We’re approximately five weeks away from the birth of our fourth child. This is causing some problems as we want the house to be perfect before she comes but we know that’s not going to happen in that time scale. Add to that Vonnie is having serious trouble with SPD again as well as pulling muscles in her back and neck which might make labour interesting so I haven’t actually been at work that much recently. I’m off every Thursday but this week I’ve actually only been in the office for one day!

What it does mean though is I’ve been able to take the kids into the garden and get some work done there.

For the past two years I’ve been trying to get my raised beds built and every year something comes up to stop that happening. Last year I had my health problems so I only managed to get the chicken coop built which left everything else still to do in the garden. We have a skips worth of general rubbish sitting in one corner, the old chicken run waiting to be pulled down in another corner, the patio to turf over and various fences to build as well as getting those those raised beds built.

So with the better weather we’ve had the kids out on what’s left of the patio whilst I fenced it off from the rest of the garden. All we need now is to paint it which will cause some problems as it needs to be done after the chickens go to bed. In fact that same problem has meant the fence at the bottom of our garden has never been built. Since we started keeping chickens I’ve actually just had two fence panels leaning against the back hedge to keep them from escaping into our neighbours garden but they ‘kindly’ cut the hedge right back thinking the panels were an actual fence. Twice this week I’ve been able to get work done after the chickens were put to bed so hopefully that will be sorted by tomorrow night. I managed to get the two fence post holes redug as I’d originally made them in the wrong place, line up the posts in their holes and get the supports nailed on and finally get the cement into the holes. Unfortunately I ran out of screws so I’ll need to pay B&Q a visit in the morning before finishing it off.

The raised beds have been started but their location has changed. Until about two weeks ago they were to be placed where we actually have all the rubbish but since losing the greenhouse to the weather and moving the shed and coop about we’ve decided to place the beds on the small hill we have in the garden.

As you can see I have one built so far with another three going in alongside it. Then once that’s finished I can get the chicken run dismantled and the fruit trees/bushes can go in there along with another raised bed or two depending on how much wood I have left. In order to stop the chickens getting in at the veg in the beds I’ve put some pond netting over them using the supports I’ve built on either end to hold it up. I completely forgot that old saying of ‘measure twice and cut once’ though when building the supports as they should have been about two inches shorter that they actually are which accounts for them looking as though they are about to fall over. They are sturdy enough for me to sit on them without fear of breaking them though. So far I’ve got the cabbage, broccoli and lettuce in there but I know the broccoli will be to big for the low net ‘roof’ so I may need to rehome them once I build the other beds.

As for the cat on the bed… I wasn’t even aware he was there until I uploaded it to Flickr! That Fitz is a sneaky one.

We were doing so well!

There I was standing in the kitchen making lunch for the kids when the wind picked up and I heard the the greenhouse flap. I never really though anything of it as not only was the frame and cover pegged down but we also had guy ropes attached and anchored well to give it some extra stability. Not only that but the frame had a kitchen unit we had spare from the kitchen weighing it down on one end that we had been using as shelves and on the other end I’d been keeping bales straw and wood shavings. Basically it shouldn’t have been touched by the wind.

by rachel_r on Flickr

At this point I should probably point out that it was a metal pole/plastic joint/plastic cover style greenhouse so it wasn’t *that* expensive but that’s not the point. When I had been building it two of the joins cracked or snapped and I had to superglue them and splint them up with masking tape.

So back in the kitchen I looked out the window I looked out the window to see the middle joints at the front door had gave way and the guy ropes and cover were flapping about like mad. I knew if I didn’t get out there all the seedlings we had would be ruined but by the time I got my shoes on and made it out into the garden the greenhouse was gone leaving a trail of destruction behind it. The seedlings were all over the garden and the straw and sawdust were everywhere.

The corner of my garden where the greenhouse originally was is surrounded on two sides by eight foot high concrete walls and the greenhouse had been blown up and over them. By the time I got out into the street it was half way up the hill and moving towards the main road. After picking up all the stray poles and the shattered joints do you know what the funny thing was? The only two joints that were still in one piece were the two that I had to glue. In fact the poles that had been on those joints were deformed when I had a look at them from where they were pulled.

So you could say we’ve had a stroke of bad luck. From the trays of seedlings we had I managed to save maybe 20 of them. I’m just hoping it’s not to late to replace the ones we’ve lost.

I apologise for our radio silence, things at our end have been a little crazy over the past few months!

