Chicken Run!!!

I came home tonight to the sound of a strange chicken-like honking emanating from the back garden. I thought 'Uh-oh' Matilda's got herself in trouble. Matilda's the biggest chook, and turning out to be the One Most Needing Rescuing at the moment. We are in the habit of leaving the chickens to run around the main garden on Friday's and weekends when we are mostly at home. As you will read that policy may need refining....

Although I could hear Matilda I couldn't find her. I checked the house and could find only three of the five chooks, perching sensibly on their roosts. I turned back to the house and spotted a fourth on top of the roof of the utility room. This was Connie, I still didn't know where Matilda was. Connie was mildly distressed and straining to look over next door's garden. That would be the neighbours with the really small garden. And the giant St Bernard dog...

Then I heard more clucking, from over the fence. I stretched up and peered over. There was Matilda poking around in a thankfully dog-free garden. I grabbed some sweetcorn and dashed around, greeting the neighbours with the classic line 'Please may I have my chicken back?'.

Thankfully after a brief chase around the garden, trying to catch a chicken whilst simultaneously avoiding St Bernard poo (the dog, not the saint), the girls were all re-united and are now locked back up in their run for the day. No more adventures today.

Problem is this means we need to seriously re-consider our stance on not clipping their wings. We thought it might be a help when strange cats venture in the garden. By leaving their wings in tact it might give them a better chance to escape. Though preferably not over into next door's garden, please, or beyond. This is farming country, ladies, you're not considered just egg-layers.

Ah, the joys of chicken-keeping. Those eggs can't come soon enough.

"Summer's lease...

...hath all too short a date".

Me neither, but I think it's to do with the fleeting nature of the seasons. September is sliding inexorably towards the equinox, beyond that point of course each day gets fractionally more hours of night than daylight til the vernal equinox next March.

We were clearing up the garden this weekend, chucking the last of the summer bedding into the compost bin for spreading next spring, cutting back the pumpkin flowers to give the 4-5 fruit chance to ripen before Hallowe'en, generally tidying up before the winter comes. I thought this would be a good moment to review what worked and what didn't veg-wise. Some things went surprisingly well, others a complete disaster.

The greenhouse tomatoes were a complete wash-out, but whilst I was emptying out the growbags I noticed they were sodden, in fact they were really heavy to drag out of the green house. They also smelt a bit whiffy and were full of worms - I wonder if that contributed to our poor tomato harvest. Next year I'm going to do what my father in law did, and just buy a few plants, rather than several packets of seeds that might not take. I'll also build a raised bed in the greenhouse rather than use growbags, think I can control the watering a bit better. I have a plan in my little note-book of a nifty multi-use bed and stage thing that I'm going to build, just you wait and see!!

Courgettes I messed up on completely - the ones I planted in 'spring' rotted off, and I didn't keep any spare plants back - I won't get caught like that again. Carrots I never seem to be able to get right - might not bother next year.

On the plus side the french beans did well - when they weren't being stripped by a voracious 7-year old - potatoes were good, and we are currently enjoying a autumn-raspberry bonanza, as this is the first year the plants haven't been denuded by pet rabbits (gawd rest 'em). Think I'll put more plants in next year, they seem to be fairly robust, and have been left alone by the birds - at least the wild ones anyway. My son came in this morning and announced he'd fed a raspberry to the chooks to see if they liked it, and was happy to report they did. Thanks, mate.

We've moved around some of the shrubs - including making a little garden for the chooks in their run to give them somewhere to relax in - honestly, these chooks are living a life of riley. Anyway the space freed up will be turned over to more veggies next year, we'll try that Alys Fowler edible garden approach and stuff veg plants among the shrubs, make as much use as we can of the limited space.

Now the days are drawing in; it's the time of hearty soups and casseroles, log fires and candles, fallen leaves and low mists. The chooks are taking longer each morning to get up, apparently they slow down as a response to the dwindling daylight. They're even going to bed earlier as well. Don't think I'll be seeing any eggs too soon.

Happy Michaelmas to you all, unless you're a goose that is...

Finished!!!

Well that was a bit of a gap between postings – you must have thought I’d given up with it all. Well, I hadn’t. Its just that things took longer to do than I thought – a recurring characteristic of mine. I didn’t think that postings along the lines of ‘Done a bit more but not finished yet’ would prove of much interest to either of my readers – so I laid off writing for a while.

