Tragedy

I should have posted earlier, to describe the terrible demise of my first family of chicks. Well. Peaches’. Five of them hatched. Three were really sturdy and on day two were out on the lawn, learning their mother’s old-fashioned scratch-n-peck form of...

Phew

So – that scrawny little thing eventually made it out (five hours later). And I’m proud to say I resisted the temptation to prise away the shell….It is flailing around quite horribly now, and its proud Mum is nudging it around with her beak –...
Birth pangs

Birth pangs

OO la la, sometimes life in chickenville gets seriously exciting. Peaches, our darling little Pekin – so docile, so pretty – got in the mood for babies a month or so ago (inspired, naturally, by my putting three white plastic eggs in her nest). Being in...

How to feed ourselves?

Seems a silly question, I know, when there’s so much of it about, when we’re burdened not by hunger but by obesity and early onset diabetes. It’s only the crazy doom-mongers with nothing else to worry about who nag about our importing more grub than...

let them eat milk

Life’s hard for a farmer when the cold comes. And for us mini-farmers too. With the ground solid as concrete and the grass stiff and grey, I am painfully aware how dull life has suddenly become for my chickens. There they huddle on the barren ground, unable to...