Carol's Chickens

The only thing left on our veg plot was the courgette plants. They still each had five or six tiny courgettes but they hadn’t grown in the last few weeks so we decided that they were finished.

Everything else was already finished but we had left the plants in as we knew that as soon as we removed them the cats would move in and use the veg plot as their toilet.

It was time to clear the plot. My husband removed the spent plants and lightly raked the plot.

In the afternoon we went to our local woods and collected twigs. As luck would have it a tree was down and there were lots of twigs laying around it. We collected quite a haul.

We have collected twigs and started to plant the veg plot

The completed veg plot

Last year was the first year that we tried this and it worked quite well. It keeps the cats off and we think it looks okay, sort of rustic, and better than being just empty. It will stay like this now until the spring.

I never usually do much baking but since I adapted Jamie Oliver’s apple crumble cookies to my own version I have really got into trying them with different fillings.

I took my eldest son, Steve, some cookies with raisins for his birthday. They are my current favourites.

Today I decided to try chocolate chip cookies and chocolate chip and peanut cookies. I liked the chocolate chip and peanut best out of these two.

Chocolate chip and peanut cookies

Next I am going to try cherry cookies and peanuts and raisin cookies, I also quite like the idea of peanuts, raisins and chocolate chip together.  I am going to keep trying different versions until I find the ones I like best.

If anyone wants to give them a try this is my adapted recipe:

Ingredients

100g raisins

200g self raising flour

100g butter

100g golden caster sugar

1 large egg

Method

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees c. Line two trays with grease proof paper rubbed with oil.

Put the flour and sugar into a bowl and grate the butter straight from the fridge into it and then rub it in as if making a crumble or pastry. I prefer to do it this way as it’s quick and easy and there is no need to soften the butter. This was a tip I picked up in my youth while making large quantities of pastry for a pub kitchen.

Mix in the egg. Add in the filling. When doing two different fillings I split the mix in half at the egg stage and add  50g of each filling to each half.

Divide the mixture into 24 bits (12 bits of each if using two fillings). Roll into balls and press down lightly into 4cm rounds, lining them up 12 to each tray. The mixture is quite sticky and rings need to be removed for this. I flour my fingers to press them down and the bits look really small but the cookies spread when in the oven.

Bake for 8 – 10 minutes or until lightly golden brown. Cool on a wire rack.

I love that these cookies need few ingredients and are simple to make and quick to cook but can also be adapted to any filling you like. Just switch the raisins for anything you fancy.

Apricot is the only girl that keeps changing her bedtime position. She really seems to prefer being with the bigger girls than with Dandelion and Cinnamon.

Apricot has managed to squeeze herself between Speckles and Emerald

Freckles as always is in her usual spot

Dandelion and Cinnamon are in their corner

I’m not sure Emerald is too impressed by this

Emerald didn’t look too happy about being moved from her corner spot and having to put up with Apricot but Apricot looked firmly hunkered down in her chosen position.

This was the night before last and last night Apricot tried to do the same again but this time Dandelion joined her too and Emerald looked even more put out. There was a lot of twittering and pushing and then pecking. Emerald was pecking Dandelion and Dandelion was pecking Apricot and at that point I decided to intervene.

I moved Dandelion next to Cinnamon and then Apricot next to Dandelion. Emerald then jumped down off the perch and went up on to Freckles perch. From there she stepped across to her corner while easing Speckles along the perch.

Harmony resumed as Emerald was back in her favourite position in the corner. Emerald doesn’t like to be moved from her corner spot. I wonder how tomorrow night will pan out!

I love seeing Speckles and Cinnamon together. Yesterday they were at the food dish together.

Speckles and Cinnamon

Again I noticed the large size of Cinnamon’s feet in comparison to her tiny size.

A few seconds later Freckles joined them and moved Cinnamon round from her spot at the dish. Freckles and Cinnamon’s heads are blurred because of the movement but I thought I would keep it as it shows all three heads in the dish at the same time.

Three heads in the dish

I love to see this.

One of my commenters asked for a look around my chicken run. I said I would do a post on it and then didn’t get round to it. I think that comment was over a year ago. Sorry!

I thought now was as good a time as any. Better late than never.

So this is the outside as I walk up to the top of our garden.

Our chicken run

Inside the chicken shed

This has featured on a few posts recently. There are two more perches across the right hand corner. The back perch is favourite and the top left perch is Freckles spot. The pop hole automatically opens at dawn and closes at dusk reacting to a light sensor.

View of the chicken’s patio area

This shows the chicken shed door, now closed, with my broom hanging at the left of it, the two little coop nest boxes on the left and the store cabinet, plus grit and oyster shell dispenser on the right and Cinnamon and Apricot with some bits of apple.

