Fun With Chickens

Money Well Spent

Having had the new hens for a week now were starting to recognise their personalities. They have been more adventurous, and innovative in the last few days than the others have been since being given the run of the allotment. They have realised they can reach grapes higher up the vine by jumping, which has provided us with plenty of entertainment, having not seen Rita or Alison do this until the new girls arrived. They have ventured inside the hut for the first time and one has explored the shed.

Betty has so far shown the most personality of the new girls. She quickly got the hang of eating out of our hands but seems to think our hands are also food. She likes to chase us around assuming we have something for us and if our hands are just dangling by our sides she will have a peck to see what she gets. This would be fine if she was gentle like the others, but she tends to be a bit rough.

Rita and Alison are starting to get used to having other chickens around and its nice to see them all together when we walk into lotty. Thats not to say they wont still give them a peck as Alison proved when Betty kept stealing the pieces of apple that were being offered to her.

Also to prove their adventurousness we have been informed that we had our very own episode of chicken run. One of the new girls managed to find a hole in the fence big enough to squeeze through and escape. Luckily chicken George spotted her and got her back in, and also covered a hole he thought she had escaped through.

In Other News

This week we have picked the last of the runner beans and they are on the agenda to be taken down this weekend. The carrots we planted out a week or two ago have started to appear which I myself am rather pleased with as I thought it might have been too late for anything to happen. Despite the weather the Blurs cucumber plant outside is still thriving and we have several good sized fruits growing from it. There were two small melons on the outside plant, but it looks as if one if the chickens thought it would be fun to pick it off and run it halfway down lotty.

One of the sunflowers has been acting strange and has around ten heads running up the very top of the stalk. We have taken the heads off of the other sunflowers and are drying them out so we can give the seeds to the chickens and the Blurs hamster Bam.

My dad came for the night and had a good look around lotty. He went back to Bristol with a bag of goodies from lotty and a recipe for pumpkin pasta. I did also let him know that pumpkin pie tastes alot better than you would imagine.

John came home from work yesterday with an idea for growing tomatoes and other similar plants, which is going to give us some work to do over the weekend and me something to write on Monday.