I’ve been busy with the chickens recently; upgrading their runs, making them clean and fun for the chickens to be in, and in the case of the little chickens, longer. Whilst working away, I couldn’t help but notice that Bowie, is, in fact, a boy after all.
Now, I get that looking at the above photo, there is no doubt, but just so you don’t think I’m a complete lunatic for ever thinking otherwise…
here is a quick reminder of what she (doh! – he!) looked like in November.
Not sure how clear it is on the above photo, but his brothers-from-other-mothers where looking distinctly male, at this same point.
Looking at the photo again, I guess he was showing signs of hackle feathers, but Bowie has never shown any aggression, has never shown any interest in the girls, did have pink, small wattles and combs and skinny legs (in November, that is), so I really was genuinely surprised she became a he and especially so much later than the others. Sargent Bilko and Bowie seem fine in together; I may have to get them more girls, between them, but as long as they can live in harmony, I’ll leave it that way.
I moved Silver (who deserves a proper name, although Silver has stuck now) out a while ago to live with the other small bantams (all the Orpingtons are bantams, but Sargent Bilko is massive and Bowie not much smaller, after the recent growth spurt, so they fit better with full size girls).
I just gave the little’s even more run (all the others are in the big, walk-in run) and a new fancy cover from Tarpaflex who I heard about on an Omlet forum. I have a similar cover on the walk-in and have discovered that not only are they a lot cheaper than Omlet, but they stay lovely and clear and are (in my opinion) much better value for money. All the other bits of the run have black bird netting over, that I use in the garden for the berry trees. Let’s hope the avian flu scare is over soon and they can go out again. I’ve rather stupidy put them where my bluebells grow so I will need to move them, but it’s good for now.
On a slight tangent, I just discovered these (now all sold!) amazing plates and furniture knobs by Holly Frean, sold through Anthropologie.
I’m slightly gutted I missed the chicken plates as the boys would have loved one each,
but I just bought the two remaining furniture knobs with ‘Puffles’ like black silkie style chooks on for Charlie’s room (Puffles is his chicken, as you can tell by the stupid name!).
I don’t actually have a decent photos of Puffles…she’s back…and a silkie…and a bantam.
So, from the eggs we hatched, we ended up with 3 boys and 1 girl. Isn’t that just the way it goes. Much as I really enjoyed the whole process, I’m too much of a wuss to do it again, as I’d never have the heart to ‘get rid of’ the boys and I’m not sure it’ll be easy to re-home them as no-one ever really wants cockerels, even handsome bantam ones that are quite tame. We’re managing as we are though; I lock them in at night and so their crow is not very loud at all, but it’ll be difficult for us to go away over summer and leave them out, as that would be very unfair on the neighbours, even though they all also keep chickens and some have cockerels too.
I’m getting my planting and seed lists together for spring, which I’m quite excited about. I’d really like to have a productive garden this year and think it can really happen, as I’ve done a lot of the never-ending jobs and feel like, for once, I’m slight ahead. Here’s to a fabulous 2017!
It’s just me and the boys for Christmas Day this year (with guests coming Boxing Day), which I’m really looking forward to. I’ve done loads of early freezer preparation and cheated quite a bit. We’ve still gone for a proper turkey (free range Kelly Bronze) as I know we’ll eat all the left overs and make some broth from the bones, so I’m happily to cook more than we need; Charlie (who’s vegetarian) has chosen a vegan M’hanncha from Jamie Oliver’s new book (I have to restrict my Christmas book buying, but this one seems worth the space). The boys, much to my disappointment, don’t do bread sauce, or Gran’s stuffing balls, so I’ve made those ahead, separated them into small batches and frozen them for me to have whenever we cook a roast bird (recipes in 
The boys don’t much like Christmas pudding either…or sprouts (sometimes I wonder if they are really mine – ha ha), so I wasn’t going to bother, but again, it isn’t Christmas for me without my Gran’s recipe pudding, so I made a small batch with a bigger pudding (for Boxing Day) and a mini one for me on Christmas Day (
My apron comes out every year for the festive season, as I love wearing it (the above is Christmas Day in France a while ago…..I’m looking very rosy-cheeked so no doubt rather a lot of wine has already been opened by the time the above photo was taken!), this year was no exception and it first appeared in November, ready for making the cake and puddings. In my head, I swan around serenely in a clean kitchen, with Bing Crosby singing in the background, ideally properly dressed and in makeup. In reality, I’m usually a bit stressed and sporting my usual bag lady look and trying to rush everything, before a school run.
