Backyard Poultry Keeping by J.C.Jeremy Hobson - The Accidental Smallholder

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Many people want to enjoy home-grown organic food and achieve a measure of self-sufficiency. A relatively easy step to achieve this is to keep poultry and to enjoy organic, freshly laid eggs as well as the occasional Sunday roast chicken.

All this can be possible with a remarkably small area of garden. Indeed, with a little care and forethought, gardens and poultry keeping go hand-in-hand: vegetables that have gone to seed can quite usefully be incorporated into a chicken's daily diet and can help to ensure a regular supply of eggs. The litter and droppings collected during the weekly clean-out of the chicken shed can be turned into compost which will eventually find its way into the vegetable patch, thus completing the simplest and yet most efficient form of recycling.

Backyard Poultry Keeping is essential reading for those who, despite having only a small amount of space at their disposal, nevertheless want to raise poultry on a non-commercial basis, for pleasure, eggs and meat.

Containing detailed, sound, practical advice, this book, which is packed full of information, is aimed at all those interested in small-scale poultry keeping. It covers every sort of domestic fowl, ranging from the smallest of bantams to the tallest of geese and from the lightest of egg-laying utility breeds to the heaviest turkeys. Even the more unusual types are not forgotten: quail, for example, begin laying at six weeks of age and provide a meat carcass by twelve weeks, thereby supplying both hard-boiled eggs for a picnic or salad, and an impressive main course for dinner guests.

Written by an acknowledged expert, and well illustrated with over eighty colour photographs and diagrams.