After keeping chickens and ducks for most of my childhood, I took a break during the University years but things soon started to get a little out of control around about 2005. After moving to a house with a bit of a garden, I decided to create an elaborate chicken house on stilts and placed it in a suitably large two level run with steps down from the garden path, duck pond, hawthorn and plum tree, large bush for shelter as well as pop hatch from the run into the field…. this was the beginning of a whole new chapter in my obsession with keeping chickens and ducks.

June 2008 and now with 5 chicken houses and 3 duck houses and after having sold a few surplus birds over the years, I was starting to get regular calls from my new found friends who were asking for help about one thing or another. Trimming of spurs, sowing up chickens after dog attacks, helping egg bound birds, getting rid of red mites, the list went on. I had started creating short articles for people with the information they needed and would give them a print out to keep but one day somebody said “What is your website address? Don’t you have a website?” and I realised that I needed to put some of this onto the world wide web. I was enjoying helping people and I thought I should create something that could be of use to people anywhere rather than just in my local community.

At first, I decided to create a general country living webpage – as well as keeping chickens, we had a vegetable garden and an allotment, I shot rabbits on the local farmers fields for us to eat and we even had a well known country magazine approach us to have a photo shoot and article “written for us” (Umm no, sorry that can’t be right?) of the ‘country life’ that our family were living, sustainably of course. I started to look for domain names to get ideas for a website. One of my favourite forums to drop in and out of was ‘The Poultrykeeper’ and after typing in poultrykeeper for some ideas, up came poultrykeeper.com.

August 2008. After a summer holiday on the Charente river in South West France with a laptop and a charger that plugged into the battery of the boat, I had spent almost 2 weeks creating the basics of poultrykeeper.com by October, the site was hosted and ready to go live.

A few of my friends agreed (a little under duress maybe?) to write a few basic articles for the site and even helped pay for the initial cost of getting the site. Since my life was already pretty hectic, I decided to give up TV in the evenings in order to be able to create the articles for the site and as I write this, I’m missing something that you can’t possibly miss on one of the many channels you just have to have

May 2009. After having received some requests from viewers of the site, I decided I really needed to create a blog for poultrykeeper. This was how blog.poultrykeeper.com came into existence… As I type this, the future is yet to unfold and the rest of my story amongst others is still to be told…

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