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The chicken run has been getting me down recently - well – the chickens, the run, the coop, and the covered run – they have all had problems which have been annoying me. Today I put on old clothes and started out by cleaning the shed out, while the kids helped by tidying up loads of empty food bags etc for me. It rained the whole time. We got extremely wet. The chickens got wetter! They were locked out in the outside run which is pure mud at the moment. They got loads of corn for their troubles though and there IS an outdoor coop which they all squeezed into.
After the shed was cleaned out I hosed down and disinfected the Ikea Hack Chicken Nest Box which was super easy – much easier than the old wooden nest box, and when it was all put back together in the shed I lit a sulphur candle which is still burning away to itself. This is something that Iain discovered for me after a little bit of googling our red mite problem. Sulphur candles can be bought in the likes of B&Q and are used for end-of-season killing of pests in greenhouses. He found that some people have been reporting great results when attacking red mites with the same candle. I’ll let you know how it goes. I do feel a little guilty that the smoke will kill the spiders as well as the mites though. (I have to say that I am a little disappointed that none of the neighbours called the fire-brigade.)
The covered run has a leak (or two, or three) which drips into a bucket. The bucket then has been knocked over and made the run extremely muddy and smelly. I scraped all that up today and put it on one of the flower beds. I am hoping the roof holds together until we get a chance to fix it.
Once all this housekeeping malarkey was over Jessica joined me in the rain to knock the rest of the apples off the tree to much hilarity as one hit me in the chest and another one bounced off Summer’s tail which made her squawk and flap as heartily as we laughed. We got about 20 apples of various sizes – about four of them were fed immediately to the chickens as birds had already been pecking at them on the tree. I have already chopped up the ones that were worst bruised in the hope that we will have crumble for dessert tomorrow.
So, all in all, a very busy burst of activity for us today – the things you get up to in the rain! Hoping to thaw out any minute now. Brrrrrrr.