We woke up on Friday morning to the dulcet tones of one of the cockerels showing off his newly-learned trick of crowing. Being that it’s still dark until lunchtime, it was 8.30am and so shouldn’t have woken the neighbours up but still – if one is crowing then the rest are going to follow suit quickly so Bob dispatched two of them (the crower and the biggest) on Saturday morning and we had one for dinner last night.

It’s an interesting experience. This bird really tasted different to a chicken you’d get in a supermarket and whether that’s my ex-vegetarian or just the part of me that’s been controlled by capitalism over the years, I find it quite difficult to eat. I couldn’t touch the dark meat although the white meat was nice enough – there’s a lot more flavour to it. The kids wolfed it down.

I think we have five cockerels left, could be wrong (I can’t see their pen from here) and I think that although it’s been a valuable experience we probably won’t go down the route of raising more table birds in the future. The space could be better utilised (in my opinion) for veg and fruit plots which pricewise will save us more money in the long run. By the time we tot up the feed prices we’re probably spending more per bird than we would buying a free ranger but there’s the benefit of knowing exactly where our food came from and what it consumed etc. So, once the last of the cockerels is done the run will be coming down and we’ll be planting a couple of trees (pear, apple, cherry) and some fruit bushes that we’ve had sitting around for a while. We’ll probably start growing seeds at the end of the month so that we have time to build the raised beds in time for the last frost.

Sorry for the lack of updates recently. We’ve had a rough old time of it these last few months and to be honest the last thing on our minds was sitting down in front of the computer and blogging about it. Things are starting to look up though.

We had great plans for our garden. We had lots of plans. Then I was hit with chest pains and the garden took a back seat for a while. So much so we’ve started getting a delivery of organic veg from a farm a couple of hours drive away every two weeks to cover what we had planned to grow ourselves.

Aside from the fox attack which took three of our hens we’ve had one chicken drop dead almost overnight and one of our ‘chicks’ was crushed in the hen house as well. I call it a chick but it was a fair size and a good age as well. I never actually get over calling them chicks as we have a favarolle that I still refer to as a chick and its the biggest hen we have! We picked up a few meat birds as well from our friend which have taken up residence in the run alongside two turkeys. The other hens have moved into their new coop which sits out in the main garden. They free-range during the day so don’t actually ever use the run any more.

My tomatoes and cucumber plants died whilst we were on holiday and my one remaining jalapeño plant is currently growing its fruits but has just been infested with aphids overnight. I need to sort that one out sharpish. My potato buckets have came to nothing. Between the chickens eating the leaves and the very heavy rain we’ve received these last few months they are all but dead. Even our bramble bush has not produced much in the way of fruit this year. In fact the only harvest we had that was successful was from our rhubarb plants. We’ve got a cupboard full of jam now thanks to that harvest.

The plant beds that I was meant to dig over the summer so that the ground was ready for next spring have yet to be planned out never mind dug. Between the weather and my health it just hasn’t happened yet. I have found through talking to some people that my hopes of getting an allotment might not be as bad as I’d heard. There is a waiting list of around 1100 people looking for an allotment with about 80 plots. Going on the councils figures they say thats a waiting time of about 30 years but after talking to a few allotment owners they say the turnover of plots is quite fast at the moment. Apparently it may only take two years to get one rather than the decades I first feared.

Anyway I’ll get back to work and we’ll see how things go with updating this place more in the future.

So yeah we got a few more chickens the other day. One of them was a hen from Calderglen Country park that kept jumping out of its enclosure so they wanted to rehome her and the others were 3 Scots Grey hens and a cockerel. Unfortunately the cockerel didn’t go down to well with the neighbours or my sleep as you can imagine. With still being ill I’m not getting a good sleep anyway but to wake up every morning at 5am to the cockerel telling everyone in the neighborhood it was morning puts the icing on the cake.

We tried to rehome it at short notice but like most people looking to offload a cockerel we had no chance. So at 10pm on Monday night after trying to completely blackout the cockerels coop we decided that if that didn’t keep him quite to a reasonable hour that was it. So we went to sleep.

At 5.30am I woke up to the chickens morning call. By 6am I’d grabbed it mid crow and dispatched it. Its an awfully weird experience sitting on your back door step watching the sun come as you pluck a chicken. Especially when you live in a town as large as the one we live in! It was round about now that I realised that we never got any photos of Glen, as that was what we named him, before his run in with the broom handle. I’ll stick a LJ-cut style thing in here I think to spare those that may be squeamish from the pics.

