The Amazing Chook

I never thought I could go ga ga over a chook, after all they are just something you eat on a Sunday night aren't they? You just buy it at the supermarket and take it home and cook it. That was before my son was diagnosed with ADHD at the age of five.  At that point we decided not to put him on the drug Ritalin or any other drug.  What we did was clean up his diet and went organic where we could.  Which wasn't very easy in the early 1990s.  One of the most memorable moments was comparing his organic chicken breast to ours (purchased from the supermarket) and saw that his looked pink and healthy, whilst ours looked grey and off.  The taste was different too. We ended up getting an organic Turkey for Christmas dinner that year and the taste was devine.  It's hard to say that we went back to supermarket food, but we did.  Cost and time was an element and the fact that Ben was swapping his gluetin free, sugar free, preservative free, organic food with other kids in the play ground.  Somethings never went back into his diet (like Coke a Cola) and we limited what sugar and preservatives he had to help him.  That and lots of love and changing primary schools to one that supported him and our decision not to put him on drugs helped Ben become the man he is today.

Since then, two other members of our family (niece and nephew) have been diagnosed with Autism and one sister is aggressively pursuing the link to diet and digestive issues now associated with this disorder.  So she is now on the path I was 16 years ago and thankfully it's much easier to get organic food.  We of course, supply her eggs from our amazing chickens who huddle around us for scraps and pellets and proudly announce arrival of their eggs by clucking rather loudly.  We have a lovely male Bantam Rooster who is an absolute delight to have.  He shows off to the girls, looks after them and is a pleasure to be around.  We put him into a cage in the shed at night as he tends to crow at all hours of the morning and continually for about 5 minutes.  He's used to the routine now and walks (and sometimes bounds) down to the chook yard in the morning.

We have a large chook yard (as shown in my last update show) and our new addition is a chook tractor.   It was built out of scraps where possible and used giant bamboo for the frame.  The bamboo was collected from a friends place down the road.  In the tractor we have four of our old girls which were purchased for next to nothing from an egg farm.  These girls do not lay very often but still enjoy the social life of a hens life.  They scratch the dirt and create baths, fertilize where ever they go and generally prepare the bed for the next planting by eliminating old plants and all weeds.  This is why I think they are amazing.  They do this work for us, for next to nothing..  Occasionally we put Fifi in (a rooster we named as a chick when we didn't know she was a he), just to keep the girls amused (they hen peck him and put him in his place).

If you'd like to see what it looks like in action , click here: