Most of you will have never heard about the British sit-com The Good Life so go here and you’ll start to understand why people are using it to describe our family recently.

It was the Easter Holidays this past weekend which sort of explains my absence from blogging but it’s mostly down to the chickens. I’m going to be blaming a lot on the chickens from now on…

Due to a bad run of weather at the tail end of last week we unfortunately didn’t manage to get the chicken run built but we did manage to finish off sealing/painting the coop before the birds turned up. Our garden is fully enclosed so finishing the run wasn’t that important but it does need finished before my wife returns to work this week so you can guess what my plans are for this evening!

On Saturday we drove out to a local village to meet someone that my wife had met on the Practical Poultry forums. After having a look around his garden and his setup I think my wife was insanely jealous but we came away with our two birds as well as a good few eggs for our incubator. Since then I have been trying to fit in building the run with the help of #2 and trying to fit in some quality time with the rest of the family.

So far I’ve managed to get a basic frame up which will let us get the wire mesh on tonight after a little bit of strengthening and once we’ve sourced the roofing we’ll get that on at a later date.

I’m not a carpenter as this picture will testify but hopefully it will do the job until we want to improve/update the run in a few years time.

So far from this project we’ve had questions from the kids on genetics, carpentry and sex. I think we’ve managed to answer everything we’ve been asked but some of the questions completely threw me at first! How do you sex baby chicks? How are eggs made? Why do only some of them hatch? Why is that bit of the run bent? I think we’ve came to understand that #1 knows everything there is to know about (as far as a 6 year old knows) about where eggs come from now and what makes a boy chicken and what makes a girl chicken. I’ve also came to understand that #2 isn’t as destructive as we think he is. I’ve never met a child that has the same effect on a room as a hurricane will have on campsite but in the hours that he was helping me his destructive streak turned into creative building session. When I hammered in the nails he spent the next 5 minutes hammering non-existent nails into the wood and checking that it was sturdy. You might think that it was just a son copying his father but he then spent the next 15 minutes building up the track for a wee plastic toy town we keep in our shed. He never does that. He usually plays with the cars and throws everything about instead.

My wife’s always been an animal lover and it seems we have a new project on the go. Ever since we first met she’s wanted to have chickens. Even when we lived 3 stories up she wanted to have chickens!

Anyway in just under two weeks time the first batch of chickens will be arriving so we’ve got a lot of work to get done in preparation. This weekend we have to get the garden cleared, the coop put in place and the run built. It’s been a good few years since I built anything on a scale like this so I’m eager to see how things turn out but I’m also looking forward to building it with the help of my 6 year old step son and my 2 year old.

photo credit: thegreenpages

There are lots of things to take into account when building the run such as making it fox-proof and the like so almost everything we do I’m going to have to explain why we’re doing it. Why dig and lay the fence under the ground for example.

Most of all though it’s the first step in our plans for getting home grown food on our plate. We’ve got a vegetable patch to set up as well but its the life cycle of the chickens that I think will have the biggest impact on the kids. We’re starting off with a few hens to see how things go but pretty soon we’ll have an incubator and will be hatching our own and there is the very real chance we will be eating our chickens. Whilst I’m perfectly happy with this I can see our kids quickly becoming vegetarians overnight. If you explain where beef comes from to our eldest he screws his face up and says thats disgusting but will still eat it the next time it’s put in front of him. I think it may be a different story if he seen the animal pecking away in our garden the day before it ends up on his plate though.