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I know it has been absolutely ages since the last one but there hasn’t been an awful lot to update you with really.
We hit moulting, no-laying, dark nights, the end of the apples and the start of the rats all at once. It has been a pretty bleak time all round.
We went from four-a-day egg activity quite quickly to none-a-day with no inbetween. It was quite a shock to me really to have a good couple of weeks with no eggs at all. There was one point where I thought we were going to have to BUY EGGS! How rude would THAT have been? Sydney is still moulting but Summer has filled out again and is looking quite handsome again after looking decidedly scrawny for some weeks. Buffy lost the equivalent of a pillow’s worth of really downy feathers but is starting to look fairly respectable again. In the past fortnight we have managed to average two-a-day and although not at the point of having enough to give away yet, we are once more eating egg as often as we like.
I loved the apple season. We had various apple tarts and cakes and crumbles during the windfall and managed to freeze enough so we can have one dessert at Christmas to cheer us up. I would very much love to have another apple tree in the garden but we would need to clear out one section to plant it in first. . . I’d love to have enough apples that we wouldn’t know what to do with them and might be forced into buying an apple press 
And now, on to the rats. Hateful creatures. They have decided they prefer to live under the chicken shed and tunnel their way in to the run at night to eat their fill. I have three traps down and have bait in various places but so far the tunnelling continues despite us catching two of the beggars. One, we found with his legs in the air and the other we found on Sunday, hidden away behind the shed and covered in maggots. It must have been there for a good couple of weeks. I have had to empty the compost bin closest to the shed which annoyed me majorly. Part of the reason I got chickens in the first place was so I could improve the garden with my own compost. To find they have built tunnels in the bin and sprayed it all around (mostly in to next door’s drive way) made me very cross.
On Sunday we spent most of the morning and afternoon rat-i-fying the shed. We have made it impossible for them to get under the shed now with a combination of wooden posts and concrete slabs on three of the sides. The only side open for them is the one on the run side and it really needs custom cut blocks put in place. Iain is ordering an angle-grinder for that job and I hope to have it all sorted soon. At one point I even held the hose under the shed almost until it floated away in the hope it would make them move on but NO! that very night there was another fresh tunnel. Why don’t they just take the hint?
So far I haven’t seen any alive (thankfully) but have seen the odd wee mouse scurrying around but the fact that I know they are there just annoys the happiness out of me. Fingers crossed this may do the trick. Funnily enough, when out at the chickens, I think I am rat-safe if I have my wellies on! Somehow I think they will save me from . . . shhh .. . too much information 