No chickens

During Monday night our second hen, Onion, died. Although she had been off colour a few weeks earlier we thought she had recovered but after Sage died she seemed to suffer a relapse and died just three weeks later.


We have decided not to replace them and so for the moment we have no chickens.  It feels a bit strange and I find myself looking for them when I glance out of the kitchen window. I have taken down the wire fence that kept them to half of the garden and we are probably going to put the chicken coop on freecycle.


I will miss "the girls". Although they were a birthday present for my husband because he works long hours and spends an increasing amount of time abroad, it fell to me to look after them from day to day. Most fine days, summer or winter I carried a mug of coffee outside and sat down to drink it with one chicken on my lap and another sitting beside me.


The downside was that as we let them range freely in the garden, they did destroy a lot of my plants and the lawn was almost bare during the winter months. As much as I will miss them it will be nice to be able to hang out my washing without a chicken hopping up onto the bowl of washing, to be able to fill the gaps in the garden with plants that won't be scratched away and to watch the lawn recover.

Onion was quite shy, easily startled and didn't like the camera so I don't have many pictures but the one below shows her a week after she arrived exploring the garden for the first time.

and this one taken just a month ago is the last one I took of Sage and Onion together, both chasing after the same piece of bread as they often did.

Sage chicken

I am posting a few photos of Sage our very friendly chicken who died at the beginning of the week.  We got the two chickens, Sage and Onion almost three years ago and they have taken over our garden and until recently when they both stopped laying have provided us with eggs.

They spent their days close together, jostling for space in a pot of soil when they were younger but lately just sitting side by side in the garden.

Just after Easter, Onion seemed poorly, she was sleepy and not eating much but after several days she seemed better and now appears to have made a full recovery.

When Sage started showing the same symptoms, I hoped and expected that after a few days of being quiet she would recover and be back to her old self. Unfortunately that was not to be.

Of the two Sage was the one who liked our company most.  When I went into the garden with a mug of coffee and sat on the bench, it wasn't long before she was sitting on my lap waiting to be stroked. Onion would sit on the bench to be near but Sage always made sure she was there first. 

Onion seems fine but but a little distracted. After three years spent together, I think she is missing her friend, I know I am.

The hens and the garden

I noticed on my last walk that very slowly the countryside is starting to green. Not the hedges and trees yet but the fields and verges are looking brighter and fresher as leaves of celandine, cow parsley and cuckoo pint push their way up first through the soil and then through the brown covering of last years leaves. I was pleased to see the grass growing too and hope it will start growing again in my garden.


Last spring when my garden had been scratched to bits by our two hens, I divided it in two, half for the chickens and half for me!  This is how it looks now.

My part (which is actually rather less than half, I have been very generous to these birds) has recovered and is beginning to look like a garden again but the rest looks pretty awful. During the winter months the grass has been eaten far quicker than it can grow and there is very little left.  As the weather gets milder and the grass grows more I hope that the lawn will recover. I had no idea that just two hens could do this much damage.

I could keep them inside their run each day but that seems a shame. I've always bought free range eggs so now I have my own hens I don't want to keep them inside a run.  At the moment they are free to wander in their part of the garden during all the hours of daylight which seems much kinder and a more natural existence.

Here are the culprits, two healthy happy hens, Sage and Onion!  Hopefully in a few weeks time I'll be able to post pictures of the garden looking happier and healthier as well.

Eggs in the garden

Our hens, Sage and Onion are just over two years old and egg production has been falling recently until about three weeks ago when it abruptly stopped. I was a bit surprised that it stopped so suddenly but they both seemed to be well and healthy and we just assumed that their egg laying days were over.

Today though whilst out in the garden my husband chanced upon these....

There were ten eggs, one of them still warm - it was the familiar egg-laying clucking that made him investigate what was happening in the undergrowth.

Up until three weeks ago we were getting an egg every other day so ten eggs would suggest that three weeks ago egg laying shifted from coop to garden. I wonder why? Everything looks just the same inside the hen house no obvious reason for the change of location.

