I posted The Chooks: #1 The kitset arrives in 2017. And now, five years later, I post this 45th Chooks post as the last of this series. I’ve had a lot of fun, and I’ll likely have chickens again sometime.

Why I am taking a break now: I am not entirely happy with the way the narrow stretch of yard along the back of our house, which forms the chicken run, is blocked off using fence panels. This means that we access the yard to the right of our house and the yard to the left of our house separately. This is something that needs to be revised. Also, the hen house, which served me well, isn’t ideal for the long term. With every passing year, the floor level was getting lower and lower, because chooks are given to digging up the earth so much.

Things being as they are, it looks like the perfect time to take a break, get my garden back in shape, have some more veggies growing this year, and maybe purchase some outdoor furniture for the patio. That is the dream anyway.

What I did with Helen and Flossie: I put them up for sale in TradeMe, along with a few photos.

The listing got about 200 views, 65 people watching, and three questions, which was all quite promising. Meanwhile my daughter mentioned that her student was interested because their chicken Sofa had lost her companion recently and was lonely. So it was decided that I sell my chickens to them instead.

I put Helen and Flossie in a cardboard box and took them over to Sofa’s place. Sofa turned out to be a sweetie—a young bantam chicken, so much so that when Helen was taken out of the box, she looked like a giant. Their place had a large yard, which was all chicken territory, and Helen started pecking at the grass without wasting any time. Flossie was still in the box when I left them.

What ideas I have for Season 2: Next time round, I will go into it knowing more. I also have a design in my head for what an ideal coop needs to be, for my style of going about chicken matters. One, I won’t bother about nesting boxes. It’s quite fun to hunt for eggs; it’s not as if I’ll have heaps of eggs every day nor that I will miss finding the eggs in the “huge” 2m x 10m chicken run.

  • The last eggs of Season 1

Two, I will aim to have a small raised coop where I can have a bedding or base layer of straw, which I can clean out once in a couple of weeks. I want to be able to sweep the bedding out easily, without breaking my back, which is why I want the coop to be a raised one. Three, The closed-off run should not obstruct free access to humans, great and small, around the yard.

But for now, I look forward to rearranging things in the yard.