Carol's Chickens

Our runner beans are really late this year. We had only picked enough for one meal before this weekend. The last few days have been lovely and sunny and suddenly the beans have really got going.

The beans were hanging in bunches

A couple of days of pickings

The beans are prepared

The beans are cooked

I have divided the beans into three meals

We will have one portion for Sunday dinner and two portions will go into the freezer. I have tried various recommended ways of freezing runner beans. Blanching them seems to be the most popular but I never liked them after that. By trial and error I have found the way that suits me best.

I treat them the same as frozen peas. I cook the beans to just how I like to eat them. I like them soft and tender. I then cool them under cold water and divide them into portions. I then freeze them and when we want to eat them I put them in a saucepan straight from the freezer and bring them to the boil. Drain and serve just like frozen peas. To me they taste just the same as if they have just been cooked when done in this way.

I am freezing the extra two portions because there will be more to pick over the coming week and we will eat those while fresh. The good thing about runner beans is that once they get going they usually keep going until the first frost.

The courgettes and tomatoes are still abundant too and the salad leaves I recently planted are growing nicely. We are also eating the fir apple potatoes. I am digging them up one plant at a time. I recently made some potato salad from them which suits their texture really well.

This year has been as good for garden veg as last year was bad, laughable in fact! You never quite know how it’s going to go but it’s fun finding out.

I love the sedums at this time of year. They add a bit of late colour to the garden and they attract the bees. There are bees all over them. They are mostly honey bees and what we call “teddy bear bees”. We don’t know what these bees are called but they appear to be furry which is why we call them teddy bears.

Honey bees on the sedum

Teddy bear bee

Both type of bee

Sedum with honey bees

Sedum with both sort of bees

I love both the splash of colour and the bee activity and the sedums also go on looking good right through autumn.

Occasionally I give the girls some fish as a treat. I give any fish that is in olive oil. A small tin is low cost and gives the girls about a teaspoon of fish each. It adds a bit of protein which is benificial when they are moulting.

Speckles seems to have been moulting forever and I am still picking up loads of her feathers and Rusty is moulting too.

Dandelion, Cinnamon and Apricot are laying again as well as Freckles who hasn’t taken a break for ages. Dandelion’s egg had a good shell. I think the stress of Rusty’s prolapse triggered her to moult more than usual but if that keeps her from laying then I happy about that. The longer break she takes from laying the better.

I put the fish into four little dishes.

Some fish for the girls

Apricot is missing as she is in the nest box

Speckles is being mother hen to Dandelion, she was doing the same to Cinnamon a little earlier

Apricot has just laid her egg

Cinnamon and Apricot have the fish to themselves

The three amigos sharing the fish

By the end of the day the dishes were empty and I knew that all the girls had had a share.

Speckles continues to behave like a mother hen to a brood of chicks. She calls the little girls to any treat and picks up bits of the treat and drops it in front of them. I have only ever seen this behaviour on videos of mother hens with chicks.

I have never come across anyone else who has reported this behaviour with an unrelated hen and adult girls, albeit, little girls. She is often sat in the run surrounded by her little girls. It is the most peculiar but endearing behaviour and we have often speculated how long this behaviour will continue. She has been behaving like this for four months now, since her and Emerald became the only two bigger girls in the flock.

Freckles and Rusty are firm friends but when it comes to the treats Rusty will peck Freckles out of her way. It isn’t in a chicken’s nature to be unselfish and when it comes to treats it’s every girl for herself so it is very odd to see Speckles giving treats to the little girls and often foregoing them herself.

When I dig for worms the best of friends run around the run trying to take possession of the worm but if Speckles gets one she places it in front of the nearest little girl. I would be interested to know if anyone has come across this before. I will update when this behaviour changes because even real chicks have to grow up and their mums eventually stop mothering them. I suspect it would change when Speckles comes back into lay but that isn’t usually until the end of February which is a long time for a hen to act as a mother.

I don’t have the technical knowledge to put on a video or sound but I did let my mum listen to Speckles over the phone recently when I gave out the bedtime treat. She makes so much noise as she excitedly calls the girls that my mum asked how she managed to get any herself and I replied that she often doesn’t.

We are quite sure that in Speckles we have the nuttiest of chickens.

As Dandelion has been laying thin shelled eggs I thought I would feed the girl’s egg shells back to them to boost their calcium. They have grit and crushed oyster shell in a hopper that they can help themselves to at any time but this will give them a bit of extra calcium.

I put the broken egg shells on parchment paper in a tray and then in to the oven on low for about half an hour. It is really just to dry the egg shells out so that they will crush easily.

Eggs shells straight from the oven

I then crush the egg shells with a pestle and mortar and then mix them into a dish of mash. I know that the girls love a dish of mash and it means that they are getting a healthy treat as it’s their normal pellets mixed with water and then the egg shells added.

Egg shells ground up

Egg shells mixed with mash

Five little girls round the dish

I love the way the bigger girls seem to take on a parental role and allow the little girls to have their share rather than any chasing away.

They enjoy a treat that is good for them

They love this and they all got a share of it. By the end of the day the dish was empty. This means they have all had their extra helping of calcium. Even if it doesn’t help, it won’t do any harm so there is nothing to lose by giving them this and I know that they have enjoyed it.

We only have Freckles and Apricot laying at the moment and they are both laying on the same day, every other day. Today I found their eggs side by side in the nest box. It’s a bit tricky telling which one is which, not!

Our little eggs

Every time I see them side by side it makes me smile.

This August bank holiday, which is the last bank holiday of the year, has been a lovely sunny one. Usually as soon as a bank holiday comes around it rains. This time we had some rain during the week and the best of the sun on Sunday and Monday.

