We tried Treacle’s egg number nine this morning and it still had the same mouldy taste (although I thought it was not quite so strong) and I had some more feedback from the “Down the Lane” forum. Someone said that dried meal worms can effect the taste of eggs and that they should only be given twice a week. I have them mixed in my scratch treat which I was giving in the morning and evening. The meal worms are the only treat that have a smell (sort of malty) so that would make sense. I decided no more meal worms at all until this is resolved and have now made their scratch treat just a mix of corn and sunflower hearts.
Other than the new reduced scratch I am only going to give them greens for now. Today mid morning they had a pot of salad leaves and mid afternoon a few cooked peas.
A pot of leaves soon got their attention
This was ten minutes later, I think they liked those!
I think that Bluebell is about to start laying, hurrah! This morning she was strutting around shouting “boc boc” and then went and sat in the nest box for the first time. Later in the day she went in again and she readily squats now. This is how Treacle behaved the day before she laid so Bluebell may possibly lay tomorrow or fairly soon. It would be good to have Bluebells egg as a comparison.
Yesterday morning was the first really hard frost and the first time that the chickens water was frozen. I go out to them just before the coop door opens so I defrosted it under the hot kitchen tap. I always rinse out the drinker and refill it with fresh water every morning. I decided rather than take the whole thing inside that I would empty and rinse it in the evening, then simply refill it the morning. Another lesson learned, I need to separate the two halves of the drinker. This morning the empty drinker was frozen so that I couldn’t separate it to refill and still had to defrost it under the kitchen tap. Tonight I have separated the two halves. There is always another little tip to learn.
The other bit of disappointing but not unexpected news is that when we went up to take the food away at dusk tonight, we once more saw a rat in there. It disappeared so quickly in the poor light that we couldn’t tell how it got out. We will inspect in the morning but my husband thinks it probably squeezed through the chicken net where we haven’t yet put chicken wire underneath. This means we will have to do the whole run. We thought this probably would be the case but have been putting it off as we seem to spend every weekend working on the chicken run. It’s a never ending project. I am sure we will resolve all the hiccups eventually.
Click here to see the history of my flock.