Looking out my kitchen window this morning, cuppa in hand, I discovered that our back yard had become Chooky Paradise over night!

Thanks to the gorgeous down-pour last night, our yard became one massive playpen for our girls, and they were lapping it up! Just look how happy they are:

And so, on that note, I vowed that today I would FINALLY blog about our gals! I have been meaning to do it for ages, and we have now had them for 21 weeks, and they are yet to grace this page! How remiss of me, they are part of the family!

So, I went to work today gathering all of the pics I've been shooting of them since we welcomed them, and I am soooooooo sad to say that I can't find most of them! Between shooting for Bacche and a million other things, I think that I have deleted them from memory cards thinking that I had stored them onto my hard drive and not actually done it! :( I had the most adorable pics of them when they were only a day old, and at various intervals whilst they were still in their little brooder box, and one particular shoot I had Jaimyn, my eldest, cuddling his in the chooky pen and it was sooooo cute! Fingers crossed that I will find them in my travels one day when I am searching for something else amdist the perpetual clutter and chaos that constitutes my various computers!

Ok, so for now, you will all have to be content with some more recent shots of them! And so, without further ado, I would formally like to introduce you to our chookies aka "The girls"!

1. Fluffy and cuddly as can be is our Light Sussex, "Peckie". We coined her name for obvious reasons, namely because she has taken to the habit of pecking at the wart on Molly-Rose's knee! :) She also has a weird obsession with pecking my toes when they are painted with red nail polish! Peckie is Zali's chooky, and she is so soft to touch!

2. Next is "Ebony". Ebony is a Barnevelder and her beautiful lacey patterned feathers are characteristic of this. She is also Jaimyn's chook. He wanted to name her "Blacky" which I convinced him was extremely un-original. Come to think of it, so is Ebony, but at least it is a little more sophisticated than "Blacky". Her feathers have this gorgeous golden shimmer when the sun hits them at just the correct angle. She is divine! Hey, how would that be for a name - "Shimmer"!? Maybe I'll suggest that to Jaimyn! Poor girl, she'll be having a major identity crisis with all of these name changes!

3. The third of our girls is "Speedy", again, for obvious reasons! (note to self: encourage children to think "outside the square"!). Speedy is Molly-Rose's chooky. She is a Plymouth Rocks, hence the stripes. She is bloody hard to catch, and loves to let you just near enough that you think you can confidentally grab her before she bolts, usually leaving you bum up, with a face full of dirt and chook poo!

4. Lastly, we meet "Heather"! Why "Heather"? Well, because it rhymes with feather, of course! And Kudos to my son, Keegan for thinking of the name all by himself! Finally, one of my kids comes up with something at least a little bit imaginative!

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The lovely Heather is the only one left of our original girls and is a hybrid Isabrown. She is also responsible for THIS:

That there egg is our very first ever gift from our chookies! It was discovered on Monday morning 19th October, and judging by the state it was in, we're thinking that there was a good amount of straining and hard work gone into getting that out! This is because yes, those are some pretty decent chooky, erm, skid marks, you are looking at there (excuse the expression!). The discovery was made on the day that our chookies turned precisely 20 weeks old, and they are supposed to begin to lay at 20 weeks, so we are pretty proud of their impeccable timing!

After the joyous discovery of our very first egg, the kids of course launched into a tirade of arguments over just whose chook was the "gift-giver"! It was even suggested that we separate each chook into their very own pens until another egg was discovered so that we could work out who the culprit was! Well, we are glad to say that the issue sorted itself out pretty quickly as we have been noticing that Heather is spending pretty much every morning roosting in the coop whilst the others are scratching about merrily, and only comes out after a nice warm egg is deposited in the laying box for us to collect!

Upon doing some further research, we also discovered that she, being the only hybrid of the lot is more likely to be a "good lay", ooops, "good layER" hehe. So, the mystery was solved! Much to Jaimyn's consternation, Keegan has been eagerly gloating since the laying began about just how much cooler his chicken is than anybody elses, so the other kids are impatiently awaiting the day that they are greeted with more than one egg when they tend to the chooks.