This is the first photo we got of Glen.

Not really the best angle I know. Ignore the background as thats my ‘building’ area for my carpentry projects. I say carpentry what I mean is knocking together badly designed things using bits of old fence panels. Anyway as he was such a big chap I didn’t feel comfortable using the hand/neck dislocation method so opted for the broomstick method. Basically you hold the bird by the feet upside down where it goes surprisingly calm and then lower it to the ground where it lays its neck down. You put a broom handle over its neck and stand on both sides and pull on the legs until the neck breaks and the chickens dead. You then have to hang it up and cut its throat so that the blood drains. Its best if you put a little water in the bucket you use to catch this as it makes it easier to clean up afterwards.

Once you’ve let it drain you can get to work plucking the feathers out. It depends exactly what your going to do with the bird but if your not that bothered about eating the wings you don’t have to worry about the tough feathers on the edge and tip of the wing. Some people like to dip the bird in scalding water which makes it easier to pluck but I found it was easy enough without doing this. Once its plucked I hung it up by one leg in the fridge. With the recent demise of my huge fridge freezer though I may have to rethink this for next time.

A couple of days later I prepped and gutted the bird. Using a pair of garden shears I cut the head off at the base of the neck. The tips of the wings were bent back until they cracked and then cut off with a sharp knife and the same was done to the lower legs.

The neck and tail were trimmed off and a hole cut just below the vent to start getting the insides out. It’s not the nicest job but you need to get your fingers inside and free the organs up and pull then out.

Stringing the chicken up was always going to be a problem for me. I can’t tie knots you see. I think I found about 3 ways to tie it up properly and managed to get it close to looking like one of them. Between the size of the legs and the chicken being stiff from being in the fridge they didn’t quite get tied down just as tightly as they should have.

After 2 hours in the oven we had a roast chicken to eat. Not sure if it was anything to do with the size of the bird but it took longer to cook than any other chicken I’ve ever roasted before. It was given the requisite time per kg and then some but it still needed to be put back in the oven for another 30 minutes to finish it off.

Thanks to the aforementioned fridge freezer fiasco we had to freeze the meat to keep it until we could eat it. Thankfully I made a lovely chicken and vegetable pie with shortcrust pastry. There was more than enough to feed the family and was probably the best way other than a curry for us to eat the meat first time around. The breast is nowhere near as big as on commercial meat birds but you get alot on the legs. In fact I’d go as far as saying that between the thigh and leg theres more meat than on a normal breast but as its dark meat it is very strong tasting. You don’t need anywhere near as much meat on your plate because of this. I also found that the breast meat actually tasted more like the dark meat from a supermarket bought chicken. I’ve often wondered where they dream up the taste of chicken stock cubes from as I’ve never tasted chicken like that before. Now I have.

We’ve been away for the last while on holiday in France after leaving family to look after the livestock. After driving all the way home from France we made it home at 5am only to find that a fox had made it into our run and made off with three of our chickens. They should never have been out of their coop overnight but thats neither here nor there. We lost one of our Orps, our Silkie and Bunty our SLW. It may sound harsh but boththe Orp and the Silkie were possible males so I wasn’t that attached to them but we’ve had Bunty since the start and she was the first of ours to lay an egg.

I’ve managed to reinforce the run but it still needs work. You’ll never get it 100% fox-proof but its getting there. It’s also thrown our plans for expanding our collection out the window. We had hoped to take on another 4 Scots Greys, a couple of male chickens from a friend and a turkey to feed up for Christmas Dinner but now we don’t know if we can. Thanks to health problems I’ve not managed to get any of the work done thats needed to house any of them and with this latest setback we don’t want to take them if we can’t protect them well enough.

Time will tell how we get on though.

Our hens have been lazy. Thats the only explanation I can come up with.

When we got our hens they were already at he stage where they should be laying but they weren’t. We’ve had them 3 months now and not a single egg has came from them. That was until this morning.

I think it came from Bunty the wyandotte bantam as its tiny. It was barely in the house and #1 son demanded to be allowed to eat it for breakfast. So he did

Over the last week Vonnie had been involved with a battery hen ‘rescue’ that involved getting 1500 battery hens from a farm in the south of England and distributing them all over the country. We were supposed to be getting 170 of the hens yesterday morning for distribution around Scotland but due to a variety of reasons the Scottish leg of the rescue was called off at the last minute. Hopefully the next rescue will get some birds up our waybut it got me thinking.

