The Quality of Mercy

A hen called Doris

That's it. It's official. We have gone soft. We are no longer the hard-nosed, mercenary, calculating, efficient small holding managers we may have claimed to be in the past. We have a PET chicken. Yep. A completely useless, non-productive birdie eating up the 'profits' (Ha! That'd be nice) and not contributing a single egg or any meat.

Meet 'Doris'. I am not sure how we came by that name; it was nothing to do with the storm as far as I know, but the name is a recent acquisition of hers; she's only been Doris for about 3 weeks. Doris has been through the wars with us a bit, surviving all manner of ill and harm, putting up with too-frequent attention from our series of various roosters and faithfully knocking out a good egg each day right round the year, sometimes as the sole egg layer in our motley band of better looking hens. She is a survivor of both fox attacks and the mink's visit, the bad winter storms, snow, ice and heat waves.

Giving the invalid a bit of sunshine in the dog-crate.

She has always been a stumpy-legged thing who walked with a waddle and, because of the frequent attentions of roosters, usually with a baldy back and a bald top of the head. She is just your generic 'red' hen with darker wing and tail feathers, possible from 'Sussex' DNA. She came to us as a 'day old' from Mentor Anne which we hoped would be pure Buff Orpington but she and her sister had a different father. They stayed short and 'bantam'-y and were named the "Mini-Buffs" but, as I said, they were excellent reliable layers so we kept them alongside the buffs for all these years past. We love(d) them. One died of natural causes last year.

Enjoying a 3-day mini heatwave.

Doris was relegated from 'productive' status to pet by our 2016 fox who, we think, bit her and damaged a leg, though she survived. On that day all the surviving chooks were scared to go back into their real coop and moved into the Tígín for 'safety'. Most then recovered and ventured back out doors (or died of their injuries) but this hen, obviously crippled and hobbling, stayed put and we went through winter bringing food and water to her where she hid under some planks.

I've been minding 20 bullocks for a guy down the lane.
This is a handsome Limousin lad. 

It was obvious she was not going to walk properly again and our then three 'spare' Marans roosters all picked on her and 'gang raped' her till we realised what was happening and separated the birds for her safety. She was in a sorry state and the sensible hard-nosed thing would have been to cull her out. Hey ho. She's still with us and still in 'protective custody' given that new name and even carried carefully out in the recent sunshine to enjoy some warmth in the dog-crate. Still has a healthy appetite and was last seen schmoozing up the sex-change hen-rooster "Herme". She hops along on one foot with the other leg jutted out at a jaunty angle, used as a crutch to stop her over-balancing but mainly held off the ground. She stretched out her wings to sunbathe, lying on her side like any other chicken. Bless her. She always looks to me on the point of "falling off her perch" but never quite does so.

Finally making a start on the daunting task
of weeding this jungle bed.

The last three days have seen us enjoying superb weather - you'd say "Spring like" but really it was more like a Roscommon Summer. We have been spending all our time outdoors and got stuck into some long overdue gardening. Weeding, to be precise. We have attacked all the railway sleeper beds in the 'Kitchen Garden' and started on the rather daunting task of rescuing the 100' x 25' veg' patch from its sorry neglect of 2016. Long story but I lost the plot, nearly literally.

4 of the 'lads'enjoy some afternoon sun
with their 'meal' in the trough. 

I have also been minding 20 bullocks for our chum down the road, who was over to the UK for family reasons. This was no problem at all as I love some part time cattle involvement. They needed feeding (forking silage to them)  and checking in the morning, then feeding again plus letting some of them out for a drink in the evening.

The 'slatted house' boys. Well, 5 of them.

16 of them have an automatically filled drinker in their 'slatted house' (as in slatted floor - all the muck falls through to a big sump and can be pumped out) but another 4 have no such facilities in a concrete floored barn. They have to be let out to access an enamel bath which you refill from a hose. Getting at water only once a day gives them a big thirst. 4 of them will half-empty the bath at one 'sitting'. These guys also get mucked out, sometimes by me, but not this weekend. They'd just been mucked before I arrived and would not need it again till my friend was back from the UK. Easy life. Beef farming? A breeze! (OK, maybe not).

'Creeny' sheep's cheese from Corleggy of Belturbet, Co Cavan

Finally, we have "found" a new artisan cheese-maker. Well, technically it has been found for us by a friend who knows of our cheese-love and was visiting a Farmers' Market in Carrick. They tried the cheese, 'quite' liked it and decided to buy a chunk for us as well as some for themselves and generously brought it to me for us to try out and see what we would 'pair' it with.

