Advantages
The advantages of having your own poultry can be many and varied. Many of our household food scraps are recycled through the poultry leaving us with usable product. Also at the end of the productive life there is meat in the offing.

From the left. Two hen eggs, aylsbury duck egg, cayuga duck egg with its blue colour and the two small eggs are from the bantams.

The soothing effect of having poultry going about their business is one that should not be overlooked.

Hens
We purchased four hens the year we arrived here and from then we have bred our own replacements. About the only advantage of full sized hens is that they lay a full sized egg. The main disadvantage with hens is they are not satisfied unless they are scratching out vegetables or leaping into the grapevines. Our hens are locked in the run during most of the day and are let out about an hour or so before dusk.

Bantams
Bantams, if allowed, breed like the proverbial rabbit.

All of our bantams free range wherever they get the urge to go. We tried to lock some of them up once but their airborne/areobatic capabilities were more than our equal so we constructed several houses for them from which they come and go as they please.

Great mothers. They will sit on their own eggs, eggs of other bantams, duck eggs, turkey eggs, stones in fact anything they take a fancy to.

A good number of our ducks were hatched by bantams. After about three weeks the ducklings are as large as the bantam and after about six or seven weeks she gets fed up with scratching for them when all they want to do is swim or sit together under a tree.

Ducks
Ducks are dirty, smelly and noisy.

Ducks are good to have if you have the room and water.

Depending on the breed ducks can be good layers or better suited for meat. We use duck eggs for baking and for general use such as bacon and egg pies and in omelettes.

During the winter we have our ducks in the orchard areas a they are great at eradicating any grasses or weeds that grow. In the winter months mice move into the mulch and the ducks make particular effort to eradicate them.