The good news is – it’s finished! After a two-day final push the chooks now have a place to run around that’s completely fox-proof. It was hard work for me at least, as the pictures will show you what a weird shape the run is, butted up in that odd-shaped corner. I’m not the best at carpentry, or DIY in general, so the finish is – how can I describe it – ‘rustic’ to say the least. Still, I’ve seen the prices some people charge for bespoke runs a fraction of the size, so can’t complain too much.

So here it is in all its glory.

Oh, and by the way the chooks are here. They have been here for two weeks actually, but as we were all off for the school holidays we could keep an eye on them during the day, and still lock them safely up at night. When ‘the girls’ – as I believe it’s popular to refer to pet chooks – first arrived they were a slightly sorry bunch, all huddled together as one mass in the corner of their house. We think they must have spent most of their lives, certainly the two weeks between us choosing them and then picking them up, in very confined conditions, and probably found the echoing vaults of their new home a bit daunting.

However they have soon overcome their initial shock and are acclimatised to their new (spoilt) lifestyle. Even now their characters are coming through. The youngest seems to be the first to exhibit new behaviour – the first to come out the outer pop-hole, the first to try roosting; the partridge pekin seems to be the explorer, going the furthest around the garden, even jumping into my lap and perching on my knee for a better view.

They are, it must be said, total time-wasters; we catch ourselves spending ages just watching them scratching around, calling and clucking to each other, exploring their new world. It was also a useful exercise being on hand, as they have got into the occasional scrape. Chickens can fly over picket fencing when they want to, but they can't reverse out of gaps behind the shed. Luckily we were on hand to avoid any major disasters or trips to the vet.

They've established a routine for us (note closely how that sentence has been constructed!), and expect to be let out pretty early in the morning, scratch around all day in their run, get let out for a general scratch around after school, then take themselves to bed around 7 in the evening. They've worked out that their house keeps the rain off their backs and that scratching in the dirt brings up all sorts of goodies. And that there's plenty of cover if they feel threatened.

Don't know what I was worried about.

Just need a few eggs now, m'dears.

No going back now

I fall for it every time.

"We'll just have a look", she says.

We were chatting to some villagers after church about keeping chooks and so on when one of them mentioned that a chap was selling all sorts of breeds down at the local farmer's superstore (y'know those places - big stores selling everything from wellies, to sheep-dip, to ride-on mowers). Anyway despite my reservations, we decided to go and have a look. Fatal.

We ended up putting a deposit down on five chooks, which the guy would hold on to for a fortnight, which meant Operation Build That Bloody Chicken Run now had a two week deadline. I had to throw myself body and soul into it, with mildly disastrous results - I threw my back out in the process, so it still isn't finished.

Anyway we picked the chooks up last Monday evening, and are now parents to five little cluckers. They still don't have a fully enclosed run yet, but they at least have a secure shed, and an outer run to peck around in.

We are off until school starts again so I have a bit of extra time to get them fully secured. It's so nearly ready. But I don't want a career in stretching chicken wire, thanks, my poor handies are absolutely shredded.

Here's a (not very good) picture of the chooks taken recently, whilst they were still too shy to come out the house.

Even so they don't keep still long enough for my camera to capture them!

Since I began this entry I've had a sudden burst of energy (it's gone now) and managed to get the sides of the run all positioned and fixed together, so they now have a semi-secure run to noodle around in. I feel a bit better about that now, there was one point when I genuinely had had enough of the whole enterprise. Now I can see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Still got the roof to do, so still having to mess about with weird angles and more finger-shredding chicken wire, but at least I'm only working in the two dimensions, now. You'll see what I'm blathering on about when I post pictures of the completed run.

These chooks better get squirting eggs out as soon as they can - it's the least they can do now!!!

As you were

Ha! I bet you thought it was all over, huh? That the grand plan had hit the buffers and was a smoking ruin? That some of the garden was reverting to, well, garden, and that I had a goodly store of firewood for the winter? Well, turns out we were both wrong.

Project 'Home-of-the-most-cossetted-chickens-in-all-England' is back on and we are now - after three weekends of back-breaking work - proudly revelling in the position of, er, well, where we were three weeks ago. Actually that's not fair, we are a little further as the fence is all up, the gate re-hung, all the painting finished and, wait for it, we now have a rain-water harvesting system installed (that used to be called fitting guttering and a water-butt.

We still have to fit perches and other chickeny-type stuff and there's the small matter of building an enclosed day-run so the chooks can wander freely without fear of predation. I've got some idea of how to do that - which as you'll remember is why we ended up rotating the entire shed 180 degrees in the first blimmin' place.

