As part of our mini-sustainability programme, we’ve been growing an assortment of vegetables to see what works in our garden and what we can actually use. Our root vegetable adventures have all gone well but, other than tomatoes and spinach, our above-ground crops tell a whole other story. It turns out that we have rather active resident rodents lurking behind / under the compost bins. These charming little critters seem to have quite the refined palate and consistently pipped us to the post on the broccoli and the Italian cucumbers. Being the refined eaters that they are, they prefer to sample and move on – causing just enough damage to ensure what’s left isn’t useable. The last straw was when they then went for the plums, nibbling and discarding as they foraged. The little blighters even ventured to gnaw on the pink grapefruit when pickings got a bit slim!
Clearly it was well past time to do something more than put out ‘eco-friendly’ traps of various sorts that have zero effect except perhaps to make the rodents snigger to themselves at the human ineptness as they nom their way through zucchini and so forth. Discussing this with DaughterDearest – my local equivalent of wildlife-and-farming wrangler – we came up with two alternatives, neither of which held enormous appeal: 1) get a kitten / cat, or 2) get some chickens – replacing the pair we had about 10 years ago, who were admittedly excellent little raptors.
Now, although I’m very fond of my five grand-kitties and enjoying spending cuddle time with them, petting them and telling them they’re beautiful, I’m very happy to then go home to my little fox of a dog, no kitty litter boxes and no dramas about keeping her indoors. Ignoring any feeding and/or cleaning aspects of cat ownership, acquiring one sounded like a complicated and also seemed to come with all manner of complicated issues that sounded unlikely to make my life easier. For best outcomes, DD suggested keeping the cat indoors for the first six months or so to ensure she knew where and who home was. After that, it would be good to walk her on a harness to get her used to the scope of her domain (the garden edges), then move on to walking her OUTSIDE the property so that she learned how to come home and not to venture onto the road.
Right. That’s so not happening! The rodents are eating the crops NOW and watching the decimation of my hard work for an additional 6 – 9 months across the prime growing seasons of spring and summer whilst training up a possible solution didn’t sound like the best investment of my time. Also, our little fox is a free ranging hound – she comes and goes as she pleases and wouldn’t take well to being shut in – or out – of the house during kitty-training.
That left us with the chicken option to consider. Coincidentally, DD had a few spares up at the farm from a fairly recent hatching and said she was happy to pass a couple of the young ones on to us. As an undertaking it seemed fairly straightforward: build a hutch, whack up some fencing, get some feed and straw, install chickens – and goodbye rats. After discussions with Himself, we decided to give it a go. After all, we’d had backyard chickens once before and, although the memories of them had dimmed somewhat after a decade, neither of us remembered it being unduly tricksome. The words “how hard could it be” were voiced…
Some research later saw me ordering a flatpack ’chicken cabana’ – which sounds a lot fancier than it actually is, although it is pretty nifty. In due course said cabana was constructed (despite the instructions included) and the next phase commenced. This involved a number of cascading events, because no plan is ever as simple as it sounds to start with. Over the next couple of weeks we had to:
- relocate a small tangelo tree to our verge garden, but
- only after relocating a small lemon tree from there into a pot for rehoming,
- moving the compost bins, but
- only after emptying them first
- erecting a run under the fruit trees, but
- only after constructing an access way (steps and gate)
In due course all was done and a positively palatial domain awaited the arrival of our two rather bedraggled-looking fowls. Bedraggled because they’d been given a bit of a hard time by a young rooster up on the farm, but also because they’re naked neck chickens and tend to look a bit that way at the best of times. Although sometimes known as turkens, naked necks are simply fearsomely ugly chickens (fuglies) with no neck feathers and quite distinctively featherless bottoms. They’re pretty much flightless, good layers and don’t suffer heat stress as much as other chickens – definitely a plus in Perth and a win for us.
On top of all that, our girls are frizzles. This means they have curly, rather than flat, feathers, apparently caused by an incomplete dominant gene (F) that results in the feather shafts curling upwards and outwards rather than straight (like a regular chicken). This anomaly makes the ‘pretty much flightless’ naked necks very definitely flightless, making free ranging them a lot simpler for us as we won’t have to factor in clipping wings and so forth. But the frizzle-factor doesn’t reduced their general fugliness, or not yet anyway. Perhaps when their feathers – lost in the stress of the move and seasonal moulting – grow back, we’ll be amazed by their quirky beauty!