I might add that despite being the only one whose chooky is giving him said "gifts", Keegan is the most difficult to motivate in the care of the chooks and we have to spy on him each time it is his turn to tend to them to make sure he is completing all of the required tasks thoroughly! The sneaky little so and so will do ANYTHING to get out of doing it but one utterance of the "b" word quickly gets him moving! (The "b" word stands for "banning" and is in reference to Keegan's use of the computer, his DS, the Xbox and the TV and basically any other computerised gadget available in the house!).

Ok, so despite a sad start (3 of our original 4 day old chickens died within 2 days of receiving them from an unknown virus and were replaced by the ones that we have now), our girls are proving to be such wonderful pets! Scruffy our Maltese x Foxy loves them too and has spent the past month playing bodyguard and scaring off the menacing Magpies that keep swooping them each morning! He's a pretty scary looking dog our Scruffy, I wouldn't want to get in his way either, being a huge Maltese and all!

So, a word of warning to anyone who is considering getting chooks! Yes, they are awesome for ridding you of your kitchen scraps! Yes, they give you yummy fresh eggs! Yes, they are such a great easy to care for pet and they produce great fertiliser... HOWEVER, that fertiliser doesn't come from nowhere you know! That fertiliser is a result of the fact that they poo aLOT!! I cannot emphasise this enough!! Our backyard is so full of landmines we never attempt to enter it without shoes, or if we do, we do so at our own risk and fully expecting the inevitable "Code Brown"! The kids have a new chant that they like to call out when they see someone standing still with chook poo oozing through their toes, it goes something like this: "Code Brown! Code Brown! Sound the alarm! Waargh! Waargh! Waargh!" They seem to take GREAT joy in leaving the poor victim stranded there in the back yard whilst running up the stairs to tell me of the impending horror faced by the "Code Brown-ee". Worst still is the fact that Neo, who STILL is not walking, seems to take great fascination with the land mines and we have had MANY close calls where a handful of fresh, warm chook poo was within centimetres of becoming his morning tea! It was totally FOWL (pun intended)!

Well, we came up with an EGGSELLENT idea and we installed some, you guessed it, CHICKEN WIRE around the shaded pergola area! Now, it all makes sense! The penny has finally dropped for me and I understand just why that stuff is called "chicken wire"! It ain't pretty, but it works, and at least we can step out our back door and only have to worry about stepping into the dogs bowl and half-eaten dog food rather than chicken poop! :)

Food - ok, well our chooks are pretty spoilt and are fed on only 100% organic laying mash, which was previously 100% organic baby chicken food. We have discovered that when it comes to kitchen scraps they aren't keen on anything that is GREEN! HOWEVER, they ADORE red! Strawberries cause all manner of chaos when we scatter them in the backyard, and as mentioned above, my red toe nails regularly feel the brunt of their excitement too. For a fun morning, place a quarter of a watermelon in the middle of the grass and watch them DESTROY it! It is such a laugh and amazing to see what is left (ie. nothing but a paper thin piece of the GREEN skin that they won't eat!) at the end of the fun!

Naturally, they LOVE worms too, and it is a free-for-all whenever it is time for us to dig a spot to bury our Bokashi waste and they see the wriggling going on in the soil! (Watch during the next week as I will be posting about our Bokashi experiences too!)

Ok, so before I send you all to sleep with my prattling on, I'd better share some more pics with you:

Here they are in chooky paradise, getting to work laying some of the aforementioned land mines as Steve gets to work in the background cleaning their coop:

And here is Neo, giving Peckie a "gentle" haircut...

Run, Peckie, Run!

(I think she'd better be a faster mover when he learns how to walk!)

Their pad:

A bit of bling for their pad, and despite appearances, this is not a wind vane! It is actually a chooky compass! The arrow says "this way to the roosters, girls!"!

Neo, chillin' with his crew, when they were about 6 weeks old:

And again, last week on the maiden egg laying day (on a side note, look how brown the grass is compared to the first shot above the rain we had last night is MUCH needed):

And finally, a family portrait:

Ok, enough from me, this has turned into the Ben Hur of blog posts! If I haven't convinced you by now to get THE most eco-friendly pets in the world, then nothing will, but at least I had a very eggstraordinary time trying!

PS we live smack-bang in the middle of the 'burbs in Brisbane, so you can't use living in the city as an excuse either!