Plump chicken and fresh curry bush goes perfectly together, for the first couple of pecks. After that your curry bush doesn't stand a chance! At least not if the hens are as enthusiastic about herb gardens as mine are! For those of you giving my post the beady eye - relax - my four legged and feathered kids would never tolerate being put in a pot!
Years ago I thought it would be helpful to plant chicken gardens with both veggies and herbs. The idea being that the harem of hens would have access through a relatively secure fence. That way the main plant and tender growth would be protected while the hens feasted through the fence on the green growth.
There were a number of reasons for this. My main reason was that they would have a diversity of flavours as well as the goodness of different herbs. A close second reason was that the chickens (in theory) would deworm themselves on some of the herbs. I was totally blown away at just how well that worked! They l.o.v.e pecking the seeds off wormwood. Lastly we need to control critters that love eating chickens. We have a wild bird problem. Wild birds bring mites. Plenty of them!
In the recent years the battle against those blood sucking mites is escalating. As part of my natural treatment I regularly chop either garlic or aloe ferrox into their water. Aloe ferrox is an amazing plant, with healing and deworming properties - added to which it grows prolifically in our area. We've now resorted to building a second safe area for the chickens. It is in a garden we recently harvested of onion. I refrained from transplanting the rue and curry bush as I had serious doubts that it would tempt a chickens taste buds. I was clearly wrong!
We have also built a second chicken coop. The young hens began laying before we could finish and we had to make a plan with the nests as they were dropping them under that curry bush! My little egg gathering farm children are always excited by eggs. Today we were rather perplexed at the size of the one. A double yolker. Having giving birth to two children I can only imagine how that poor hen pushed that monster egg out.
Fellow homesteaders will relate to using all sorts of containers for all sorts of projects. We have a number of big drums (recycled from the commercial cheese factory). One has been halved and filled with diatomaceous earth and wood ash for their glorified sand baths. We also have white bottles (recycled from the commercial dairy). We store ... ummmm .... anything and everything in the bottles. We cut three of them in half today and have used them as nests.
We built the usual wooden nesting boxes, this time with a front and back flap. (What is it about a chicken that likes to use their nest as a glorified ablution facility?) To make cleaning easy(er) we have filled the halved bottles with lucerne (alfalfa) bale (Shhhhhhh don't tell the goats their winter snacks are now under a chicken bum)
To help in our fight against those nasty mites I chopped up a lot of herbs to top off the nest bedding. I love the aroma of freshly cut herbs.
Today it was wormwood, lavender and rosemary. It smells delicious and those feathered ladies should be strutting their aromatic stuff for the rooster soon.
Today was a really successful day on the homefront. We finished our last minute pre-freeze planting. With winter fast approaching it is good to know that the little veggies seedlings are in the kitchen garden and protected from the coming frost. And all the animals will be safe and warm. Here's to a bumper crop of organic eggs from my herb loving hens.
If not. Curried chicken sounds like rather a tasty dish.....