In England from what I’ve read the Battery Hen Welfare Trust buys hens from the farmers for around 35-40p per hen usually and passes them on to chicken keepers all over for the cost of £1 per chicken which goes towards care, food and petrol costs. They seem to have no problems finding homes for all these chickens as at very short notice they rehome thousands of birds with great success. In Scotland though there is a waiting list of 1500 people waiting to help out. Farmers just don’t want to sell their chickens to them. Then the Lanark auction came up last week and a good 30-40% of the poultry there were ex-battery hens. I’m caught in two minds about this. Yes it means they get a new home but with auction prices rising it also means the farmers are doing it for a quick buck. I know they have to find cash where ever they can these days but it’s the sudden increase in back garden chicken keeping they are taking advantage of. On one hand they are still selling them on to be looked after but they are doing so at much higher prices than before.

Well the chance to move to the North of Scotland fell through so the thought of using the garden as not just a place to store my potato plants has came flooding back.

photo credit: southgeist

Between our front garden basically being a moss bed and our back garden being a sodden lump of clay we have our work cut out for us. I’ve always known the front garden, under the living room window at least, was very shallow. I had a great deal of trouble planting the roses last summer as I just couldn’t find anywhere that didn’t have hardcore or concrete less than 6 inches under the surface. With this in mind I set about building a raised flower bed under the window to give the plants something to grow into. I think it’s not bad but it could have been built far stronger if I’d thought about it more. For instance the top soil is pushing the frame out from the wall as I only built 3 sides to it and didn’t anchor the corner pegs in well enough. It seems to have settled down now though and after a friday night of planting bedding plants at 10pm with my wife it looks not bad. Now we just have to hope the grass seed we sowed comes through OK and helps cover up the mess that was made. Thats one tonne of topsoil used up and 2 more to go. I’ll get those bags moved from the side of my house one of these days. Vonnie also tried to plant our cherry tree thats been languishing on our patio since last summer. Every place we come up with to plant it ends up having problems. We have a corner of our garden that the kids use as a short cut all the time and that has worn away the grass over the years and we hoped that by planting the tree they’d stop cutting that corner but as we found out the shallow topsoil covers our whole garden and not just under the window.

In the back garden we chopped down the rest of the hedge and hired a chipper so that we could use the waste on the chicken run floor as well as a mulch for the rest of the garden. We were expecting a small almost useless shredder for the price we were paying but as the hire company had got a new model in they gave us that for the same price. For an electric shredder it was a beast and my hands and arms are covered in small cuts from the branches as it ate them up. That will teach me not to wear gardening gloves and long sleeves! We were caught out with the weekend hire though and so only managed two thirds of the hedge but we plan on burning the rest over the coming week.

On Saturday we decided to build up the kids swing set which had been hidden in our loft for the last 18 months. Everything was going fine until we had all the sections laid out and had started building it. The rain started. Then the thunder came. I’m not sure just how safe building a metal frame in my garden which backs on to an electrical substation during the thunder storm is. Needless to say I panicked a bit when the first flash of lightning came.

My cucumber and tomato plants are are coming on well but unfortunately the fw that I managed to plant outside really didn’t like the weather last week and didn’t make it. My pepper and chilli plants are coming along now although they are still very slow in growing. As for the potatoes, I only planted 4 tubs as I ran out of containers but they are growing like wildfire. I’m having trouble giving them enough water I think as they just soak it up.

Our chicks are now coming up on three weeks old and we’re starting to wonder about the sex of each chick. Unfortunately none of our chicks are auto-sexing so we’re having to do it the hard way. Between checking the wing feathers and waiting for their colours to appear we think we’ve finally managed to nail one of them.

Faverolles grow different coloured feathers depending on their sex but without photos to compare to it can be a bit tricky to say for sure. The best description we’ve had so far to separate them is that cockerels have black feathers on their wings and pullets have biscuit coloured feathers. As you can see from the photograph it certainly looks like a female to me.

That leaves us with the Silkie to sex and both the Peking Bantams. I’m reliably informed that to sex a Silkie means to wait until it either crows or lays an egg. That will be fun. I’m also informed that by three weeks the Peking’s combs would be very evident if they were cockerels which they aren’t at the moment so fingers crossed it stays that way! I’m not entirely convinced by how accurate that would be at his stage though but only time will tell.