Thank you, ladies.

Today's haul (from three hens)

I wish you much happy, healthy eating with your own eggs and produce!