100. Trouble in the hen house...

It's not all been a smooth ride with the chickens to date. Feed them pellets and collect the eggs is what I signed up for.

Oh no, like most things in long trousers, it is proving a little trickier.


I have blogged before to report a possible disappearance of the brown hen. But, I put that down to doing things on automatic pilot. But no, she went AWOL again. In fact she disappeared last Friday, and I spent a very worrying night wondering where she was.

She turned up in the morning, and refused to say where she had been. I threatened to ground her but did not. And when it was time for us to leave for Cambridge she had disappeared again. So we went away with only two chickens in our hen house.

My hope was that she was playing away in Eva's hen house, and sure enough when we returned Eva told us of our stowaway. Eva put it down to 'the grass is always greener...'

This has all been quite unsettling, especially in light of the loss of our bees.

The brown hen is now back (captured), and confined to barracks for a few days so she understands where she lives. And I am trying to make our grass greeener by making porridge for them. The problem seems to be with leftovers - chickens really like them, but we don't have any!

We have also marked our chickens with yellow leg loops...so if any chickens come to visit you, you will know whether they are KFC.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

285. Been thinking about my last blog . . .

Image
. . . even if no-one else has. One of the implications of much of an apple's goodness (minerals and vitamins) being in its seeds is that to benefit they have to be eaten. And not just eaten but chewed up as apple seeds tend simply to be passed. I then remembered something about apple pips containing cyanide. I began to look into all this . . . There are hundreds and hundreds of web snippets on the benefits of eating apples, an apple a day keeps the doctor away and all that. But quite difficult to shore it up with trusted sources. A medium-sized apple weighs 150g - 200g and contains half that number of calories. 80% is water, 10% is carbohydrate, 0.5% protein and 4% minerals and vitamins. Half the minerals and vitamins and fibre are in the peel and the core. Apple pips contain amygdalin which can release cyanide when coming contact with digestive enzymes. According to the http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/contact-us/about-us/  (Cambridge University group) about
Read more

319. We've got a dog!

Image
I know, I know . . . but I've kind of always wanted one . . . . . . from when I was very young, before I joined the Job, when I was thinking about joining the Job. I had a dream (I must have been 13 or 14, and I had lots of posters of dogs on my bedroom walls) about becoming a bearded-batchelor police dog-handler. In my dream I called the dog Wolfram . And guess what? We've called our dog  Wolfram ! He's so cute. He is, of course, an Alsatian and a good guard-dog. Which will be good because this is a big place and Sarah's away a lot. (The door-bell went off in the middle of the night last week, no-one there, turned out it was half-pressed in, but it didn't half freak me out.) Anyway, Wolfram is a new type of dog. Specially bred for people like me. He's a veggie. Eats like a horse of course, but and this is the point, he eats just like a horse. CRUCIALLY, he shits like a horse too. So, no smelly piles all around the garden but just the sweet
Read more

73. Stuck for something to read?

Try a William Boyd novel. They hook you from the start, have interesting and original plots and are not overly long. What's more there are lots of them, and relatively easy to find in second-hand bookshops. Perfect for a holiday read, if you are stuck on a difficult novel or just want something a bit different. His books sometimes feel like he has written them with the aid of a special book-kaleidoscope: twist it again, 10 bizarre plot-lines fall out and Boyd glues them together in 300 pages. Try one!
Read more