Carol's Chickens

Last year a little plant arrived on our drive. I thought it was a weed but I thought it was pretty so I let it stay. I put out a blog post about it and Mum told me it was a plant not a weed but I now can’t remember what it is called.

This year it has established itself all the way along the wall of our drive. It needs no looking after and thrives here giving a splash of colour to the edge of our drive. We are happy to leave it be.

A bit of colour on our drive

A close up shows how pretty it is

I love it when something pretty arrives on it’s own and makes itself at home.

Dandelion hasn’t seemed herself for the last few days. She was spending time sitting with her head hunched down into her ruffles. I was worried that there was something wrong with her.

This afternoon while Rusty was in the nest box laying her egg I was very surprised to see Dandelion by the ramps of the nest boxes. I have never seen her go to the patio, without persuasion, apart from at bedtime. She then left the nest boxes and went into the shelter followed by her trusty sidekick, Cinnamon. I have never seen these two go in there either.

I started to think that she must be getting ready to lay an egg. I had thought Cinnamon would be the first of the three amigos because her comb is the most red but I noticed that Dandelion’s face and comb were a deeper pink than before. I guessed that her blond colouring compared to Cinnamon’s brunette colouring could be why her comb and face are a lighter shade.

I decided to get my camera and take a photo to demonstrate this. Just as I snapped the first photo she laid her egg, in the run, right in front of my eyes. A tiny, warm, damp, egg. She immediately perked up and looked back to normal. So that was what her problem was. There was no blood on her egg and it is even tinier than Freckles egg.

Maybe she was stressed because she didn’t know where to lay her egg. I think it took her by surprise when it arrived because she hadn’t even sat down. I know they have to stand up to actually lay their egg but they usually sit first.

Dandelion lays her egg in front of my eyes

I didn’t realise when I clicked this photo that that expression on her face was the concentration of laying her egg. It wasn’t until she stepped forward that I saw the egg.

And there it is

As she stepped away from her egg her eyes brightened up instantly.

Dandelion’s egg on the left, Freckles egg in the middle and Rusty’s egg on the right

Dandelion’s tiny egg is on the left, it is a paler colour than the other two

It is so tiny that it falls through the egg stand

Dandelion’s egg

I took this photo to show the egg’s size with the fifty pence piece to compare it with. This was so unexpected. Today we had three little girl’s eggs. Well done Dandelion.

Yesterday Speckles and Freckles laid their eggs together. Freckles doesn’t seem to mind who lays their eggs in the same nest box as her. She is happy to share and she likes to gather any eggs underneath her and will happily sit on them until she has laid her own egg.

Surprisingly, despite this, she hasn’t gone broody yet and is in fact our best layer. Her record is now laying four days in a row. When I saw Speckles and Freckles eggs side by side in the nest box it made me smile because Speckles lays the biggest eggs and Freckles lays the smallest eggs.

Speckles and Freckles egg

You have to smile at these eggs.

We bought our television when we moved to this house ten years ago. We wanted something small so that it would hardly be noticeable as we have tried to keep with the Edwardian style of the house and didn’t want something modern to jump out.

People have laughed at it and said that they thought it was our lap top rather than a television but we have always been used to a small T.V. so we were fine with it. Over the last few years though our eyesight has deteriorated a bit and we found that neither of us could read anything on our T.V. any longer.

I would pause the T.V. and stand in front of it to read out loud anything written. We could no longer read sub titles or text on phones or football scores. We decided it was time to move to the next size up. One size up would still fit the small corner where it lives.

We were surprised to find that they are not very expensive. Yesterday we bought one and set it up and oh my goodness, what a difference! We are suddenly able to see every bit of writing. It has made a huge difference to us. We wonder why we didn’t do this before. It still feels like we are watching someone else’s T.V. at the moment. It is so amazing to be able to see everything that is written and every detail that we didn’t even realise we were missing. Lines on faces and beads of sweat. Yes Steve, I know you will be wanting to say “I told you so”.

Old T.V.

New T.V.

Oddly enough in the photographs it doesn’t look that much different and yet it makes a massive difference to us. The screen is much wider and perhaps because it’s ten years newer there is much sharper detail. We have also put the D.V.D. player in a different spot underneath the drawers which makes the T.V. look slightly lower.

We are so pleased that we finally got around to changing this. We just hadn’t realised how much difference it would make to us. Better late than never, we can enjoy detail once more.

I have been waiting for a bit of sun to open our tulips.

Tulips tightly closed despite it being a bright morning

A bit later in the day they are starting to open

By the afternoon they are open

I love the way the tulips react to the sun. The red is so bright in the surrounding sea of blue. You can’t help but smile.

Speckles seems to like the shelter. She likes to sit in there and once laid an egg in there. Yesterday she was sitting on top of the shelter. She seems to have claimed this shelter as her own.

Speckles finds a new place to sit

They do like to find a new place to sit.

Since my lovely husband gave our rose a hard prune in readiness for our new fence we have reclaimed an extra strip of garden. The rose used to extend out to the chicken run leaving us just the brick path next to the run to squeeze down to do any maintenance. Now we have a strip of garden beside the chicken run.

We now have extra garden

The trees in this area are all self seeded and we are leaving them to create a sort of hedge. We intend to keep the rose back on to the fence in future to keep this strip of garden so that it makes it more accessible for us to get in here and maintain the rose and the chicken run if necessary.

It is also lighter in the run for the girls. When I laid the first row of these bricks last year the rose was grabbing me and I was fighting it. Now we can walk on the brick path with ease.

It is the first time this end of the garden has been tidy as the rose was daunting to tackle. It will be interesting see what it looks like as the season progresses. I think it will be good to have it under control and to have a neat fence and more space in the garden.

It was just over two weeks ago that I took this photo of Speckles bottom.

Speckles bare bottom

Speckles has pins on her bottom

Compare it to this photo. She has rows of pin feathers and the gap is closing up. As the fluffy feathers open the gap should fill in.

I am so pleased that her new feathers have come through so quickly and  that they aren’t being pulled again. Hopefully this means that the problem has passed without becoming a habit and she will soon be back to normal.

I really think it was the stress of the girls being confined to only half of the run that triggered this and now the girls are fully integrated the problem seems to have passed. This is really good news.

The first set of tulips are going over and the next bunch are just getting ready to open.

Another clump of tulips in a sea of pulmonaria

Bluebells

There are bluebells all around the garden, plus some whitebells and pinkbells. There are more of these every year but that’s okay. I love the garden in the spring.

I have been trying to get some good close up photos of the three amigos to update my “meet the flock” page. I haven’t done this before now as I have been waiting for Dandelion’s head feathers to grow in.

Her long tail feathers fell out and regrew very quickly but the pin feathers on her head have taken forever to open. They are still not all fully opened but it’s been two months this weekend but I am getting impatient with waiting.

Cinnamon is the most difficult to get close up photos of because she is the most shy and also she doesn’t keep her head still so any close ups I get are often blurred.

Apricot

Dandelion

Cinnamon

The three amigos

Their close up

This is my favourite photo of the three of them so far. What beautiful little girls.