Chicken Crisis

 

Dark days indeed. Or at least, dark enough to make our chickens stop laying. Two are moulting and the other two are on a go-slow.

Before we had the hens, we bought very few eggs. Apart from very infrequent baking and an occasional spate of ice-cream making, we probably only got through a dozen or so eggs a year. However after just twelve months of fresh eggs arriving daily on our doorstep we are dependent on them. Omelette, muffins, eggy scramble for the kids, cakes, custard, fried, boiled.. damn, now I'm hungry again.

Anyway, here's the shameful secret. Yesterday we had to
buy some eggs.

Well, we'd not had bacon and egg sarnies for nearly a week.

The Chickens Have Landed

The lovely Pam of Fenland Fowl came today and brought us four young bantams.

We have a Maran, a Hamburgh, a Wyandotte and a Leghorn x Legbar cross. So far we've not named them, but they've settled in well and managed to ignore the scrutiny of our cats and William (who was more interested in banging on the coup).

In a few weeks' time they should start to give us multi-coloured eggs - very dark brown from the Maran, blue-green from the Leghorn x legbar cross and brown and white from the Wyandotte and Hamburgh. Now we've just got to look up all of our best recipes. Hopefully some of them will include courgettes as the veggie patch is making a last stand before Autumn and we can't pick them fast enough.

Chicken House

Even if we can't build our own house just yet, we can build something for chickens to be proud of (we hope).

We're going to be getting four birds from Fenland Fowl, hopefully to give us some lovely fresh eggs. There's just time to go and buy feeders, drinkers and layers pellets, and then we'll see if the cunning chicken coop design works.

The nettles in the background are making a last stand before the strimmer gets dusted down. Try to ignore them - we do.