In all of the years we’ve kept chooks, they have generally been fed a complete pelleted dry food and foraged for everything else during their wanderings. It’s been more tricky since we’ve been here, partly because they have a habit of escaping from the garden which causes us no end of grief as we have to retrieve them from neighbours’ gardens and once, we were sitting in the lounge and heard a tapping on the front window. I got up to see what it was and a hen was sitting on the windowsill trying to get back in! We’ve also got a large population of urban foxes for whom a chicken or two would be considered a very tasty treat. Hence these two, Aretha and Irma have largely been confined to barracks. They come out for a couple of hours each evening when we’re home and can keep an eye on them but for the rest of the day they are literally cooped up.

Because they don’t get much foraging in, we have to supplement their food with things from the kitchen. I’ve tried them with all sorts, including cooked potato and other vegetable peelings, cooked rice, muesli on occasions if we don’t finish our breakfast and lots of salad veggies from sandwich making etc. It came as a total surprise that they LOVE tomato so much that they will literally grab it from my hand and then race around with the other in hot pursuit trying to steal it. It’s hilarious.