Concrete floored barn.

The cheese-maker, 'Corleggy' (it means small windy hill!) is based in Belturbet up by the Northern Ireland border in Co. Cavan and this cheese is made from unpasteurised sheep's milk. It is called 'Creeny'. It is fierce and tangy and has quite a 'pong' coming off it. I love it but for Liz it was rather too fierce/sharp. In blue cheese Liz would love the creamy "Cashel Blue" but finds the sharp twang of Danish Blue too much. Creeny would be the same to her. It has just stepped over that line from 'very tasty' to 'too much'. 'Very nice', she says, ' but you'd need to pair it with a sweet chutney' (like the mango/kiwi chutney she makes here).  Our friend who bought it originally was last heard of "still trying to decide whether (she) likes it or not!

This post has been squeezed in just prior to us starting a whirlwind of visits in and out, but more on that in the next post. One of the visits promises to be VERY EXCITING but you will have to wait and see.

Fending Feathered Friends off Fruit

Red currant bush stripped of all fruit from ground to the
height an adult turkey hen can reach.

There is a technique which is a big part of gardening which you won't find so described in any gardening book - "Savannah-ing". This is our word for what is probably called 'raising the skirts'. When we get a shrub, bush or tree up to a decent height we prefer to clear the ground tight around it and cut away all the shaggy, leafless bottom branches to let a bit of light in under it so that its shape resembles one of the trees or thorn bushes in the African Savannah (or trees in a 'Capability Brown' landscape) and has a browse line. Up to now we have had to do this ourselves with secateurs and the hand fork.

No saw-fly this year but the turkeys did a good job of
stripping these goose-gogs of their leaves.

Step forward the adult turkeys, Tom and (particularly) Barbara who turn out to be quite keen to do this themselves especially on any fruit bushes they come across. We have a row of them in the Kitchen Garden which regular readers may know we call the "Jam and Chutney Hedge" (aka Jam and Jerusalem Hedge) and we have never had a problem before with chickens, but we now have red currant bushes stripped of all fruit below a couple of feet in height while the fruits were still green.

Well protected strawberries.

The gooseberry bushes are all below 2 feet at the moment, so they have lost all their fruit (while still hard and immature) and most of their leaves, like the worst kind of saw-fly attack. The poor little fig tree is also fruitless. We do not want to fence this whole area off again (and anyway, turkeys are great fliers and wall-jumpers), so we are looking at letting these bushes grow into a "standard" shape - the lollipop format used for roses, to see if we can get them to do all their fruit up above turkey height. Meanwhile we fenced the birds completely out of the strawberry bed when we caught the turkey parading around and, again, pecking at hard green fruit. We then caught her pushing her head and neck so far through the 2 inch chicken wire to reach more fruit, that she was bulging the fence, so we had to add another 'layer' of fence. Thus protected, the fruits are now ripening and we were able to taste our first strawberries today.

Tree protection against geese. 

The geese, meanwhile, give us a rather different problem in the orchard. Geese are stronger, tougher birds with toothed beaks and an obsessive nature. They will try a few pecks at the young bark of your new fruit trees and if they find it tears or breaks, they will keep at it, returning to it like a terrier with a stick, worrying it so that the hole gets bigger and bigger. Quickly they will ring-bark the tree. We have tried plastic spiral tree guards which are cheap and work for a while but eventually they become brittle or the tree grows enough to burst the spirals open, exposing bits of bark which is still young enough to be interesting to geese.

We got some fruit through to 'ripe'!

Some of our trees are in full sized sheep guards from the first year, when it was sheep we were fending off. (Sheep are a whole different story, as their damage is browsing as well as leaning heavily on the tree and rubbing to try to relieve an itch). Our best solution for the rest and one which, were I writing the book on keeping fruit trees safe from geese I would describe, is a cylinder of 1" weld-mesh (aviary mesh). The stuff we use is 90 cm (yes, sorry about the mixed units) tall which is taller than a goose at full stretch and the one inch mesh is too small for a goose to get even a beak through. The stuff lasts for ever and certainly for longer than it takes the bark within to become too old and gnarly for geese at which point you could still take it off and use the collar for another young tree. This stuff may be expensive but these are just bits left over from when I was building rabbit runs many moons ago.