I did make a new apron for this year, but never managed to get it photographed in time for 
That’s it really. I just didn’t want to finish the year without a Christmas post so Merry Christmas everyone!!
Sweetcorn was also a great success and I did my usual method of freezing them whole and raw, with the outer leaves intact. I have quite a few still in the freezer, which I shove in the microwave for a few minutes to cook (again, with the leaves on)…delicious!!
In other news, I’m back to cooking and baking again, especially now the weather is cooler. Bread is back on the menu and thanks to two new books (both recommended by my Sister) I’ve been enjoying trying new things. I have to be careful with my cookery book buying as I already have loads and so I only add new ones if I really think I’ll really use them.
The rye section in Gill Meller’s ‘Gather’ is going down well. I’ve made the ‘Coriander and Caraway’ bread, which tasted delicious and would have been great, had it not got stuck in the tin so that it came out in pieces 😦 and the ‘Chocolate Rye Brownies’ have been declared ‘the best thing you’ve made yet’ by the boys. Awesome. I’m still miles away from the master baker that my Gran was, but I do try.
Sergeant Bilko is ‘King Chicken’ and has turned out to be quite magnificent. As he’s a Orpington bantam, he’s about the size of a regular hen. Gosh he’s handsome.
His brother-from-another-mother (not named…..can’t believe we haven’t actually named them all yet) is equally big and so far they seem to be getting along quite well. I do keep an eye on them both, and if they start to fight, I could either put one of them in with the brown hybrid chicks, or try to re-home one. As long as they seem happy, I’ll just keep both.
I think when I last posted….ahem…in July..we had three Pekins. Sadly, I came down one morning to find the cage door open, the chickens were all out and two were missing 😦 I think Mr Fox (who drops by nightly, leaving his little calling card on the lawn) had managed to work the door open by jumping repeatedly on it (I looked at night footage once, from the security cameras in the garden and was amazed at how much the foxes jump all over the cages, trying to get in). If the door latch isn’t pushed down hard, it can work its way lose. Bogart and the chicken with no name were both munched, I assume, as there wasn’t even a trace of feather. We now only have Lana (Turner) left (middle chick in the above photo).
As I now have quite a little flock I’ve had to be a bit inventive with my Eglu. They really need a 
I did try to photograph the chicks at various stages, but they aren’t very good at sitting still and often present me with a rear view. I did get some images though, so here’s the little chickies as they were, and now.
Definitely a girl.
Boy. Sadly.
Also a boy.
They’ve grown a lot, even since the above photos and the boys have started to square up to each other, which is interesting to watch. I’m waiting for them to feather out a bit more, so they look a little more handsome, then I’ll try to find them new homes.
The Pekins
I was positive, a boy….still am, I think…but he’s showing no characteristics of a boy and is the softest drip of a chicken, loves a sit and cuddle. He’s one of my favourites.
Girl – hurrah!
Another girl.
I’m forever thinking I should try to photograph the borders and flowers more in the garden, but I never really get around to it. The top borders (as above) where looking quite good, earlier in the year. They are now rather overgrown and weedy, but there is still more colour than there has been for a while.
I do like having the chickens roaming around. The ‘big’ girls can make quite a mess, but the Bantams are much less invasive and definitely get my vote.
Ava was looking especially dandy in front of the side bed,
which has my winner of a plant, Mathiasella bupleuroides ‘Green Dream’ growing in it. I just LOVE this and plan to buy another for the upper border. It flowers early, is architecturally quite fabulous and the bees are always all over it. I think you can dry the flowers…must try that some time….I wonder if you could then spray them silver for Christmas?
