Sara's city hens

This month, Jeremy Hobson meets Sara Ward who has transformed a West London Victorian terrace house into an urban smallholding – complete with 20 hens!

- Jeremy Hobson

What first got you interested in chicken-keeping?

[It was] part of a journey to discover where our food came from - we decided to shop more ethically and, to offset the cost of choosing organic food [and] to produce some at home we were [soon] growing vegetables, herbs and salad but our small back garden wouldn’t allow a cow or a pig (neither would my husband!). Our first pair of hybrid hens arrived with their ‘Eglu’ as a birthday present in 2007; a couple of chicks hatched in my daughter’s classroom at school came to join them and, when moving to a house with a larger garden the following year, we decided to invest in a bigger Eglu Cube and to expand the flock.