Carol's Chickens

At last the tomatoes have started to ripen and they are going to be the next thing that we will be deluged with.

T wanted some pretty things on our second plot and this is very pretty.

We are getting loads of potatoes now too and onions and the raspberries are still plentiful and so good. So far it has been a very good year for the allotment plots.

Speckles is definitely showing her age but she is still well and happy which is so good as she is our oldest girl yet.

Speckles still really enjoys a dust bath and it’s always so good to see. She is moulting at the moment and always leaves behind a few feathers in her dust bath.

We love this old girl.

We have never made pickles before. We have lots of gherkins from the allotment and of course an abundance of runner beans.

We decided to try pickling the gherkins and the runner beans. We googled how best to do this. There seemed to be lots of different ways of pickling gherkins. Pickled vegetables seemed more straight forward.

We had been saving pickled onion and gherkin jars and also coffee jars for this purpose.

The method we followed for the gherkins was to salt them overnight which is supposed to make them end up crunchy. We sprinkled them with salt and the next day poured off the water that had come out of them. We decided to use the brine we had saved from our bought gherkins and added a bit of vinegar and a little sugar. We added, our home grown, chopped chillies.

We cut the gherkins length ways to fit two jars. We bought the mixture to the boil and poured over the gherkins to cover. They need about three weeks before they are ready.

For the runner beans we cheated a little and bought some pickling vinegar. This made it really simple as it already has all the correct ingredients and spices and doesn’t need boiling.

I prepared the beans in the usual way and cooked them for just five minutes. I ran them under a cold tap until completely cold and filled a coffee jar with them. Then it’s just a simple matter of pouring the vinegar over them until they are covered and putting on the lid. Again leave them for three weeks.

We have no idea how well these will turn out but it is an experiment and will either be repeated or not according to the results.

We are looking forward to trying them out in a few weeks time.

We can tell that Speckles is really feeling her age these days although I am pleased to say that she remains well. I was also pleased that while Ebony and Flame were feeling the recent heat Speckles didn’t actually didn’t seem bothered by it. Maybe because she is less active.

Speckles Spends a lot of time sitting. Sometimes she will perch with the other two bigger girls and sometimes she will just sit on the ground. Speckles also likes to sit in the shelters or on top of the big shelter in the shade of the hypericum. She is often joined there by the little girls.

Another sign of her age is that Speckles is easily anxious. If both Ebony and flame are in the nest boxes at the same time Speckles shouts the whole time until one of them is out again. This was another reason to break Ebony from being broody.

It’s only occasionally that they would normally be laying at the same time but with Ebony in the nest box all the time it would happen regularly. We have also seen Speckles spook herself. I would be pottering in the run when Speckles would cry out as if being attacked and run to the patio although there would be nothing to be seen.

Speckles is our longest lived girl and we call her our creaking gate. I know that we have to be ready to lose her one day but at the moment we are making the most of her and she seems a very happy retired girl.

We have been experiencing a heat wave this week. Ebony and Flame have been feeling the heat and were panting with beaks open.

I gave the girls dishes of mash in plenty of cold water and some frozen spinach.

I have tried putting trays of cold water in the run in the past for them to stand in to cool off but chickens don’t really want to stand in water.

I then had a brain wave. I poured watering cans of water in various shady areas in the run. The girls immediately went to scratch in the damp dirt. I thought this would cool their feet. The girls seem to really like this.

I will be doing this every afternoon while it’s hot. Last night at dusk I checked on the girls in the chicken shed. It was still hot and Ebony was standing on the perch with her wings held aloft.

I decided to prop the chicken shed door open as our run is very secure and the open shed door is hidden behind solid fence panels. I also poured a watering can of water over the patio area outside the open door to help it cool a bit more.

I will keep the chicken shed door propped open until this heat wave breaks. I hope it will cool down a bit soon.

Both our allotment plots are growing madly at the moment. Both plots are quite different.