I just nipped out now to try to take some photos, but it’s too windy and to be honest, on close inspection a lot of the blooms are very much past their best. We’re about to enter that period where my garden looks all faded and sad, and where I always wish I’d grown some dahlias for later colour!
I was lucky to get invited to Hampton Court Flower Show last week and the main theme seemed to be wild flowers, informal planting and lots and lots of wild flower turf. I could happily also go in this direction, especially as maintaining my beds is quite a chore (not that I’m suggesting for a moment, the meticulously planned ‘informal’ planting of the show doesn’t take forever to achieve), but I feel like I’m now stuck in the ‘Brilliant Bold’ garden theme I opted for 10 years ago.
My own wild flower patches, in the vegetable garden, aren’t nearly so impressive….especially as the shed behind them needs re-painting (that’s the wasps, by the way, eating the wood and removing the paint stain layer. There’s a purple wasps nest somewhere…hopefully not in my loft!).
There isn’t a lot else to report in the garden. I did harvest the garlic, including some quite impressive bulbs of ‘Elephant’ garlic that have been growing since last autumn. It’s not the best crop I’ve had, partly due to the rain, it was in danger of going mouldy if not pulled up and so was taken out a little too early. Still fresh garlic is so amazing, it’s something I’ll always make time for.
and plenty to come, including tomatoes, aubergines, melons, squash and sweetcorn (which I’ve allowed flowers to grow amongst, as above) so quite a productive garden this year.
I was so incredibly impatient in the early stages, much more so than I’d expected to be. The urge to candle eggs more than I should and then going to listen at the coop for signs of a cheep around hatch day were quite compelling. The chicks didn’t start to hatch until day 22 and most arrived day 24!! So much for Pekin eggs hatching early. I assume it was the cold weather and the girls not sitting well.
In the end, I did move all the Pekin Bantam eggs under Audrey (Hepburn, white chuck above). There were originally 2 x Lavender, 2 x Millefleur and 2 x Frizzled/Cuckoo eggs (bought from 
Greta (Garbo, above) hatched the Orpington Bantam eggs that came from 
Sadly, two of the Orpington chicks tried to mysteriously die early on. It was after a night of horrific rain and thunder and I suspect that Greta had freaked out and they had been left in the cold. I managed to save them both by bringing them indoors, warming them up (I genuinely thought they were dead as they were stone cold and stiff, but on closer inspection saw some signs of life) and making a makeshift chick A&E in a basket with my seed warmer mat underneath. 
But the little grey one then did die a couple of weeks later. I didn’t try so hard to save it this time, I figured it just wasn’t meant to be. He/she was F’s favourite 😦
F has generally been brilliant with the chicks. He loves them and spends ages in their cages, it’s been really nice to see him so involved, but then he’s always been great with animals. 
I eventually bought a small, low, Omlet Walk in run so he could get inside more easily, as he kept trying to crawl on his belly into the old run to say ‘hello’, which didn’t really work. It’s ugly, but practical, and I don’t have a lot of money to spend and didn’t have the time or know how to knock up a quick run. I can move this around on my own and I will, likely, extend it for winter and tuck it under the trees for all the Bantams to live in together, when I’m more organised and can save up the money. I really like the appeal that it can be easily dismantled, moved, or extended, all of which work well for me.
This is my new favourite place to sit, I really enjoy chick watching whilst I’m laptop working (lots of shop photos to edit and things to list at the moment) and we often open the doors right up when the sun is shining and the brave chicks come into the house.
It’s been a joy hatching out our own eggs. Hearing the first cheeps and then seeing little heads pop out from between Mum’s feathers is great fun and I really am getting a lot of mileage out of watching them learn life’s lessons from the older chickens. The big question of what to do with the boys is still looming, but I do have possible homes lined up and I’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. I can see how these things become addictive, but we’re done for now as this will be my chicken maximum.
