As usual for a Monday I was baking bread - 2 loaves and some rolls. This always makes a morning when it's difficult to get anything done outside and I wanted to weed the asparagus bed, but every time I tried to get out either the phone rang or someone came to the front door wanting change for egg buying.
Talking about eggs, we had some good luck with getting new chickens. We buy our hens at point-of-lay, that's about 18 to 20 weeks old, from a farmer who has them available four times a year in March, April, July and October. Our plan was to have 60 in March but it clashed with the time C was away at our daughters and the grass in the chicken run hadn't really got going so we decided to wait until his April batch. Then last week we had an email from him to say that he still had some of the March batch left, they were already laying, he needed to get them shifted and did we want them for £6 each? So that's how we come to have 60 chickens without having to feed them for a month and wait for them to start laying. C picked them up Saturday, they laid 32 eggs yesterday and they produced around 40 teeny eggs today.
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| Clipping the long feathers on one wing stops them being able to fly over a fence. This doesn't cause any harm to the hen. |
Our oldest group of chickens, whose eggs are often thin shelled, wrinkled and not good quality will be sold on to someone we know. We will move their shed, give it a good pressure washing and the new hens will go out onto the field as soon they've eaten their way through the grass in the chicken run in the garden.
We are hoping for sunshine and less wind tomorrow so we can get the plastic on the poly tunnel.
Thanks to everyone for comments yesterday.
Back tomorrow
Sue