One of the new Guineas (left) and a 6 week old turkey (r)

In other bird news, a few pics of the kindergarten. Turkeys #1 and #2 (Christmas and Noel?) are now 6 weeks old and starting to tower over the new Guinea Fowl. They are also starting to out-grow the rabbit run they are in and look keen to get out amongst it, free ranging. We will probably let this happen in another week or so when we feel a bit more confident that they will not fall prey to the young cat 'Soldier'. Turkeys #3 and #4 ('Janus' and 'Hugh' apologies to any Terry Wogan fans. Don't ask) are now 2 weeks old and starting to outgrow their first brooder-crate, so we need to scrounge a couple more big potato-crisp boxes and move them on a stage, but they have to stay under heat for the first 4 weeks.

OneChick is now 8 weeks old.

'OneChick' (as we have named the chick of 'Hen with One Chick') is now 8 weeks old and has started becoming independent from Mum. You do still see them together but you also see the chick just mingling with the rest of the flock and both of these now sleep in the main coop, Mum having decided of her own accord to move house from her little nest next to the camping toilet about a week ago. She looks to us like a hen, which is good news, she can be our replacement for the Sussex Ponte we lost recently.

The two chicks at 3 weeks old.

The two chicks of 'Hen and Two' are now 3 weeks old exactly. They look well and healthy and seem to be thriving. They are feathering up well. The buff-coloured one looks like he/she may be another pure-bred Buff Orpington but the white one is probably either a Sussex Ponte hybrid or even a Hubbard cross. We kept 2 hens out of one of the batches of Hubbards (a red and a white, the 2013 birds) to see how they would end up and be egg-layers. They are definitely part of the gang and are regularly 'trodden' by our roosters. Time will tell.

Examining an old frame of ivy honey now being cleaned
by bees in the swarm box. 

Finally, in the bees dept, we have had a good amount of interest in the swarm box so that I wondered if a colony had actually moved in. I needed to examine the box for queen and new brood; if we found these the colony would need moving from the swarm box to the new hive before they got too well established (and started to build their own comb in the box). Well, no worries in fact (and a bit of disappointment; I would have quite liked a 2nd colony). There were 100+ bees in the box and it was busy but these are just 'robber' bees exploiting an undefended source of stored honey. I don't think they are my bees - the flight path is straight south away from the box, not nipping across the 30 feet to our hive. They are there in force cutting away the cappings on the honey comb and nibbling all the solid honey out. I should be left, in a few weeks with some nice clean 'drawn' comb which I can re-use if ever I do get a second colony. That may well be next year by now, the swarm season seem to be over. Never say never, of course; these ladies can swarm as late as October if they are desperate enough.

Jam and Jerusalem

18 days in and we are still very much enjoying (and being amazed by) this lovely dry spell and we are getting as much outdoor time in as we can while it lasts. The current forecast from "Wet Éireann" (as it was becoming called, really it is 'Met Éireann', of course, the Irish Met Office) is that the rain returns on Wednesday but we can't complain now for a while - we've had the best innings ever for a Feb/March nearly-three-week spell.

My first 2 pics here show a before and after of the old compost site mentioned in a previous post. You can see what I mean about the rather unsightly and rushed construction based around an old fence line and loaded with compost more as a way of suppressing nettles and brambles than anything else. The triumph of hope over experience? When did you ever manage to kill nettles by piling 'rubbish' on top of them?

With the compost moved you can see that the space has now been leveled for use as a flower bed and is, in fact, already planted with some Crocosmia (Lucifer) which we had bought in Lidl's. The third pic shows the neater new arrangement. The 'good stuff' is held in behind the wooden paling fence and the nettle-y rubbish, now buried under some rabbit cleanings, held in by corrugated sheet. The chickens are on hand, as ever, to inspect. They loved it - all those worms! Our friend and Mentor, Anne actually grows worms in wormeries as a source of vital trace elements and key base proteins for their (many!) hens and estimate that each hen needs only 7 worms a day to meet that need. Anne was in that business (organic eggs) in a 'former life' and has all the scientific knowledge backing it up. On that basis, our hungry worm-guzzlers have had about a month's worth.

Along the outer edge of our Kitchen Garden we have created a row of currant and berry bushes which we hope will grow to form an edible hedge. I have seen this done before in Kent while judging the Environmental Action category of the Calor Gas "Village of the Year" competition where the team making it happen called it their Jam and Chutney Hedge. They had damsons, gooseberries, currant bushes and more in theirs. We do not have damsons in ours but the name still fits except that we started jokingly calling it the 'Jam and Jerusalem' Hedge and that name has now stuck.

