Busy Saturday . . .

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.

Let’s have an Apple Evening Shall We?

Three apple related stories in honour of the Apple Event that took place earlier this evening.

First off is the indignant Jasper after being rudely awakened by the Apple Chime when I had to restart the Mac with him lying on the table in front of me. I have witnessed this a couple of times now and generally the kittens do not like this noise! What kind of kittens are they? Spare a thought for the kittens - they are going in for their ops on Friday - they will be coming home without certain parts on Friday night. That'll learn them!

Next is the first use, this evening, of an Ikea apple corer. I bought it at the end of the apple season last year AFTER I had stood and cored all those apples we used for apple crumbles and schnapps. I'm sure it was ridiculously cheap but it will be worth its weight in gold. 2 seconds is all it took to core this home-grown apple! The other thing that was ridiculous was the way the children both pounced on bits of the apple - seriously, you would think they had never seen an apple before!

And last, but not least, imagine my horror when I saw 4 or 5 damaged apples on the small tree this evening when I went out to check on the chickens. You may remember the two trees are inside the chicken run, but as none of the chickens even showed the least bit of interest in the apples last year we really didn't think it was necessary to build the run around them. I stood and puzzled over this destruction for a good couple of minutes until David stuck his head out the door and said he had sat in the living room watching a couple of chickens up the tree, pecking away at the apples. They are about waist height (the apples, not the chickens), and with another wee jump the chickens could be up and over the fence and away in to the neighbour's garden!

How's that for a home grown Apple Event?

Getting There . . .

We trundled on last night for a couple of hours and finished the main frame work of the new extension, most of the chicken wire, and only stopped when we realised there was no point in starting the two doors which would have to be laid down on the muddy ground to make. Best to leave that for a drier night, or if one of those take too long to come around then we could move the whole kit and kaboodle round to the garage floor. 

Izzy provided us with great entertainment, I think she was trying to locate sunken treasure in the puddle the rain had made in the sand. Her wee feet were as pink as anything at the end of it all and she didn't seem to mind that we had giggled at her.

There is one great piece of news about the grassy area / lawn / turfed area. A couple of weeks ago we bought sorry looking turf from Homebase for an area we had lifted slabs up from last year. We had unsuccessfully tried sowing it with grass seed then gave up and went for turf. Of course with the chickens free-ranging all the time there was no hope of that turf surviving. Then it became sunny and the turf kinda dried up. I resigned myself to the idea there was never going to be grass there and contemplated lifting the turf and disposing of it.

However, over the past couple of nights I have noticed a distinct greening of the turf. Rather than it being completely dead we became hopeful that it might produce something. Last night we noticed that the rain storm had boosted it again. I am now most confident that we WILL have a lawn this year once the chickens are contained in their new extension. YAY!

Here is a panoramic photo of the new extension for you :D

The part with the 69p Ikea shower curtains is the main run and is (almost) completely weather-proof and as fox-proof as we could manage without actually testing it with a real fox. The new extension is not going to be weather-proof or fox-proof but will only be used during the day and means we will soon have three separate compartments to keep chickens in.

The area to the left of the original run has David and Jessica's trampoline in it. They hardly ever use it now as it always seems to be dirty and both have said they would rather have more room for the chickens than the trampoline but as it was a present from Nanna and Papa Iain wont hear of it being sold. I have just worked out in my head that we will probably have enough wood left over from this last project to convert that area too . . . hmmmm . . . must work on Iain . . . :D

Additions . . .

We have had a busy couple of days chicken and garden wise. On Thursday evening I headed to Granda's Farm and bought 18 hatching eggs off him for our two broody hens. Lacey and Buffy had been on the nest for over a day and I decided to see how they would get on with some eggs.

I got 6 Light Sussex, 7 Maran, 2 Pekin (from Ethan's hens), and 3 cross-bred eggs. They were all marked with pencil and put under the two girls later that night. They took to the eggs immediately. It was kinda cute to watch Buffy push the eggs around so they all fitted under her. I know they wont all hatch, and I know most of them will be male, but it is all good fun and the children are mightily taken with the whole idea.

I then decided that we needed a new small run for the chicks as you can't let them in with the grown ups for a long time so we went to B&Q to buy plywood and wood to make that. Remember when you were in school and you said "I'm never going to need the half of this stupid maths"? Well, could I for the life of me remember what an equilateral triangle was called and what each of the angles should be. Took me ages to work it out. I think I have the compound saw angles all set now but we concentrated on the new outside run on Sunday and this chick run was put on the back burner. By the way, YAY! for B&Q's 15% off ALL products over the weekend. We saved over a fiver on that trip. Oh, and we got a free box of screws too because the girl failed to see them on the trolley - in plain view!

On Sunday we tackled the larger project as both Iain and I needed to be involved in this. We were adding more space to the original run so the chickens can be much more contained. All through the winter they have had the full back garden to free-range in and much as I love to see them on the back doorstep welcoming me every time I open the door, I really want to plant some vegetables and get on, generally, with gardening life. I have an apple tree, a pear tree, and several fruit bushes, all to be planted but you daren't put anything within reach of those greedy girls. 

We managed to get the basic frame put up, and the first lot of wire stapled into place. We have two doors to construct and the rest of the wire to staple on. Somehow or other we ran out of wood. I'm saying nothing about the lack of not one, not two, but EIGHT extra pieces of 12' timber but suffice to say, I wasn't in control of the working out of the timber. I organised the chicken wire. . . there seems to be plenty of that! We will buy the extra timber today on the way home and hopefully have the rest of the run finished within the next couple of nights, after which, it will be open for visits and inspections!

Third Compost Bin . . .

I managed to get the third compost bin put into place today.

Having experienced the unpleasantness of rats moving in to the first one, I now make sure there is wire mesh underneath them right from the word go. This was almost the last of the mesh we got for the chicken run - there is only a little bit left now, after us thinking we had bought far too much. Nice to know we didn't waste our money.

The first bin I got (extreme left one) was from somewhere like B&Q and cost me over £20. You will be very happy to hear that our local council started "selling" bins last year for a fiver each - with a cap on two-per-household. I am not sure why they cap it - there have to be more people NOT wanting them than there are people wanting more than two. .  you know? Seems to me they could be a little relaxed for us interested lot. I was totally wrong in my anticipation that the bins would be "spit-through-and-tiny" - they are actually really quite good - and as you can see they are bigger than the one I bought.

YAY!

It wont be long before this one fills up a little and beds down into the mesh, making it too difficult for the rats to move in to their des-res.

The first bin isn't quite ready for emptying though. Am not too sure what I'll do when the third one is full. There is something very wrong about the idea of putting the valuable chicken poo in the green collected bin and "giving it away"! I may have to acquire two more bins. . . I'll show you a photograph of Iain's face when I announce that to him!

Here is a lovely shot of one of the apple trees this evening:

If you believe the amount of buds on the trees, this is going to be a bumper crop. Fingers crossed for that - we really enjoyed the apples last year.