Chickenrun

Donal O’donoghue gets the low-down from GIY guru, Michael Kelly, on keeping hens at home

Childhood memories were undammed in a recent chat with Michael Kelly, GIY guru, author, TV presenter and keeper of hens. I saw again the cardboard box of u y newborn chicks delivered by a kindly bus driver making an unscheduled stop on his journey from Cork to Kerry. I relived the daily climb into the hay barn to retrieve the warm eggs from its womb. I recalled our erce cockerel, with his ying talons whenever we got too close to his birds. And there was the morning of the massacre, when a fox (or foxes) slipped into an unlocked henhouse, leaving corpses everywhere, including the once-mighty cock, bloodied spurs folded beneath his body like the undercarriage of a downed airplane.

Some 20 years ago, Michael Kelly le a career in IT and moved to the sunny south-east with his wife. ere, they set about creating ‘ e Good Life’, raising a family (his daughter is now 15, his son, 17) and learning to grow their own food. Kelly was new to the game but a quick learner, graduating from growing garlic to all kinds of everything. In 2008, he founded GIY, with its impressive HQ (café, organic garden, shop, leaning centre) on the edge of Waterford city. In recent years, as a presenter of such TV shows as Grow, Cook, Eat and Food Matters, Kelly has preached the gospel of GIY, a message also fed through his podcasts and the Grow HQ courses, which include the practicalities of keeping hens at home.

“I now can’t imagine being without hens, as you get very attached to the eggs,” says Kelly. “It’s hard to go back to the shop eggs, even those free-range organic ones, once you taste what a real egg is like.” He now has 10 hens, all Rhode Island Reds, one of the most productive egglaying breeds, that can lay up to 300 eggs a year in their prime, which is the rst couple of years. “I buy hens from a poultry farm in Wexford as point-of-lay pullets so that they are ready to start laying straightaway. e rst year you buy the pullets, they will lay through the winter but the number of eggs they produce decrease gradually over time.”