So far this 'hedge' has been a bit of a piece-meal affair with the bushes going in at roughly the correct spacing as and when we bought or were given them. Liz today decided that this needed to be a proper 'project' and the line of the hedge should be more formally marked out with stones and weeded. She's been getting on with that, barrowing weeds round to the new composts, robbing stones from up the left side of the hay-barn and gathering good topsoil from the hay-rake bank. With this area being still on the flat and not yet a raised bed, it has been a damp job even after the days without rain.

Our main weeds in there are creeping buttercup (Ranunculus repens) and good ol' couch grass, neither of which will happily let go the soil around their roots when damp. By comparison, I have been weeding around my allotment raised beds and I am delighted to find that the soil there has dried nicely enough to crumb up easily at the touch of a shuffle-hoe, and to fall easily off the buttercup, dock, annual grasses and nettles which are 'my' main weeds. It is pure joy weeding down there. We look up occasionally or call 'Coffee?' across the orchard to one another, and then meet up at the chairs by the nearly-pond to chat and sup in the warm sunshine.

The last day of 2012

After a succession of very windy and wet days, out of nowhere, we get a mild, warm, sunny, calm one. Liz gets to run some laundry through the system and even hang some on the line (all be it not 100% successfully - it gets showered on) and even has a crack at some ironing. I can get on the ground a bit to dig some more raised bed in the 'allotment' and I get in the 25 raspberry canes (13 summer fruiting "Malling Jewel" and 12 autumn fruiting "Autumn Bliss") which we got from Future Forests. They got heeled into the Kitchen Garden raised beds but I wanted to get them into their final position while it was still 2012 and before it warmed up and they started growing.

The young chickens made 10 weeks today. We have noticed a couple of times, that they sometimes square up to each other, chest to chest, cowl feathers (hackles) raised. My chums on the poultry forum ( Fowl.ie ) tell me that this is a sure sign that they are males, so the stock pot may be looming for them, but cousin Win and I are still holding out hope that they will turn out to be gals, and can join the egg laying team. If it's the stock pot for them, then we have hopes that in the Spring, Broody Betty will do it all again and this time we'll know how to manage her properly (12 eggs into the clutch all at once, for a start!).

Here is another pic of the rabbits - the three 'babies' are in the middle, though you can see that they are now as big as our own buck, Rogers (on the right in this shot). These blighters all escaped the run today and we were out there in wellies with torches trying to round them up in the dark. Luckily, when threatened out loose by a roving human their natural reaction is to head home, often using (and giving away the location of) the hole out of which they have escaped.

And so to our own celebration of the end of what's been a brilliant year for us, including gutting and rebuilding the house, starting on the garden, hosting a few visitors and getting our roots down a bit in this far flung place. We have dined on steak (a lovely T-bone from our lamb-butcher, Ignatius Gannon), oven chips, peas and mushrooms, we have drunk some nice Rioja and we are now chilling in our lovely toasty warm Living Room in front of the real fire, chatting, reading books and wondering whether we'll bother to watch the Crosby/Astaire movie "Holiday Inn" to keep us awake till midnight (we may not need the movie). At midnight we will listen to a countdown on local radio and then stick our heads out and shout "Happy New Year" across the front lawn into the inky blackness. We will not expect any reply or any fireworks. We will then do the 'First Foot' thing with coal or turf, Greek fire-water, salt, a slice of bread or cake and a €1 coin to cover all the bases.

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL OUR READERS. HAVE A BRILLIANT 2013 

Lazy Beds

With the guests gone and the evidence of their visit squared away, Dad can get back into the garden and check out progress on the vegetables after the week of beautiful sunshine. The warmth has brought on the peas and broad beans beautifully, so we can have a first portion  of peas with supper on Monday night. The broads will be a few more days yet but the runners and French beans are starting to flower profusely. We are also looking at some courgettes soon in the kitchen garden from which we have already been enjoying various cut and come again salad stuff.

The broader picture, though, has Dad needing to finally give in to the local method for raised beds or lazy beds and trenches. It's just been too wet this year gardening on the flat, to hoe or control weeds, so that we have a depressing embarrassing lawn of weeds between the rows of crop so that a mower is sometimes more appropriate than a hoe. The crops sulk in damp, cold misery, succumb to slugs or general malaise so that often 'we' have just given up on them and ploughed them back in.