The sun really had an effect on the garden.

The sun is working it’s magic

The tomatoes are ripening

We are now picking plenty

This shrub is laden with berries

I have enjoyed spending time in the garden in the sun and the chooks have done plenty of dust bathing and sitting in the sun too.

After I wrote yesterday’s post Freckles laid an egg. She is our best egg layer. We then had to buy some shop eggs as a catering customer had requested a plain, sliced egg, sandwich.

I know I have done comparisons before but I thought I would take the opportunity to compare a medium sized, standard girl’s, egg with Freckles and Apricot’s eggs.

Egg size comparison

Medium, shop bought, egg on the left, Freckles egg in the middle and Apricot’s tiny egg on the right.

Tiny but perfect!

For Sunday breakfast we had bacon and eggs with the last of the little girl’s eggs. There has been a slow down at the moment as Rusty is moulting and not laying, Cinnamon had her second, one day broody spell, and last time this happened she stopped for a week, Dandelion’s recent eggs have been broken and Apricot had taken a break after briefly going broody. This meant it had been down to Freckles to keep us going. I decided to use all the eggs between the two of us.

We had all five eggs for breakfast

The two oval shaped eggs on the left were Cinnamon’s last two eggs before she took a break and the three round eggs are Freckles.

For lunch we had a ham and tomato sandwich with tomatoes from the garden. For Sunday dinner I had some sliced pork and gravy in the freezer from a previous Sunday roast. For only two of us, there is always to much meat no matter how small a joint I buy, so I make double the gravy and freeze half and freeze half the meat for another day.

The veg we had for Sunday dinner

I roasted the last of the early potatoes and a courgette and we had the first proper helping of runner beans. The runner beans are late this year but as the dwarf beans have recently finished and now the runner beans have got started this has actually worked out quite well. The runner beans should continue until the first frosts.

After we had eaten the breakfast eggs Apricot laid her first egg after a ten day break. Her eggs are really tiny but as we had eaten all the eggs there were no other eggs to compare it to. Instead I thought I would compare it to a strawberry as her eggs are also a similar shape to a strawberry.

Apricot’s egg

Strawberry egg

Apricot’s eggs are tiny

They may be tiny but at least it means we now have two girls laying. It was very satisfying to have three meals made up from our own produce.

There are loads more courgettes coming and lots of tomatoes now ripening. We are heading for the moment when we have a glut and I may have to cook courgettes and tomatoes together for the freezer. They can then be added to future dishes. I am not complaining as this is the best year for the veg plot for many years. Long may it continue.

Dandelion has been laying thin shelled eggs right from when she started laying. She is clueless about laying and right from the start she would sit in a nest box then lay an egg in the run or lay an egg in the run then sit in the nest box. Sometimes she sits in the nest box then lays the egg the following day. Occasionally her egg will be in a nest box and sometimes it will be in the chicken shed.

Her last three eggs have been broken. The first was laid in the run and had been broken and eaten. The next two were laid first thing in the morning in the chicken shed. They had both been broken but not eaten. They were broken side up which leads me to wonder if they have been pecked. I think perhaps they were pecked and then the automatic door opened and the girls abandoned the egg in the rush to get outside.

I am only speculating as I can’t be sure but below is the egg facing the way that I found it.

Dandelion’s egg

I squeezed the egg shell and it is thin but I don’t think it would have broken on it’s own. The next time we have eggs I might dry some shells in the oven, crush them and add them to some mash. Dandelion has always laid thin shelled eggs but she doesn’t seem to suffer when laying.

Amber, our bantam vorwerk, always struggled with egg laying. She would lay thin shelled or soft shelled eggs and always looked poorly before laying. Luckily she didn’t lay often. I tried giving her crushed egg shells, limestone powder and cod liver oil, but nothing made a difference so I am not convinced that this can be changed.

The good thing is that unlike Amber, Dandelion looks healthy and happy and doesn’t struggle with egg laying at all. In fact she seems unaware that she has laid an egg most of the time and will sit in the nest box afterwards for a while and then give up.

I decided to scramble the egg and give it back to the girls rather than waste it. I scramble it in a little olive oil and water. I was also about to give the girls a treat of probiotic yogurt. This is good for their digestion system but must only be given in small amounts, about a teaspoon per hen and only occasionally. It shouldn’t be given more than once a week and in fact I give it about once a month. As the egg was only a tiny amount I mixed it with the yogurt and put it in four little dishes.

I give the girls some yogurt

The girls are loving the yogurt

Apricot has a yogurt beak

Emerald is splattered with specks of yogurt

We had to go out for a few hours and when we returned all the dishes were empty and Emerald looked clean once more. I am never sure how she manages to get clean but she never has the specks of yogurt on her feathers for long.

I think the girls enjoyed their treat.

We pruned the shrub that grows in the chicken run as it had grown through the weld mesh and was looking a bit odd. The girls like to reach up from the branch perch and peck at the leaves so we thought we would put the pruned bits in the run for them. They had a great time pecking at the leaves.

Some pruned branches for the girls

Rusty still has a clean and fluffy bottom

Cinnamon is too busy in a dust bath to join in

After I had given the girls a pot of growing leaves, to decimate, I thought that there would be nothing to lose from seeing if they would regrow.

The girls greens are regrowing

I am pleased to see that they are regrowing. I think the girls will have some more fun with these at a later date.

The shrub that they are enjoying has also grown huge on the inside of the run. I have decided that I will prune that part at a later date so that they can enjoy the pruned branches again on another day. It is good to get maximum fun for the girls from the greenery.