The first plot is more functional but T wanted the second plot to be more of a relaxing space. He had seeded a large wild flower bed and put in a seating area and barbeque. He also planted two passion plants to climb the back of the seating area and a grape vine to climb the outside, side, of the seating area.

The second plot has the advantage of a row of mature raspberry canes. We have a row of raspberry canes on the first plot but we only planted them last year so they are not producing yet. We have already, all of us, picked loads from the second plot and have some in the freezer. They have slowed down now but I still managed to pick a small ice cream container full a few days ago.

T also wants to win the giant pumpkin competition. Last year his pumpkin plant was huge but had no pumpkins on it and he was disappointed. This year he has been feeding his pumpkin plant with seaweed twice a week and he has huge pumpkins.

As for the produce I am not needing to buy any salad items or veg. We have lettuce, cucumber, gherkins and tomatoes for salads. We have onions, garlic and chillies for cooking and potatoes.

For veg we have courgettes and runner beans by the bucket full. We have had some broad beans although they didn’t do so well as the black fly effected them. We have some broccoli but that isn’t as fast growing. We have kale and chard which comes back as fast as we pick it. I have been giving the chooks chard every day for their daily greens.

Still to come are sweetcorn, carrots, parsnips, cabbages, beetroot and by winter brussel sprouts and leeks. There is also rhubarb which unfortunately I don’t like and of course the raspberries still coming.

I don’t think we will be buying any veg for the rest of the year. We are also supplying all our neighbours. It is lovely, but picking and watering, in this heat is the difficult part. We could do with some respite from the weather at the moment.

I thought that I should do an update on Marmite in case anyone hasn’t been following the comments.

It was four days ago that Marmite laid the weird shaped egg after looking miserable all morning. She then bounced back but the next day looked really poorly again. She then did a poop on the patio which had a rolled up bit of egg shell in it.

I always worry that she may not expel all of the egg or egg shell. Marmite bounced back again and then looked really poorly again. She would perk up and eat something and seem better for a while and then look really miserable again.

We wondered if this was going to be the time that we would lose her. She was standing in the run with her eyes closed.

The next morning Marmite laid a soft shelled egg in the chicken shed first thing in the morning. Before the weird egg she hadn’t laid for a week so it seems that she had been looking so poorly because she had another soft shelled egg coming a few days after the weird egg.

After the soft shelled egg Marmite bounced back to normal again.

As so often happens after an early morning soft shelled egg Marmite didn’t seem to realise that she had laid it and she went to sit in the nest box.

This is usual for Marmite and so I feel much happier about her at the moment. It looks like she has bounced back again, thank goodness.

The other thing that I have realised with these girls is how much they have become used to being handled.

In the post before the one about Marmite’s weird egg I put on a photo of Smoke puffing herself up when she is broody and another girl comes near to her. In the comments my mum asked if I could pick her up.

The answer is that I do pick her up all the time when she is broody and she accepts me picking her up. It is only the other girls that she takes out her aggression on.

I have been trying to break both Smoke and Ebony out of their broody spell over the last few days. I realised that I also pick Ebony up all the time to move her out of the nest box or to lift her off of another girl’s egg. Ebony is a thug with the other girls and can be quite brutal with them but she also accepts me picking her up.

I remembered back to when I first had Ebony and Flame and they would peck me if I tried to lift them when they were broody and I had to wear gardening gloves to lift them.

Now I pick all the girls up and they never peck me, thank goodness. I realised that it is just that they have simply got used to me handling them. I think they probably accept me as top girl and they make no attempt to peck me even when I am moving them from the place where they want to be.

The good news is that after four days Smoke came out of being broody and after five days Ebony has come through being broody too. I had been closing the nest boxes and blocking the chicken shed and putting buckets on top of the nest boxes to stop Ebony sitting there.

When another girl wanted to lay I opened one nest box and closed it after they had laid. Finally Ebony has given up. Hurrah!

There is definitely something wrong with Marmite’s egg laying machinery. Marmite was laying normally last year and even went broody a few times.

