Joshua and his girls

As promised last week I am now going to introduce you to the Cluck Brigade. One of my dreams about homesteading involved chickens, ducks and quails. Almost three years ago I was getting frustrated I still hadn't any poultry and decided it was high time. So I bought myself a smallish chicken coop to get me started.

This turned out to be a wise move. Not long after I heard of somebody who needed to find a new home for her flock due to poor health (hers, not the chickens), and two days later I was able to pick up a rooster and three hens for no cost. They are Dansk Landrace chickens, Danish country breed. Supposedly one of the older, unaltered breeds of chicken, and can be traced back some 2000 years. They had been on my shortlist of breeds I was interested in.

Say hullo to Joshua.


So Joshua, Amelia, Beatrix and Cecily moved in to Fowlty Towers. The first few days they only had the small run for going out, but then we constructed a larger area with some netting and bales of straw. About a week later we were all ready for them to become free range.

I knew when they moved in that Fowlty Towers was on the small side for the four of them, and started building a larger coop. Unfortunately it proved to be too much for me to manage along trying to focus on eating and keeping the house, especially as that was the summer of house renovations, so dad ended up building the bulk of it. And it was fortunate that Pear Tree Lodge was being made, because one of the hens ended up hatching three chicks.

You can tell by the difference in wing development which order they were hatched

I had decided that any cockerels would be sacrificed in the name of discovering whether or not I could cope with slaughtering and eating my own chickens. And any hens would be sold off. As things turned out, all three chicks turned out to be female, and I was advised to keep them so Joshua had a larger flock to occupy him. Possible inbreeding on this level was deemed to not be a cause for concern. So at the end of 2013 I had a flock of one rooster and six hens.