We have collected the eggs and wait to see where the next egg turns up. I'm assuming that the eggs are safe to use as long as they look ok. Any suggestions for encouraging laying in the hen house?

The garden and the chickens

My garden is looking a bit of a mess at the moment.  These pictures were taken two summers ago before the arrival of our two hens, Sage and Onion.

They have a coop and run which is suitable for 3/4 hens so they should have plenty of room but I wanted them to have more freedom and space and so they have had the run of the garden for most of the day. When we made this decision I had no idea just how much destruction two hens could do.

Now eighteen months later, the patio is permanently covered with soil and stones, all the plants in pots have disappeared

and parts of my lawn look like this.....

At the end of last winter the grass looked very sparse and it did not fully recover during the summer.  This year it looks worse.

Another disadvantage of having hens in the garden is that unless I keep the back door closed I have hens in my kitchen, which is quite sweet but not very practical.

Do I sound fed up?  We like having the chickens and they are very friendly, sitting on the bench beside us when we take our cups of tea outside and rushing up to meet me each day when I go out to hang the washing on the line, but I also like my garden.

Hopefully we have found a solution,  we are going to share the garden, half for the chickens and half for me to actually grow a few plants in.  You can just see the netting fence in the photo dividing the garden into two.

The trouble is, the chickens are not happy with the fence.  They peck at it, they poke their heads through the holes in the netting, they paw at it with their feet and they moan. So now of course I feel guilty about restricting them to the bottom of the garden.

I am hoping that after a few days they will have got used to the fence and will be contented chickens once more.  Does anyone know if chickens have long memories or will they soon forget they once ruled over the whole garden?

Snow week

Compared with the amount of snow regularly falling in parts of the world, our area seems to have really struggled to cope with the snow.  After our two snow days on Monday and Tuesday, we were back to normal on Wednesday. Then on Thursday we woke up to more snow and we were all at home again.  This morning I have been checking the websites for school closures and listening to the travel news and it is to be another day at home.  Our council is one of the ones running low on salt and grit for the roads so I'm pleased not to have to venture out in my little car.

We have been enjoying some local walks though.  The roads are icy and slippery but walking through the woods is fine although very wet and soggy. The pond in the picture below has water lilies in the summer but now it is frozen with the little islands all surrounded by ice.  Its a pity the ice is so thin, it would have been fun to walk out and explore.

I've been using the snow days to  have a good tidy.  I have more time in my day when I am not giving lifts to the boys to school, work and sports training. It is surprising how much time these  journeys take up.  

It is raining now as I write so the snow will probably soon be gone (but then I said that on Tuesday!) so I'll make the most of today.

The chickens really don't like the snow and have been looking quite miserable, if its possible for a chicken to have a sad face.  I wondered if they were missing eating grass so I rolled a snowball round the lawn to clear a patch and they followed behind me clucking excitedly. Grass must taste better than the cabbage leaves I've been giving them instead. 

Hope everyone is keeping safe in the wintry weather.

The first day of Autumn

Today is the first day of autumn but the weather this weekend has been warm and sunny, it seems we are finally getting a bit of summer weather. Yesterday we were out most of the day and spent quite a lot of time indoors but today we had nothing planned and I made sure I spent most of the time in the garden making the most of the unexpected sunshine.

My husband gave the chicken coop a thorough clean and tidy. He disinfected it and stood all the pieces in the sun to dry. The chickens were definitely a bit put out by the whole process.

Just a few things left in the garden to harvest, a few autumn raspberries

and some tomatoes. Everything is packed close together in our little garden and the tomatoes have grown into the grape vine. Despite all the wet weather, the grapes seem to be really small this year.

I picked most of the Bramley apples today. I needed the ladder to pick some of the higher ones and decided to prune the tree at the same time. I tried to make it into a nice symmetrical shape but it still is a very lopsided tree.

