Hen keepers, how did you find your birds?

Try the forum on rivercottage for local suppliers or look in the yellow pages for your nearest agricultural merchant - this will probably be your best source of food and sundries for them anyway. There will probably be cards in the windows there for hens, this is a good time of year to start looking. If there aren't any, the people in the shop will probably be able to give you some local info.

Another way, would be to check the local paper and free ads. Or go into Smiths and look at the magazines like Practical Poultry and others with smallholder in the title and flick through the back pages for local breeders.

Finally, you could ring some egg farmers (from the yellow pages) and ask if they have any 'spent' or 'end of lay' hens. These willbe your cheapest option and they're very rewarding to keep but need a bit of extra care in the first weeks.

HTH

I found mine through the breeders' directory in Country Smallholding. If you're looking for a laying hybrid most breeders will be happy to sell you just hens, pure breeds are more likely to be pushed with a rooster but even with those I found a number of breeders were happy to sell just hens.

If you use the online version you can easily use ctrl+f to search for breeders in your area - there are five in Leics alone.

http://www.countrysmallholding.com/content/resources/?id=781

For pure breeds you are generally looking at £1 a week (ie a point of lay at 18 weeks, £18...buy a little younger if you want to make them tame for your children), for hybrids it should be less than 1/2 that.

I think that some breeders will send you birds - try the Wernlas Collection - Sue Hammon is well known and a big advocate for both pure breeds and small scale keepers and she's jolly nice to boot.

Hope that helps.

Try PMing SarahSaver.

She has just got some chicks and she is from your area.