I know, I know, it is sooo middle class.

Kind of like the new stone cladding.

Or the new companion to every IKEA kitchen.

If you do not believe me, check out the Eglu. The coop for people with far more money than sense…

But today we collected three chickens. They were from the British Hen Welfare Trust, and are all ex battery hens, so have had a pretty crap life up till now. Battery hens are all disposed of (in the sense of ‘killed’) after one year of production, as egg productivity drops. In the first year, each hen will lay around 300 eggs, but these 18 month old hens will probably manage around 4 a week now.

Two dozen eggs a week- more than enough for us, although William will eat as many eggs as you will put in front of him.

If it is not obvious why we wanted to keep hens (apart from just being pretentious!) then perhaps you can call round and have breakfast with us some time- fresh egg with chunky toast anyone?

They are all a bit scraggly and the expectation is that they will take a few weeks to settle in to their new coop before we will see any eggs, but when we opened up the box that the chickens had travelled home in, one of them had rewarded us already with a nice brown egg!