Tag Archives: Ixworth chickens

The National Poultry Show 2013 (1)

Posted on January 2, 2014 | Leave a comment

I’m a bit behind with this blog post, since the National was held on 16th and 17th November 2013. We’d thoroughly enjoyed the show in previous years, and so it’s a fixture on our calendar. We went on the Saturday. Unlike 2012, though, when it was crowded almost from the moment the doors opened, this show was nothing like as well-attended. But (to our untutored eyes at least) the standard of the birds was absolutely superb.

So this blog entry is going to be a picture-fest of chickens. Be warned!

These colourful "gate guardians" were on sale at one of the trade stands.

These colourful “gate guardians” were on sale at one of the trade stands.


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Chickens and eggs

Posted on December 22, 2013 | Leave a comment

We’ve made a start on culling the Year 1 cockerels. Last year we were fortunate in getting 9 hens and 5 cockerels. This year, out of our dozen, we had only 4 girls and 8 boys.

Although we left the hatch until fairly late, because of the unseasonably cold wet spring, they’ve matured quite early. The cockerels are fighting, crowing, and pressing their attentions on the hens. And much to our surprise, this morning we found a small brown egg, nicely formed and with a firm shell. We haven’t even put them on layers’ rations yet!

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Ixworth chicken update

Posted on November 6, 2013 | 1 comment

There’s no real trigger for this post, other than I haven’t shown any chicken pix for a while.

Here are this year’s hatch (known as the Year Ones):

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Two generations of Ixworths

Posted on September 26, 2013 | 4 comments

It’s end of day one at the allotment for our new flock. They had a good run this morning, and a brief outing late this afternoon. The new birds are loving their outside time. They’d really worn their little patch of garden lawn to a frazzle, and now they’ve got lovely long grass once again.

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Chickens’ New Home

Posted on September 26, 2013 | Leave a comment

We’ve spent the last week or so reinforcing the second run at the allotment, which was broken into by a fox last year. Another layer of heavier duty weldmesh has been added to the bottom half.

Last night was the night that this year’s newly hatched chickens moved from the back garden, where they were getting a bit cramped, to the allotment. We moved them at dusk, putting them into the house and hoping they’d roost straight away, but they were having none of it, and came straight out into the run. I was a wee bit worried that the smell of the creosote that I’d used against red mite had put them off, but I needn’t have worried. When we checked on them after dark, they were roosting snugly.

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Fruit and chickens

Posted on September 12, 2013 | Leave a comment

Discovery apples signify late summer, but when the more mainstream varieties come on stream, we have to admit that it’s nearly autumn. The Discovery cordon on our new allotment has quite finished fruiting. It’s been given a quick summer pruning, but I’ll need to cut back all that top growth later:

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Spring is in the air

Posted on January 29, 2013 | 1 comment

I know that there’s still a lot of rain about, but the temperatures aren’t quite as low as they have been, and the days are getting longer. At the weekend, the chickens had a good long run outside, which gave us the opportunity to change the straw bales in the run. They certainly enjoyed investigating the nice clean windbreak, although as we left they were already busily pulling it to pieces.

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Ixworths in the snow

Posted on January 20, 2013 | Leave a comment

Here on the north-west edge of London we haven’t suffered too badly with snow compared with other parts of the country, but a good covering on Friday has been compounded by another one today. We went down after church to replace the chickens’ drinking water, and also to add a layer of Aubiose to the coop so that they had somewhere warm and dry to snuggle down.

The urban foxes had been busy! Not only were there tracks everywhere, but one hopeful had burrowed into a pile of woodchips that I’d temporarily stacked against the smaller henhouse.

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Purple Hen

Posted on January 13, 2013 | Leave a comment

We don’t give our chickens names as a rule. The cockerel is called Billy (after a vulgar expression implying that he’s more noise than action), and the senior hen is called Cromwell because she has a growth on her beak that looks like a wart. But now, albeit temporarily, we have a new name – Purple Hen.

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Integrating the flocks

Posted on January 2, 2013 | Leave a comment

We’ve been maintaining two small flocks of birds for a while, corresponding to our two hatches of eggs early in the season. The first batch turned out to be 3 boys and 5 girls. We chose the best looking (in terms of Ixworth standards) of the cockerels, and culled the other two. The flock became known as “the allotment chickens”, because they were transferred to the allotment first, leaving “the garden chickens” behind for the time being. The garden chickens consisted of 2 cockerels and 4 hens.

We’ve now got just one big happy family.

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