So here's some pictures.

See how it complements the houses behind (oh for goodness sake, Ed...). The dirt area to the right of the picture will be where the run will go, probably utilising the existing wall. I'm almost frightened to say it but that blue colour doesn't quite go with the lavender and clay scheme of the coop, but the missus doesn't read this...

And a closer view:-

Ignore the runner-bean wigwam, that's just a temporary use of the space, and I couldn't be bothered to move it as it was soaking wet, but I think it adds to the ambience. (Hmm, that blue definitely clashes...)

Now onto the window boxes and bubble fountain....

Further away than ever...

Have you ever got part way through a job and wished you'd never started?

We call it the 'Wednesday feeling' around here. Years ago we were replacing our kitchen, and had taken a week off work to do the job. The old kitchen was ripped out and walls prepared and plumbing and electrics laid down. We'd also decided to replace the tile floor with the then-vogueish laminate flooring. Chipping up the tiles was no problem, but the floor surface beneath was too uneven to lay the laminate on directly. There then followed two days of relentless chipping away at the worst of the bulges to even off the floor, using a hammer and cold chisel.

By the second day of this (Wednesday) despair had begun to creep in that we would never get this kitchen done. My wife refused to get up, all our other help had departed, it was just me bashing away at the same square foot of floor for hour after hour. We were exactly half-way between the old kitchen and the new kitchen, and a bleddy long way from either.

Well, we're here again. Both you and my other reader will remember how we decided to reverse the layout of the hutch-coop by simply (yeah, right) swapping the two gable ends around. This appeared to be going okay, us using the opportunity to re-paint the inaccessible sides of the hutch while it was demounted. Problem was, we would not leave alone. As that day's rain began to fall, I realised that the untreated base of the hutch was now exposed to the elements. In order to protect it I lifted it up and leant it against the wall under the shelter of the creeper growing across it. Mistake! We discovered that two of the four cross struts were rotten, and worse still the dry sand and slab base on which it stood was now very disturbed. I poked around a bit and discovered a vast network of tunnels beneath the base.

Our two rabbits - despite being afforded particularly well-appointed accommodation - much prefered the simpler life and excavated themselves a burrow underneath it all. If we ever have rabbits again I may well skip the wendy house hutch thing altogether and just dump a pile of earth in their pen and let 'em dig out their own house...

Anyway all this waffle is by way of leading up to today's update. The site now looks like this:

No, the pictures aren't out of order, that really is the view as I write this latest episode. We have gone backwards somewhat. Basically I have now created the world's biggest cat litter tray. With extensive soakaway. Our two cats demonstrated this almost within minutes of it being exposed.

Hmm, I get the feeling it's a Wednesday again, and somewhere somewhen I am pounding away hour after hour at a square foot of floor.....

We will prevail. We must, as I have a garage full of hutch sides, roof panels and fence panels revelling in three weekend's worth of painting. They're either going out the back as a coop, or out the front with a big 'For Sale' sign on 'em.

If I write no more postings then it's the latter. Feel free to make me an offer!!!

A Coop in the making

Well, it won't house rabbits anymore, not unless they can work a sliding door. Or learn to lay eggs.

I woke one morning to find my father-in-law already at work. He had been secretly commisioned to build a nesting box to fit the existing hutch-soon-to-be-coop. (He had built the original hutch, so obviously knew what he was doing). He had brought the next box up with him, along with some other bits of wood for which he had plans for and a comprehensive toolkit. He clearly didn't trust that I had the tools required, or at least that I could lay my hands on them the same day they were called for...

Anyway at some ungodly pre-breakfast-coffee hour, he began loosening the panelling on the side of the Hutch-coop, and offered up the box to its eventual final position. He seemed intent on holding and fixing the construction himself, but I thought 'well he's just turned 80, he needs to start taking it easy' so I went out and helped him. He had it all worked out, so we carefully prised off 3 lengths of panelling, creating a gap in the side of the coop. Next the box was affixed to the side. In fact this happened so quickly I didn't get to take a picture before the box was on.

Next, one of the prised-off bits was trimmed down to slide back in above the box to draught-proof the coop. Of course being a tight (precise?) fit it needed to be hammered home. I hope the neighbours weren't expecting a Sunday morning lie-in, had they have looked they would have seen three generations of one family tapping home a bit of wood with a claw hammer, with the intensity, concentration and anxiety of three bomb disposal experts defusing a particularly tricky device.

