Why You Should Start Keeping Chickens in Your Backyard
My colleague Sabina has started a mini-farm in her backyard. By now, she feels like a real hobby farmer when she walks into her backyard with a bucket of feed to feed my new pets: two chickens. By now, she’s such a fan of these new house—or rather: garden—animals that she could shout it from the rooftops. Hence this plea for keeping chickens.
I don’t have to walk my new pets, they don’t leave hair on my black sweater and they don’t dig their claws into the new sofa. Instead, they weed my backyard, clear out all the slugs and spiders, make short work of my kitchen waste and will soon provide fresh eggs. My life has taken a new turn since two chickens moved into a coop in our backyard.
No pimple popper videos, but watching chickens
I had been dreaming about chickens in the garden for a while. It seemed so cozy to me, all that scratching around and clucking. But experienced chicken keepers also told me very different stories: the entire garden dug up, mountains of smelly chicken manure and all those eggs that start coming out of your ears after a while. Still, I couldn’t let it go. Just as other people get happy watching videos by Dr. Pimple Popper or secretly watching porn, I spent entire evenings reading about chicken breeds, coops and chicken feed.
Clucking from the back seat
And then I saw an online ad from someone looking for a new home for her two bantam chickens. Two! And bantams! So the entire backyard of our row house wouldn’t have to be converted into a laying shed and run, and there would still be room for a bench, the herb garden, the apple tree and the rest of the green jungle alongside a little coop. A white one and a pink one, two free-roaming candyfloss clouds in the backyard—it seemed perfect to me. They came home with us in a moving box, where a little coop was waiting for them. From the back seat, we heard them softly clucking, and they immediately thought their new coop was the most normal thing in the world.
Delicious, risotto!
And now they’ve been scratching around the garden for a few weeks. Besides laying feed and pikmix (that really is what chicken feed is called), they get something tasty from the kitchen every day, because chickens love leftovers. A stub of carrot, leftover cauliflower, a handful of lettuce: it all disappears in no time. A little risotto with basil and mozzarella? They happily clucked their way over to it. Raisins? They went absolutely wild. Strangely enough, they kicked the boiled potato out of the coop, and they’re not interested in arugula either.
Trading advocaat
That mountain of eggs will work itself out. I’ll simply bake Red Velvet cake more often, we’ll make omelets, mayonnaise, pancakes and occasionally bring a box to the neighbors—or I’ll set up an illegal advocaat business. The only downside: grilled chicken. I love a really juicy roast chicken, with lemon and rosemary inside, but now I’m not sure I’ll still enjoy making it. On the first evening the chickens lived here, stir-fried chicken thighs with ketjap and broccoli were on the menu, and I didn’t really dare post that on Instagram: imagine if the chicken lady saw it!
On the other hand, the chickens themselves eat everything, even… chicken, so perhaps I’ll just have to get over it after a while.
