About Us
I grew up with hens and chicks running about the yard. I left it behind for the sophisticated life of a teenager. However, when my own children were young, and I was a stay at home mum, I re-entered the world of poultry-keeping for a time. Lifestyle changes as my children became adults resulted in another cessation.
Recently, thanks to my partner’s love of small holding and poultry keeping in particular, my love of poultry has been re-ignited. This time, however he is the driving force. Nowadays, we are enjoying the constant availability of beautiful, fresh, free-range eggs, the sounds of the poultry in the field and the pleasure of collecting the eggs and watching the antics of the fowl.
The emergence of a newly hatched chick continues to raise a smile while the colour, size, shape and contour of the eggs as they are collected each day is an ever present source of wonderment. With familiarity, the size, the shape, the colour are identifiable and attributable to particular birds.
For Eddie, it is born out of a love of nature, all she provides, and working close to the earth. Surrounded by poultry in his youth, hens in the yard, turkeys (mostly in the trees) when needed indoors at nightfall and geese in the farmyard half mile away.
They raced there after school in springtime to be first to get the hallowed goose egg. As children they rescued pheasant eggs from the meadows at hay cutting time and hatched them under hens. A lifetime ago, this love is now rekindled.
In so far as we can do so, we try to be self-sufficient and self-sustaining. We very quickly identified a need for a resource for information on poultry keeping with an Irish perspective. We found lots of books and web resources but they were all focused on poultry keeping in other countries. However, although there are few households who would not have some memories of perhaps their parents or grandparents rearing their own hens, eating their own home grown chicken and eggs, poultry keeping, in its current form it is relatively new in Ireland and no such resources are available.
We've spent many hours sourcing information relating to poultry keeping from an Irish perspective but found the only useful sources were from a few very reputable poultry keepers in the UK or from American Universities, extension programme's. While these were reliable sources some of the information we required and which needed to be specific to Ireland, was unavailable.
We are developing this website to fill this gap, using our personal experience and that of others. We will continue to add to this information in the future. We've included links to the more useful sites found during our own research in the Useful Links Panel on the left hand side of this page.
While Eddie has been busy planning, designing and building housing and fencing pens outdoors, Stasia (that’s me) was busy learning how to build a web site, this is the fruits of my labour. Like all else it is a work in progress and will be altered and improved upon in time.