Job done and final bits of wood on to seal against draughts and a natty lid affixed, as demonstrated below by egg-collector in training.

Then he set about, converting the small rabbit door on the other end, which was covered by a bog-standard cat-flap, into a pop-hole, complete with sliding cover and pull-string. Er, take my word for the pull-string mechanism, the camera man was too slow again...

It all looks rather good, and so far hasn't cost us much. We still have to finish painting the fence its new colour scheme, and I have to replace a rotten post and fix some gravel boards.  Got to admit this weather is not helping the project much (even as I write this I hear more rain falling outside) but we will crack on and get it done.

One thing that had been bugging me was the area surrounding the coop, where the chooks (see I'm getting into the lingo already!) would swarm/peck/scratch whilst we were out. I worried that the fence wouldn't be sufficient protection - neither keeping them in nor foxes out. So hunting around the web I came across this site and posted a query on the forum. Straightaway the answer came back. To paraphrase Chief Brody, 'You're gonna need a bigger fence'.

So halfway into the build we have a design issue. We need really to have some sort of enclosure for the chooks to run around in safely during the day, probably roofed over as a brick shed overlooks what will be their home, which to my mind seems an ideal launchpad or access route for an inquisitive fox.

"We could build something that links to the pop-hole, but it would be an odd shape, and the ground slopes a bit. It will look really naff", I said to the wife as we discussed it.
"What about the other side next to the wall, it would look better against that", she replied.
"We'd have to think of getting them from the coop to the run, and back again everyday. That would be a bit of hassle" I said, then thinking out loud "its a shame the nest box isn't the other end...."

She looked at me. "We could swap it around, couldn't we? Take each end off and move it to the other side. So the nest box is this end and the pop-hole the other..."
"That would mean taking the roof off, taking the front off, taking the pop-hole side off, taking the nest box side off and moving it to the other end, then putting sides, front and roof all back together"
"Yes? And..?"
"I may as well fit some guttering to the far side to catch rain water, whilst the roof is off."

She smiled at me. "You're really getting into this, aren't you?"

A scheme is hatched

It could all end badly. They may be a complete waste of space, just scratch and squawk and poo around all day eating us out of house and home. They may regard my attempt at gardening – a fragile and faintly disappointing endeavour at the best of times – with contempt and trample all over it, ripping the place up.  Or we may wake one morning to find them gone, nothing but a few traces of blood and the odd dismembered body part to remind us of them. It could all be a disaster. I’m forbidden to even think of eating them.

I'm talking, of course, about chickens, not teenagers. We are embarking on an experiment to keep some garden friendly chickens - if such a thing exists - in what will turn out to be a small garden. Actually a very small garden. Incredibly small. A small garden that is already something of a mecca for wild birds due to a conscientious feeding regime. A small garden that is a playground for several cats - two of which we own. A small garden that already hosts regular footy kick-abouts starring an exuberant seven year old with a tasty left foot. And now we intend to introduce some chickens. I ask you, what could possibly go wrong?

So preparations are under way even as I write. Breeders are being sourced, breeds researched, hen-keeping courses being checked out. Favoured birds at the moment are chooks called - possibly - Fizzles, or Banamans or Slickies. I'll let you know when I know. In the meantime we need to sort them out somewhere to live.

Here is the hen-house-to-be.

Observant readers may note its rather open aspect and generous ventilation – but it's undergoing a renovation at the moment. It used to house our rabbits (now sadly departed) – but apparently no self respecting chicken wants to live in an ex-rabbit hutch,  no matter how well appointed – so modifications are underway. It's also in-between colour schemes, hence its slightly queasy look – its moving from the blue colour scheme you can see hinted on the fence posts to one based around that shade of ‘whatever-it-is’ you can see on the house. (‘Warm clay’? ’Hazy sunshine’? ‘Baby sick’? – I don’t know, I just paint what I’m told.)

We are doing our homework. The hutch-now-soon-to-be-coop will of course require some additional features,  a nesting box on the side, some roosting perches and a few other things I haven’t got around to thinking about yet; probably a nice veranda and a couple of window boxes. I suspect the path that led from the rabbits’ front gate up the rabbits’ front garden to the rabbits’ front door (no, I'm not kidding) may be a fairly unique feature for a chicken coop. Probably a temporary one as well.

We'll see how it all turns out. Will we get a steady supply of eggs, or will a neighbouring fox have a take-away blow-out to remember? The adventure begins.....