I have two chickens sitting on hatching eggs, which I am ridiculously excited and impatient about. Clearly, I am new to this, but this is how it went for me:
Gertie sat longer than usual on the nest, mostly refusing to move of it, even at night to roost, and when I went to see what was going on, she hissed and pecked at me, especially if I tried to move eggs from under her. She also had her sweet fat little belly and feathers all flattened out over the nest (see above), covering the (totally infertile!!) eggs that were in it. My original plan was to try to stop her brooding, so I shifted the eggs, kicked her out of the coop and shut the door so she couldn’t get back in.
I did also notice there were a lot of feathers in the run (I originally thought maybe one of the other chickens was being a monster, and pecking the Pekins, but once I realised she was broody, it was obvious she’d been plucking her own feathers to line the nest – bless). 
Lastly, there was broody hen poo which looks, to me, like a mini cow pat – nice!
I tried to make her a separate nest in the end of the big run, but that clearly wasn’t going to work out, plus I’d read a lot that she would have to be moved away from the other hens, so I moved her into a run of her own. I used one of the cats plastic carriers, with a plastic box on top for her nest (it’s still quite cold in the mornings so I figured the double insulation would be best). I put some diatomaceous earth in the bottom of the cat carrier, as I figured she wont come out for her usual dust bath, then I put both sawdust and straw on top and popped in quite a few existing eggs so she might think she had enough to settle for hatching.
Choosing eggs. God there are just soooooooo many. In the end, slightly by mistake, I double ordered and got 6 mixed Pekin Bantam and 6 mixed Orpington Bantam eggs. I was planning to only put 8, max, under her, but then Audrey turned broody too, so I made her a little house in the chicken maternity hospital, next to Greta, and put six eggs under each (I mixed them up, for insurance).
The girls started off a bit crap, to be honest, they weren’t great at keeping the eggs covered, I ended up giving Greta 7 and Audrey only 4 (one got chucked out, at this stage, as it’d been left out for too long and was freezing cold when I checked). Interestingly, I read on a forum from someone very experienced (sorry, can’t remember who) that they believe you can ‘re-set’ incubating eggs once in the process, as long as it’s before day 15. They reckon that the eggs go into a kind of stasis so they can get cold for quite a long while, but then be put under another broody hen (a more reliable one) and will still hatch, just a little later than the original hatch date. It’s a thought, anyway. They also both managed to poo in their nest and walk it all over the eggs, which I decided to gently and quickly try to wipe off. Could be a mistake, but there was just too much chicken muck to leave it. They have settled right down now, though, and are both doing a great job, they’ve also been moved into an Eglu that I’ve split with cardboard so they get half each.
I pretty much scoured the internet for weeks, trying to decide what to get and where from. It was very early in the season, so little was around and if there’s one thing I have noticed, there is a total lack of local, decent, chicken ‘selling’ websites. I do like a good website, I like photos, descriptions and an accurate showing of availability (or a good guesstimate) etc. I am not very good with sites that just have lists of chickens, with no images and no indication of what is currently in stock.
Luckily, I found a place in Kent that updates its site weekly and shows well what they have, so we pottered over one weekend (after calling ahead) to pick up some Bantams.
My plan was to get four, and I really wanted it to include a Light Sussex and a Lavender Pekin, I didn’t want Silkies and the others would be down to what was there when we visited.
First to be chosen was a Frizzle Poland now named ‘Elvis(seena)’. Felix fell in love and I was swayed, despite her costing more than any of the other chickens and looking rather daft. Daft in a kind of fab way, I should add.
Charlie then sulked because he wanted to choose so we ended up with a little black Silkie called ‘Puffles’ (I should know better than to let my kids name animals).
I did get to choose the last two, so I did get my Light Sussex Bantam ‘Ava’ (Gardner) (top photo) and a very pretty Silver Birchen Pekin, called ‘Greta’ (Garbo).
I, basically, was sad not to have got my Lavender Pekin, so I went back the next day….and came back with a Porcelain Pekin, ‘Audrey’ (Hepburn…I am so much better at naming things than my kids 😉 )…because she was soooo pretty and friendly and I got swayed, as you do.