I think I might have been a bit late picking as the blackbirds had already sampled some apples. I sorted them into apples for storage and apples to cook straight away.

Unfortunately rather a lot fell into the cook straight away category. I brought my preserving pan into the garden and sat in the sun peeling and chopping a pan full of apple. We now have lots of stewed apple to eat this week and in the kitchen at the moment, three jars of apple are back in the pan and coming up to temperature.

So the first day of autumn was very pleasant and productive, though I wouldn't mind a break from peeling apples!

Potato harvest

I planted these potatoes in pots at the end February, two tubers to a pot. Today I had run out of potatoes so I decided it was time to see how well they had grown. The chickens watched closely as I tipped out a pot and found some good sized potatoes.

This pot contained 1 lb 8 oz of potatoes which seemed to be quite good considering they were in a relatively small pot. We ate them this evening, I always enjoy the first new potatoes from the garden.

If I had plenty of room I probably wouldn't bother growing potatoes in pots but it is a good way of getting a few potatoes from a small space.


After I had gathered up the potatoes, the chickens scratched through the compost eating anything they could see that moved. So potatoes for us and plenty of bugs for the chickens.

Chickens and eggs

Our two chickens are enjoying the bright summer weather. The lawn which they almost destroyed during the wet winter months has recovered so they once again have plenty of grass to eat. With the long summer days they now spend up to fourteen hours a days just wandering around the garden eating- seems like a nice life!


They are quiet most of the time but there is quite a bit of fairly loud clucking at egg laying time. Recently, a rather bleary eyed teenager came downstairs complaining that the chickens were really loud that particular morning and had woken him up. Chickens do get up much earlier than teenagers but then most living things get up earlier than teenagers!


I joked that perhaps the noise was loud because they had laid a really big egg. When I collected the eggs, I found this

a huge egg.

It is longer than the width of my hand, I'm not surprised there was a lot of clucking.

We have now had the chickens for almost a year. My husband has been writing down the price of the feed, grain, straw etc we have bought in that time and yesterday he worked out that our eggs cost us around 70p a half dozen. I realised I no longer know the price of eggs because I haven't bought any but for free range organic eggs (we buy organic layer pellets ) that must be well under half price.

So two of the advantages of keeping chickens, reasonably priced eggs and a method of waking teenagers!

Rain

Everything has all dried up now but earlier in the week we had a lot of rain. The fields at the bottom of the village were flooded,

our garden got very wet,

and so did this chicken!

A woodland walk

I think this is one of the best times of the year to walk through woodland. There is so much fresh new growth on the trees and on the woodland floor. We walked through these local woods just after a rain storm and it seemed that we could almost feel everything growing. In the photo above the woodland floor is covered with bilberry bushes, I made a mental note to return in the summer when the berries are ripe.

The woods were filled with birdsong and we heard a cuckoo calling. This year I have heard the cuckoo more often than usual. I know the numbers have declined in recent summers but I don't know if they are recovering or whether its just that we are lucky to have a few birds nearby.

Back home in our smallish garden all this new growth has to be contained so today I tackled some pruning. A pile of leaves and twigs proved to be the perfect playground for the chickens.

Scratching about in the twigs must have been quite exhausting for one chicken who decided it was all too much and just settled down in the middle of the pile for a little snooze!

March winds

March winds and April showers

bring forth May flowers

Although the storms earlier in the week did not affect us directly, commutes to school and work were disrupted by train cancellations and we did have a little upset in the garden.

The washing line must have been weakened by rust and the strong winds were the final straw snapping the main pole.

Oh dear, more expense, but on balance, drying the washing outside must be cheaper than buying, maintaining and running a tumble drier.

The nursery rhyme may put winds in March and showers in April but we've definitely had both together. The ground is completely water-logged. The chickens seem to love it, they may look very innocent in this photo but just look what they have done to my "lawn"!

I am still waiting for some warmer weather when the grass might grow faster than it gets eaten. Until then I shall try to ignore the muddy patches and look instead at some of the March flowers.