Eglu Go Up

F&F reviews the Eglu Go Up and two pretty new hens.

Two lovely, beautiful little hens joined the F&F garden this week. They came in a van, with their own lovely run from Omlet. Meet Victoria, a Miss Pepperpot chicken, and Rosie, a Gingernut Ranger.

Omlet sent me their new coop and run, the Eglu Go Up, to review. Eglus are quite special chicken coops: they’re the only bird house that’s on display at the Victoria & Albert Museum, for instance. They are a design classic, dreamt up by four graduates from the Royal College of Art. Everyone likes pretty things, but often chicken keeping is a bit rough and ready. Eglus make it oh-so-stylish. And this is the stylish gardening blog, so…

The Eglu Go Up came with a man in the van who put it all together for me. There are instructions for doing it yourself, but he showed me how to open all the various hatches, and where the feeder and drinker should be hung. He also put the birds in their run, while Florence and Lady Penelope watched from their run.

The run for the Go Up is bigger than my run for Florence and Penelope. It is wider, and because these two chooks are (at the moment) quite a bit smaller than my existing hens, they’ve got a bit more room to play with. The coop is off the ground, which means that I’ve lost no hen garden space at all to the new coop, and the chickens have got somewhere to shelter when it is raining or very sunny. Because it is all made of plastic, it is much more weather proof than wooden coops, and much easier to keep clean and pest free. I imagine that I will have more problems dealing with lice and red spider mite in the wooden coop than I will in this one.

The Eglu also has a droppings tray that you can pull out from under the hens’ roosts which makes it nice and easy to clean the chickens out each day. I will post more on how to make the best use of your chicken manure very soon.

And every morning when I trudge up to the coops to wake my four little ladies up, the Eglu is the easiest one to deal with: it has a handle on the top of the hutch which you pull up and turn, and inside the run, the coop door opens and the chickens spill out giddily down the ladder.

They seem very happy indeed in their run, which you can push around the garden on the wheels that work rather like buggy wheels. If you don’t want your lawn to be chickenified, then you could push your Eglu every few days and keep the grass in good condition. I’m keeping mine in the same place in the hen garden, and am weighing the really clever anti-dig skirt that deters predators down with turf so that the predators can’t see the skirt and so that the hens have access to plenty of grass when they’re in the garden. You can see the anti-dig skirt here:

There are two things I dislike about the Eglu Go Up. One is that the girls haven’t yet worked out how to use their long, deep feeder properly. They chuck their layers pellets all over the bottom of the run, which means a bit of waste. It has a lid, which I’ve taken off in the picture above, to see whether the mess is less without the lid. I’m not quite sure it is…

The other is that while the bit under the coop is perfect for a bird to snuggle under (I can see Lady Penelope chilling out there as I type), it’s quite difficult to access as a chicken keeper. This wouldn’t matter so much if I were moving the run around on wheels, though. It’s also worth noting that while the website says the coop is suitable for four medium-sized chickens, or 2-3 larger ones (Lady Penelope, for instance, would only fit in with one other bird as she is such a beast), the run is only suitable for two birds to stay in. My girls free range in their garden for a couple of hours every morning, and then from 8pm until dusk on work days, and free range all day in the garden whenever one of us is at home, but in the winter they will spend more and more time in the run, so it’s essential that they have enough space. Cramped chicken runs lead to miserable, grumpy and unhealthy birds, so don’t go overboard. I think four hens across two runs is fine for me, though: in peak weeks I could be bringing in 28 eggs a week, which is more than enough for two people.