Inside the store cabinet

We chose a tall store cabinet because the previous shorter one meant that the girls would get on top of it and not only make it dirty but eventually they trashed the top of it.

The big plastic buckets on the bottom left have chicken pellets and corn. The clear bucket on the right has my coop boots. Behind that the other bucket has all the sprays and smaller items with the brush and dustpan in front of it.

The top shelf has pine shavings on the left, plastic containers of sunflower hearts, corn, grit and oyster shell, the red container has wet wipes, there is kitchen roll, disposable gloves and two torches.

There have been lots of other items in here but I have recently had a chuck out and got it down to the every day stuff.

There is a layer of marine ply cladding the fence along the patio area (behind the little coops and the store cabinet) and the right hand side looking out into the run. This is tough and doesn’t rot and can’t be chewed through by rats. It is sunk into concrete on the patio area and goes underground on the right hand side of the run into a layer of tiles and chicken wire. From past experience we have modified the run to keep rats out and haven’t had a problem since we installed the marine ply.

Looking out from the chicken’s patio

This section of the run can be closed off for the integration of new girls by closing the open gate and closing the square hatch.

The two chicken shelters

There is a chicken shelter in each section for extra protection on cold and windy days. Above there are roof panels which are solid on the right hand half of the run to insure that stays completely dry and the left hand side has panels which can be opened on warm and sunny days to let the sun in but closed at other times. They keep it mostly dry but parts drip at the joins in wet weather. There is weld mesh over the top of the panels to keep the roof secure.

The bottom part of the run

This part of the run has the ladders which are constantly used by all the girls. They like the ladders and the high branch perches above them. Again the two halves can be closed off while integrating new girls. There is a dividing gate in the foreground which is kept open most of the time.

There are branch perches all around the run in high and low positions. The girls like to perch in the shelters and on top of them and there is a round metal table behind the biggest shelter that they also love to sit on.

I  have recently given all the shrubs in the run a hard prune as they were getting up into the run roof and growing through the weld mesh. They have all had a hard cut back before winter but will grow back again in spring.

The weld mesh goes down under the ground and then horizontal on the inside of the run to stop anything digging in and outside there are rows of bricks where there aren’t path or patio slabs.

The outside of the chicken shed also has weld mesh stapled to the bottom three feet to give it extra protection from anything trying to chew their way in and is on concrete.

We have worked on the run to make it as secure as we possibly can.

The run has evolved over time. I am happy with it and it only needs occasional tweaks these days. Over the years we have been constantly improving it and I think it is pretty much as good as we can get it.

Some of you may remember that I did a post about Little Mouse in the spring. We had been seeing a little field mouse in the garden and on the veg plot.

I then started seeing it in the chicken run in the early evening. It would run behind the chicken shelter and then come out again quite close to me. I managed to get a photo.

Little Mouse on April 26th

This was before I had my current camera as a birthday present from my husband in May. I could probably have got a much better photo with this camera. I wasn’t able to zoom with my old camera so this was fairly close.

I saw Little Mouse escape through the weld mesh so there is no way of keeping it out of the chicken run. As summer progressed we stopped seeing it.

About a week ago I became aware that it was coming back in the chicken run. I am of course just assuming it’s the same one, it may not be, but I like to imagine that it is. I haven’t seen it but when I moved one of the little coop nest boxes to sweep underneath there were six to eight tiny mouse droppings and some crumbs from chicken pellets.

I have been moving the little coop nest boxes every morning and sweeping away what is there and each time it’s been the same. There are always between six to eight droppings so I think it’s just a single mouse because there is such a small amount of evidence. One morning there was also a cherry stone so it seems it is bringing it’s own take away in too.

At the moment I am just going to leave it because as long as it remains at just one and the droppings are under the coop, away from the chickens, I think it’s not doing much harm. I am reluctant to put bait down and kill one little field mouse that may have been visiting all year.

As the days get shorter I will eventually take the food dish in at night and then there will be nothing for it to come in for. As long as we don’t suddenly end up with many mice I think it’s okay to just leave Little Mouse.

We still have quite a bit of colour in the garden. There are the asters and there are a few wisps of late lavender and some yellow poppies still flowering.

The rose that I had for my fiftieth birthday was originally a standard but we let it go a bit wild. It always flowers until the first hard frost. It still has blooms and buds.

Late roses

The white rose on one of the arches never has many blooms and yet is still throwing them out one at a time.

A single late rose

On the fence outside our kitchen window there are the different coloured berries but the winter jasmine is now flowering too.