Way back, when Mike the Cows was tractor-ploughing and tractor-rotovating he did suggest ridging it up (which is quite easy, I now know, with a couple of changes to settings on the rotovator) but we didn't really know what we were about back then and Dad thought he meant into potato-style ridges. We declined the offer, thinking we'd be able to plant rows 2 feet apart and simply walk-behind-rotovate up the rows like you would in Kent to keep the weeds down. Then came the rain for most of May, June and July and the flat rotovated land saturated and could not drain.

It was John Deere Bob who explained what was meant by ridges - three or four foot wide broad ridges (what they'd call 'breeds' in the Fens) with deepish trenches between but with the ridges/trenches aligned down the slope (we'd done our initial rows across the allotment, effectively parallel to the contours). You can either dig the whole site over and then make trenches or use a traditional Irish method which saves quite a few square yards of digging and that's called 'Lazy Beds'. You skim the turf (or 'lawn of weeds in Dad's case) off where the trench will be, folding it over to lie upside down on the edge of the ridge, grass to grass. You then shovel out the trench and use the soil to bury the rest of the ridge and the flipped over turfs. You can also then cover the whole with plastic to further supress weeds. We used plastic sheeting left over from the building project, plus we recycled the ground sheets from Mr Silverwood's thrown-away tent. We have since seen pics of raised beds and Lazy Beds in the Museum of Country Life in Turlough, Co. Mayo, so we now feel very authentic!

Now we're talking. Now the soil in the ridge tops is drying out and does not water-log and Dad can stroll up and down in the trenches easily getting at the weeds even on the wettest day. The rest of the allotment will be converted to raised beds as it comes free after we have harvested the current crops of beans, cabbages etc.

My final pictures on this catch up are just a nice shot of the High Hopes pink rose climbing up the Tígín wall and a nice box of 9 eggs showing 4 dated today (15th Aug) just because all the gals are now in production.

Working Away

On the 6^th July we had what Mum describes as a “pootly-pottery day”. Mum and Dad moved Stalag Bunny, so confounding Padders latest attempt to tunnel out. They then spent some time looking at the weeds on the allotment bit, but it's too wet to even try to get on it so we have to hope the veg gets away quickly. They weeded and thinned crops from the kitchen garden instead. Lunch featured beet leaves, other salad leaves and radishes from there. After lunch we let the chickens out to mooch around – Mum describes this as “closely watched by Deefer and Coco who disapprove thoroughly of this proceeded but are willing to indulge us for the moment”.  Supper is heart and mushrooms, with baked rhubarb for pud. John Deere Bob turned up just as Mum and Dad were finishing so we had a nice gossip and some more gentle instructions on how to manage the land (raise the skirts on those trees, dry the wood out for a year, put the trenches in the allotment in north/south so the rain runs off towards the bog, etc) along with some praise for what we've done so far. Love him.

Saturday the 7^th sees Dad head to Dublin to help Sparks with the first stages of an attic conversion, leaving Mum in charge. At one stage she is telling internet friends that, “Right now, there are three chickens in the run and three in the rain gully (a four foot ditch) that runs from the back of the chicken run down to the bog. And they're finding so many grubs and yummy stuff that grain is so not tempting them out. Devils! I've been calling 'chook chook chook' till I'm nearly hoarse and Deefer and Coco are trying to tunnel out of the house to join the fun. The three feathered hooligans in the run are alternating between laughing themselves sick and whinging about not being out there with the other girls. Meaniess.

Dad claims to be “Very busy at present due to helping Sparks to start the conversion of the attic. This means all the heavy stuff, hefting 8 foot RSJs up into the attic from front garden, sticking these into the walls and bolting together into one 16 foot beam. I hate to complain after a month and a half of wet miserable weather but it was BLOOMIN' HOT up under those roof tiles in the Dublin sunshine! Having done the 'steels' we then started on rafter beams, doubling up the flimsy rafters with sensible '5 by 2' timbers, so again, all that wood had to come up through an upstairs front window, then a hastily cut hole in the boy's (5) bedroom ceiling ("Daddy! Why is there a HOLE in my bedroom?" ”

On Sunday 8^th, Dad reports a “big ol' fried breakfast up in Dublin cooked by Sparks for whom I was steel-erecting Saturday”. Dad fills the little Fiat car with scrap wood for range down here, and some kitchen goodies dropped off by Steak Lady, plus spare soda bread and SuperQuinn sausages. Dad headed for Steak Lady’s as he needed to take pics of Tut (Tutankhamen) the tail-intact Yorkie for a friend of Mum’s but Steak Lady was sweating on feeding breakfasts to 8 B+B guests so was a bit brisk and Dad fled.