Poor Audrey got a respiratory sickness shortly after she arrived 😦 She was absolutely 100% healthy when we got her, as where all the other chickens the was penned with, I assume the move had simply stressed her out and brought out mycoplasma but she was a sick little thing, breathing like Darth Vader and sneezing. I separated her out (lucky I kept the old guinea pig cage) and she spent two weeks indoors getting well on antibiotics. Oh yes, sick chicken on table whilst children eat, bet that’s freaking a few people out!
She recovered just in time for Elvis to get sick. I was pretty convinced that Elvis wouldn’t make it, actually. One thing that worked amazingly well was steaming the chickens. I had boiling water creating steam, that was directed into the cage and each time, afterwards, the chickens really perked up and then ate, which they clearly struggled to do when they were all bunged up. With Elvis, I had to syringe water into her (which contained the antibiotics) as she refused to eat, drink or move. Again, each time, after she’d had water, she perked up and then went on to eat a little. I know most people would have just culled her, but I had the time to nurse her and just couldn’t bring myself to do it and we did win in the end.
The big bonus of her having been indoors for a couple of weeks, is that Elvis became even more tame then she originally was. She loves sitting in knees and being petted.
She also loves to ride on shoulders, like some kind of crazy hen parrot.
Prompting a Face Book post of one boy and his chicken….which weirdly, I posted on the day it was later announced that Barry Hines had died. Sad 😦
The Bantams are just the very best. They are all very, very tame and the little Silkie, Elvis and Audrey, especially, like to be handled. I love how all the chickens follow us around the garden when we’re outside or try to come indoors for a nose around. I can totally understand why they are recommended as pets for people with young children, and as the Pekin Bantams have feathered feet they really don’t do much damage to the garden.
There is, of course, the egg bonus. All of my Bantams lay daily too, which is just fab. They must be happy 🙂
The Light Sussex lays bigger eggs, as you’d imagine (bottom, right) but I do have a soft spot for the little white eggs we get from the others. The boys have a regular 5 egg fry up from them which always makes me laugh!
But the boys are away at the moment (and have been for over a week) and I’m struggling to keep up on my own. I’ve already made two batches of ice cream, various omelettes and a big Quiche in the last week and it’s not making much of a dent…that’s the down side of all my neighbours also having chickens, there is no-one directly around to give the eggs to 🙂
One of the reasons I went for a Go, apart from asking lots of friends who have them and reading a load of reviews, was that I wanted to keep moving it around so the chucks could be on fresh grass when they were contained in the run. With three meters, it is very possible to move, but it’s quite hard work. The grass tends to grow through the fox proof skirt (in my case, probably because I don’t mow the lawn enough!) and it becomes quite difficult to drag it around. In fairness, it was much easier with the two meters.
Boy, did I have problems! To cut a VERY long story short, I realised that the wheel handle wasn’t correct. It didn’t look anything like the promo photos and there wasn’t enough sticking out to get a good grip on to push the handle down and hook under the brackets. I took lots of photos, wrote emails and made many phone calls to Omlet over the next week. First, they sent me a new frame…..er no, that wont solve it (but I politely went through the motions and waited another day for the re-delivery before calling them to point out it was, in fact, the same frame as the one I already had). Then it was agreed that the wheels were wrong, turns out they were an old design sent out by mistake. On opening the box, the ‘new’ replacement wheels, were the same as the existing wrong ones. As with the originals, they were in the correct box, but had the wrong handles inside. Grumpy, much, me? Noooooo.
Eventually, after lots of deliveries back and forth, I got the correct wheels. (I hope you appreciate that I ran out in the rain to take this photo). Not sure how clear it is, but there is a turn in the handles that makes it much easier to grip and maneuver. 
(storm Katie, which wasn’t forecast to be all that windy here, turned out to be much worse than expected and the poor hens went for a ride during the night!)
This is my current set-up. I have two Eglu Gos and (as of recently) both have whopping three meters of run on the front, which with the one meter underneath the Eglu makes four meters in all. I didn’t know if they would still be easy to move around the garden but they are perfectly fine, if a tiny bit wobbly. I’m really happy. Doris lives with her new hybrid pals, Edna and Beryl and the other Eglu has the Bantams (next post!). They all free range together, but I don’t think they could have lived together, for instance in a 
Rock Cottage Year 