No storm damage but a fluffy bottom

Posted by louisa on Thursday 5 January 2012 in chickens, house | 7 comments

My Twitter feed today has been full of nearly squished chickens, roofs flying off sheds, greenhouses half blown away and house roof damage but despite living near a lot of very tall trees, this was the extent of the damage we experienced in yesterday/last night’s gales:

Because we live next to woodland, wind always sounds much worse than it is around here – even light winds create a constant roar through the trees – and every morning after windy nights, I wake up expecting three trees to be smashed through the greenhouse, half our roof tiles on the floor and the chicken coop have blown away to the marvellous land of Oz. It’s always a relief when I see that hasn’t happened.

The bird feeder isn’t even broken – just the twine that was holding it up – and I’ll get the chickens up to that level of the garden tomorrow (when it’s supposed to be sunny) for seed clear up. I’m sure they’ll love that chore.

Speaking of the chickens – four small things:

• John’s dad surprised us with a trailer load of woodchips yesterday so they have a nice fat layer in the run – lots of fun to scratch around in and much better for draining a storm’s worth of rain. The woodchips always smell great – usually like a pleasantly woody men’s aftershave but today they (or at least the garden) smelled like raita/yoghurt and mint sauce. Not like mint but specifically like yoghurt and mint sauce. I don’t know why but I’m not complaining.
• I mentioned this on Twitter earlier but for those not on that mighty social media timesink, the partial roof I put on the run last month survived the winds just fine, therefore I am ace and a master craftswoman. And/or the chicken run is in a sheltered dip and I got lucky.
• Rain/mud issues aside, this winter (so far) has been much better than last winter for our girls – I’ve not had to defrost their drinkers at all (I was doing it twice a day during the coldest bit of last winter) and they’ve kept laying well – we got four eggs (from six girls) just about every day in December despite the short days, them getting older and the fact it’s been moult season.
• Blue the chicken has been the last to moult and since the others are all refreshed & perky, she’s dropped right down in the pecking order these last few weeks. As my new joint favourite chicken, I’ve felt sorry for her so I’m pleased to see her bottom is getting nice and fluffy again. Hurrah for fluffy bottoms.

Have you suffered any weather-related damage to your house or garden this winter? Do you have any ideas why the new woodchips smell like raita? How do you feel about fluffy bottoms? All important issues of the day! :)

Five things

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 16 November 2011 in chickens, frugal, making | 3 comments

ONE. Two of the chickens are in moult – Ginger the Black Rock and Ms Mauve, an ISA Brown. There have been a lot of feathers about in the coop and run but neither have gone too bald (… yet?). Both have lost their tail feathers so look strangely round and last week both lost neck/head feathers, but Ginger’s have pretty much grown back now, so only Ms Mauve is left looking bit funny.

(I’m not keeping them/her in a separate run from the rest of the crew during the moult, just some of the others had just wandered outside of the run while I was taking photos. She followed shortly afterwards when she realised that there were leaves to scratch in out there, weeeee!)

TWO. Sticking to chicken related things, we’ve discovered that if chickens eat achocha, it taints their eggs like onions or (wild) garlic. I’ve been feeding the chicken some of the many, many achocha fruit we’ve had this season in an effort to get through them before the frost turns them all to mush. They weren’t sure about them at first but now om-nom-nom them up. We discovered the tainting issue – which isn’t unpleasant, per se, in savoury food but definitely there – on Monday, just after I’d taken them the remains of the entire 15ft tall wall of achocha to pick through. Monday’s eggs have been quarantined so they don’t accidentally get used for a dessert!

THREE. One of the reasons why I’ve not been writing much here is #NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month. All my spare (and not so spare) time has been sucked up by that, so not only have I not been blogging much, I’ve not really been crafting or playing either. But on the plus side, because I’ve been so focus, I’ve written over 60,000 so far and I’ve not been idly browsing the web or eBay so I’ve saved money by avoiding temptation. Woo!

FOUR. Despite #NaNoWriMo getting in the way of my crafting, I have had a couple of evenings off from writing (when I was too exhausted/distracted to write the day we found Kia and after a busy day in the garden at the weekend) and I’m only about four rows off finishing the back of one of my crochet tops. If I hadn’t been writing, it would be long finished by now – and I’ve got an idea of how I can make another one which is just as nice but even quicker. Because I don’t already have enough WIPs…

FIVE. A little paranoid perhaps but I’m rather aware how quickly we’re getting through our wood pile. I cut a load of wood on Sunday but we’ve already nearly got through the ones for the “big” stove in the office. I think we might start using the central heating more until the winter properly kicks in, so we can see what it holds: I’m worried about racing through all our wood supplies now, then finding ourselves without heating for a fortnight during a super cold spell like we did last year (our boiler broke at just the wrong time). I much prefer our free heating from wood than our expensive gas, but I think I’d rather have a few weeks of expensive warmth than risk having no warmth at all!

What’s going on in your life this week?

Lime the Chicken’s badly timed winter moult

Posted by louisa on Thursday 6 January 2011 in chickens | 3 comments

You know when it was really cold a fortnight ago? When it was minus frickin’ 17C so nights and didn’t get above freezing at all for a fortnight or more? That was the time when one of our chickens, Lime, thought it would be a good idea to start her first moult.

Or rather that’s when I really noticed – looking back at pictures now, I can see she was losing feathers in late November – it just reached a critical mass in that cold snap in December – and it worried me a lot.

Lime has always been my favourite of the chickens – she was the first one we could identify (she had black flecks in her neck feathers) and from the start, she was the friendliest. She’s the only one to have jumped up on my shoulders/back (John says I look like a strange “farmer pirate” when she does it) and always wants to be as close to me as possible when I’m in the run. Her personality reminds me of our cat, Carla – and since me noticing her moult coincided with Carla having a cold and Lily-dog having food poisoning, I was already stressed about beloved animal illness!

During the coldest weather, I kept a close eye on her – she got a lot of warm porridge hand feeding and other treats, all including generous quantities of poultry spice (a mineral booster). I thought about making her a jacket but thought it might stress her out further so had it as a last resort plan. Thankfully her feather loss seemed to slow at that point and then eventually the weather got warmer too so I’ve not had to do it yet. She lost a lot of feathers on her neck and on her back & breast – but retained enough on her back & breast so she didn’t look completely bald, just white and scruffy. This pic shows her next to one of her sisters – she looked as red and fluffy as that before the moult started.

Over the last few days, we started seeing some great regrowth around her neck – yesterday the new pin feathers looked just like thin paper tubes (they’re actually a keratin sheath) but now little feathers are sticking out the end like super fine paintbrushes.

I suspect she might not be out of the woods yet but it’s still nice to see regrowth, to know that it won’t last forever and within, hopefully, a month or so, she’ll be back to normal.