This year Marmite has struggled to lay all year. She often looks miserable the day before laying and most of her eggs have been soft shelled despite the fact that she regularly goes to the grit and oyster shell dispenser.

Four months ago Marmite laid a weird shaped egg with no yolk. A few days ago Marmite had her humped, miserable, stance and we knew she was about to lay again after a months break.

The next day she went in the nest box and I kept a close eye on her. When I checked her she had just laid another weird egg. As usual Marmite bounced back once she had laid.

I feel so sorry for Marmite to have to keep going through this and there is nothing I can do to help her. I had hoped it might improve with time but I think this weird egg shows that there is something wrong inside her.

We have had soft shelled eggs in the past but we have never seen the sort of strange eggs that Marmite lays and we know that it means there is something adrift.

We have to be prepared that Marmite won’t be a long lived girl. Every time this happens we think that we are going to lose her and every time she bounces back it is a great relief.

I don’t know how long Marmite can go on like this. I worry about her not being able to pass the complete egg. It will be very bad for her if she gets some egg stuck inside her.

We have to make the most of every day that we still have her.

We seem to keep having two broodies at once. I suppose that as Smoke is such a regular broody it is bound to happen that she is broody along with another girl from time to time. This time it is Smoke and Ebony.

It is frustrating when this happens because Smoke is the most consistent layer of the little girls, when she is laying, that is and the big girls are the most regular layers overall.

Smoke laid eight eggs in ten days this time round and it’s Ebony’s first broody spell of the year. Ebony was only broody once last year but she stayed broody for a month and then took another two weeks to start laying again. She did, however, continue to lay until the end of November which was two months longer than Flame.

Because Ebony was broody for so long last year I have decided to try to break them out of it and if it doesn’t work with Smoke I would like to at least break Ebony out of it. It means such a drastic fall in our eggs to have Ebony out of lay for such a long time.

I had already been closing the nest boxes at the end of the day to encourage Smoke and Ebony to roost in the chicken shed at bedtime. This works for Ebony but Smoke has been sitting in the corner of the chicken shed instead of perching. At dusk I lift Smoke to the perch.

The next step was to close the nest boxes once Salmon and Spangle had laid. Marmite hasn’t laid for a month so is unlikely to need to and Flame has formed the habit of laying in the corner of the chicken shed so this doesn’t effect her.

Salmon and Spangle have been laying every other day at the moment so this means that on the days in between I can keep the nest boxes closed.

Ebony is determined and has been sitting on top of the nest box instead of inside it. I have had to resort to putting buckets on top of the nest boxes to deter her.

Smoke is an angry broody and if another girl gets anywhere near her she puffs herself up to to make herself as big as possible.

Ebony was just out of shot on the right hand side of the photo which was making Smoke puff herself up. I know I shouldn’t be amused to see this but I can’t help it!

I am not sure how long this going take. Who will crack first the girls or me!

We bought the classic Morris Traveller two years ago and recently sold it for the same price we bought it for. We have spent money on it in between but all hobbies cost money so I am not going to count that.

We have now bought a practical family car also for the same amount of money so it feels like a switch of an old car for a newer car and we are really pleased with that.

We started looking and found a lovely bright blue ford fiesta. We thought about it and my husband went back to buy it the next morning only to find that it had sold already.

They had another ford fiesta that had just come in and it was slightly newer, bigger engine and less mileage, a bit more money and was white. My husband decided to put a deposit on this time so we wouldn’t miss out again. They are selling fast.

I was disappointed that it was white. After years of us both having white vans I had really fancied a colour. However what we needed was a practical car and this met all our needs. We decided to go for it. It would match the van and at the end of the day it’s a practical car that’s fit for purpose.

I have since got used to the fact that it is white and we were both looking forward to collecting it yesterday. It is eight years old, fairly low mileage and should be low cost to run and repair if needed.

Sitting inside the car it felt big and we felt high up and yet looking out of the window it looks small. I have decided that it’s a bit like the tardis, it’s bigger on the inside than the outside.

Anyway we are very happy with our, new to us, car.