Winter jasmine

Some of the anemones are still throwing out a few late blooms.

Anemone

The sedums get darker and darker in colour as the season progresses.

Sedums

It is lovely to see these little pockets of colour so late in the year.

Since we have lowered the back perch in the chicken shed all the girls apart from Freckles have roosted there. For the last two nights there has been a slight change in the line up. Apricot broke away from Dandelion and Cinnamon and snuggled up to Speckles instead.

Speckles, playing the part of mother hen as she is, was happy to have Apricot close to her. It was a sweet picture.

A slight change in the bedtime line up

These two are in their usual spot

Apricot is cosying up to Speckles

It looks like Freckles perch is up against Emerald but that is an optical illusion. There are a good few inches between her and the perch. There is of course plenty of space along the perch but Emerald likes to sit in her corner.

I am happy for Apricot to sit with either pair, it was seeing them sitting alone, that I didn’t like. This is so much better than before. A happy bedtime line up.

Earlier this week we changed the perch at the back of the chicken shed. Things never go according to plan and we found that the job wasn’t as simple as I thought it would be.

Because we had two parallel  perches my idea was to use them as a step up perch and a roosting perch as we have on either side of the chicken shed. I must admit that my husband suggested we just move the complete thing down low but for some reason I had it in my head that it should be the same arrangement as the side perches so that the little girls would be at the same height as they were used to.

This meant buying a shorter pair of brackets for the top perch. You can see the marks above where the brackets were before. The back perches now matched the height of the side perches.

The new lower perch arrangement

We got the job completed just as the girls started coming in at bedtime. I soon realised my mistake.

There wasn’t enough of a gap for Emerald to fit comfortably.

The three amigos went straight to the new perch and were happy with it. Freckles is always the last in and hadn’t come in yet. Emerald wasn’t at all comfortable and kept turning and getting up and down. Emerald is the biggest girl and there wasn’t enough room for her tail to fit comfortably. Speckles solved the problem by facing the back of the shed but Emerald wanted to face outwards.

The side perches would have enough depth for Emerald but she is a creature of habit and this is her spot and this is where she wanted to be. It is totally random which way Speckles faces but not so with Emerald. Emerald always faces outwards.

I felt awful for Emerald and stupid for not realising the gap would be too small! We decided that the only thing to do was to lift all the girls out and alter the perch again.

This was our second attempt

We changed to the longest perch on the longest brackets and put it in at the height of the lower, step up, perch at the sides.

All the girls on the lower back perch

Emerald and Speckles couldn’t wait to get back in their spot and the three amigos quickly took the other end of the perch together. I then picked Freckles up and put her in the middle. I just managed the photo above before she jumped down and returned to her usual spot.

Freckles back in her usual spot

It was good to see the three amigos snuggled up together again

I think it is going to be impossible to change Freckles habit so I will leave her to perch alone. I feel happier though that the three amigos are perching together again.

The next night

I watched the girls go in the following night. The same thing happened. Emerald and Speckles settled in their corner and didn’t seem bothered by the perch being lower. Apricot was first to the back perch. Cinnamon was next and Dandelion soon followed.

Lastly Freckles sauntered in and headed straight up to her spot on the side perch.

Freckles in her usual position

The three amigos are snuggled up together again

A view of all the girls

In the end I think this is a success and I am happier with this arrangement. It seems that the three amigos did want to perch at the back but Dandelion couldn’t get up there before. It is much better that before winter the three amigos are perching together again and can keep each other warm.

It’s a shame that Freckles is on her own but she has been used to this spot since she joined the flock and I don’t think we can change her habit. She is the largest of the little girls so I think she will be okay.

This also means that if we have new girls in the spring they can use the right hand perch during integrations.

Although it was a hassle moving the perch twice I feel that we got it right in the end. The chicken shed has had many perch changes since we have had it but sometimes we need to evolve things to suit the changing needs of our girls. The girls seem happy with this new arrangement.

I can’t believe that we are still getting courgettes from our veg plot. I have ready cooked dishes, with courgettes in the freezer, but as I am picking the last ones which are smaller in size, I have been finding different ways of cooking them as I go.

This is my latest favourite way of cooking them. I saute them in margarine to soften them a bit. I then add a crushed clove of garlic and cook for another minute. I then add a dollop of sun dried tomato puree and cook for another minute.

This is so simple and delicious.

Courgette dish

We still have baby courgettes on both plants but I keep thinking that they won’t make it. You never know though with the strange weather we are having at the moment.

I think this year I have had to come up with the most different ways of cooking courgettes ever to keep up with their abundance. I am sure this will be an all time record for our courgettes.