Dad reports that he is not 100% on the navigation yet round Steak Lady’s and out to IKEA on the ring motorway (M50) but knew it was near the airport, so set the sat-nav to “airport”. On our sat-nav when you don't know the street name in a small town or village but you want to go to the village 'centre' you click on the name and then "City Centre". Like an eejit, Dad did that to the Airport, so he went the 15 minutes from Steak Lady’s to the Airport in 45 minutes via the Dublin City Centre and O'Connell Bridge. Sight seeing tour! Yay!

Anyway, he dug himself out and got to IKEA as it was opening (11am) and successfully completed mission to buy two CD shelf units and found a utensils-pot for the draining board. Mum approved. Dad rocks as domestic shopper! He has a 2 and a half hour run back to the sticks, happy re-union with wife and we doggies and lazy afternoon letting chooks out, mooching about. He mowed the enormous front lawn enjoying attendant swallows swooping along next to him catching the insects he was half-killing with the mower. Delightful. Dad cooked lovely Cajun chicken and veg supper to which Mum added yummy mushrooms in cream sauce.

9^th July

On Monday 9^th we quietly enjoy our morning as there is no chance of a badly timed visit by near neighbour John Deere Bob . He has caught Mum and Dad out still in dressing gowns before now at 0900 but on a Monday he is otherwise involved, away in Galway. Lay-in! Late breakfast. Yay!

Mum attacks an alpine range of ironing while enjoying Lord Black in the Leveson Inquiry. Dad is off to builders' providers "Cooneys" of Castlerea (we think we were probably their best customer Dec 2011 to May 2012) to order wood and sheeting for this week's carpentry projects, the car port, the log-store and the wee housey for the Gas Cannisters.

Then... Weeding. Dad’s lovely allotment, 25 foot by 100 foot all proudly ploughed and rotovated by tractor this April and intended to be kept clean of weeds by regular hoeing, and to be full to bursting by now with burgeoning rows of crops has fallen victim to the ceaseless June and now July rain. Everything small-seeded has sulked in the chill, wet and gloom, and has been overcome by slugs and general malaise, and the weeds and grass cannot be hoed because it's been permanently too wet. Dad says, “It is an embarrassing disgrace”. Despite the wet this drives Dad to get amongst some of it on his hands and knees with me helpfully licking his face now and then and was a-ripping and a tearing out grass, creeping buttercup, baby docks and any number of other wrong 'uns. These were tossed into the Carver bucket and onto the ever-increasing compost heap. It looks a little tidier but not much. Still needs to dry out like JULY should be, and he can hoe it. 

Sadly today also has its tragedy. Around 1300 we realise we have not seen little Coco for a while and start calling his name and then we start an anxious hunt. Outbuildings, sheds, fields and gardens are scoured. Dad’s heart sinks as he decides to check the lane outside and there he is horrified to find the small sad form of Coco by the side of the road. He is dead. The nature of the injuries tells us that it must have been instantaneous, quick and clean. Dad thinks he recalls a bulk tanker lorry going past at about the right time so maybe that hit him. The driver probably would not have even known. Dad gathers up the little fella and he gets a small grave in the kitchen garden close to Haggis’s last resting place. Poor little mite was only 2 years old. At least his final months were spent happily exploring and racing around on ‘the farm’ where he was loving it. We’ll all miss you, Cokes. “Small Brown Dog” Dad would call him.

On Tuesday 10^th Dad is involved in heroic car-port building - big long 20' beams of '5-be-2' slung between the two sides of the former hay barn, 3-be-2's in the other direction and some nice shiny new corrugated sheets over the top. There is lots of iron-y clanging and banging. With Dad back in buildery mode Mum is encouraged back into "Catering Team" mode and there were, much to Dad’s delight, bacon butties!

It might have been the noise which put the Lovely Girls off their laying but not a one laid an egg in the morning. Only when they'd been out free ranging for a while did they all one after another get 'the urge' and like kids out on a football pitch being allowed sneak off back to the changing rooms for a wee, you'd see them slinking back to the coop doing their "I'm about to lay an egg" squawking and clucking. One poor lady ended up the wrong side of the chicken-wire. She could see the coop pop-hole but in her little bird-brain didn't work out that she could go round the other way to the gate, so was just fretting up and down the same 3 feet of fence till Dad 'helped her get over it'. I think the egg was so near she nearly laid it as she landed. Gotta love 'hins'. Not the brightest element in our menagerie.