Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
Poultry-mad medic’s new chicken breed
‘It is very different eating the meat of chickens which you have brought up and looked in the eye but you know they’ve had a much better life than a batteryfarmed hen’
A doctor with a passion for poultry is creating a breed of chicken named after her favourite village.
The Boughton Blue will have bright blue large eggs, will lay more frequently than your usual hen, and will have a feathered crest.
Nicola Smith has spent seven years looking after her feathered friends, and now the hens have laid olive-green and dark-brown eggs that are the size of your fist and double yolkers, but this is her newest and most unique project.
Nicola, a doctor at Kent and Canterbury Hospital who lives in Boughton-under-Blean, said: “I started off with just three bog-standard chicks and then one of them got broody and I decided I wanted to do something completely different.
“I bought my first blue egg off eBay for £12 for a pack of six, and then bought some cream legbar chickens which lay blue eggs.
“I decided I wanted to improve on that – I wanted the eggs to be bluer and bigger and the hen to lay more often, so I’ve started breeding for those qualities.”
Nicola, 49, has around 30 chickens in total, and has spent many hours researching the best way to breed a high-quality bird.
She used a book called Genetics of Fowl, and says she became “completely obsessed” as soon as she started rearing chickens.
She now runs hen-keeping courses and is on a mission to encourage more people to have chickens in their garden.
The mother-of-one said: “If more people kept chickens for their meat or just enjoyment, then the chickens would have a much better life.
“In a commercial setting, it’s really not very nice and they’re killed in horrible ways.
“My husband and son are not interested in looking after the chickens but they love the meat.
“When they first had it, they were amazed.
“We recently went to a top gastro pub and my husband said the chicken was so tasteless compared to ours.
“It is very different eating the meat of chickens which you have brought up and looked them in the eye, but you know they’ve had a much better life than a batteryfarmed hen.”
Nicola’s next hen-keeping course is planned for Saturday, July 18, 2pm until 4.30pm and it costs £40.
To find out more about Nicola’s courses, email nicola.smith@ talktalk.net