I was trying to figure out how old the oldest of our chooks is, and I vaguely remembered this photo. Here she is as a baby, just hatched, in this post of November 2016.
And here she is – Mrs Fluffy Feet – eight years later, which is up towards the upper end of chook life expectancy. She still lays the occasional egg, and ably defends her spot in the pecking order when I dig up worms in the chook run. She could easily become a chook centenarian at ten years old.
We have a dozen chooks at the moment in our deep litter system. Occasionally they have a scratch in the backyard or the lane, but mostly they live in a 20m2 run with a deep bed of lawn clippings, coffee grounds, bamboo biochar, wood chips, ash from the wood fire, kitchen and market scraps, leaf litter and garden prunings to scratch through. I have five neighbouring households providing their kitchen waste and lawn clippings, and the rest is all foraged and free. The chooks cost nothing to feed, and they earn their keep making compost for me. They make literally tonnes of compost a year.
The deep litter/compost is surprisingly full of worms, and black soldier fly larvae and lots of other little insects and compost processing creatures. Whenever I dig up some buckets full of it for the garden, I turn over a few forkfuls for the chooks to scratch through again. Just a few forkfuls so as to keep the breeding population of soil dwelling creatures intact. It’s a kind of tertiary processing – first the chooks scratch through and eat what they want of the kitchen scraps and garden waste, then the worms and other soil dwellers do a secondary processing of it, then the chooks scratch through again.
We get enough eggs year round for us, and in spring enough to give dozens away, and enough to make pasta for the year. But the eggs, and occasional meat when we hatch chicks and cull adolescent roosters, is a side benefit. A very valuable one, for sure – our eggs are deep golden yolked and so fresh they poach beautifully without any swirling or vinegar or fancy tricks, but the compost is the real gold.
Here in suburbia (so far at least) the pressure from predators has been not nearly as strong. I have always let my laying hens die of natural causes, but in rural homesteading the natural causes have all too often been a carpet snake, quoll, eagle or goanna. From time to time, I’d get chooks living into double digits but not so often. Here in suburbia, I might eventually have to think about how to deal with geriatric chooks occupying all the space.
For now though, it is a small joy to be able to give Mrs Fluffy Feet the chook equivalent of a Maggie Beer aged care diet. And to be eating eggs with a very clear conscience.
