What to do with Annie

With two of our chickens passing away recently we have been deliberating what to do with Annie.  She has shown no signs of illness but she is not doing so good on her own, she is quite upset and distressed at being alone and having no friends around her.  We have decided to try and re-home her to somewhere she can live out the rest of her days in retirement but will have friends around her.  We contacted Heronfield Small Breeds Farm and Animal Rescue Centre, which is not far away from us, and they agreed to take her in.  We will miss her but we have had to do what is best for her.  Bye bye Annie.

Annie is the dark grey chicken in each of these photos.

R.I.P. Star

After we lost Ginger, one of our chickens, we noticed that one of our other chickens, Star, was not herself.  A few weeks after Ginger passed away we noticed that her droppings weren't normal and she was not herself.  We sought Veterinary help and he thought it might be Cancer and he gave her some medication to ease her suffering and she did perk up a bit but she had lost a lot of weight and I think it been too much for her and I found her this morning in one of the nests in the hen house.

This now means that Annie, our last chicken and the dark grey one in the first photo, is all alone and we need to consider what we are going to do as its unfair to keep a solitary chicken.

R.I.P. Ginger

Whilst we were on holiday we put our 3 chickens into boarding care for the week with a local place that looks after your animals whilst your on holiday.  We've used them before without issue but since last year they have changed hands and whether it is something to do with that or just coincidence but one of our chickens has been very poorly since we picked them up and sadly she passed away today.  We have to take our own food for them and she seemed perfectly fine when we dropped them off.

She will be sadly missed by her hen-house mates, who we will be keeping a very close eye on to see if they get ill as well.

What are we growing in the garden this year?

Last year we had a bumper crop of runner beans, a few potatoes, carrots and beetroot.  The cabbage and cauliflower growing was a waste of time because it became caterpillar feed.

This year we are trying dwarf beans in the hopes that we will have a crop of beans but not be over-run with them.  We are also trying beetroot again with a variety called Pablo, some multi-coloured carrots which are basically orange, yellow and white and then we have tomatoes, potatoes and strawberry.  We have had strawberries growing for a few years actually but they always get eaten by the slugs and snails so this year we have put them in a hanging basket to see what happens.  Slugs and snails can't climb up thin air can they?

I didn't actually take a photo of the hen house last year to show you what it looks like, I just took photos of the hens.  It has a run which goes underneath the sheltered house.  The beans this year are in the big red tub that used to have the strawberries growing in and the strawberries are in a hanging basket.

A couple of bags of potatoes and the chickens being nosy as always.

We also have flowers in the garden.  I won't show the lavender as that's in another post but here are some of the flowers we have growing too.  First is a scented rose that I've had for years, so long that we bought it with us from our first house to this one as it was in a big planter originally.  Its now planted in the garden properly and gives us a good display every year.

We have a massive shrub/semi-climbing rose from David Austin Roses called Spirit of Freedom.  Its beautiful, the flowers are ginormous and  heavily scented.  The only problem is that the flowers are so heavily that they usually hang down towards the floor and you can only see their beauty when you lift them.  I have a multi-coloured Spirea, it flowers white and pink on the same shrub and then that is Cranesbill Geranium and both are usually covered in bees.

In this last photo, I have two photos of a pink flowering plant that I have no idea what it is or where it came from.  Its not invasive, so I've ruled out it being a weed, when its overcast or dark the flowers close up tightly like they've been rolled up.  Then we have Campanula, which is pretty in masses of clumps but is very invasive so has to be controlled a lot.

Getting chickens and harvesting the vegetables

We are back from our camping holiday just outside of Wells, Gloucestershire and have been and got some chickens.  We have been advised that our house should be able to accommodate 4 chickens so we have chosen 4 different breeds.  Ranger the ginger one, Bluebell the grey one, Sussex the white one and Rocky Road the black one.  We have called them Ginger, Annie, Star and Roxsy.

The place we had them from has a return policy whereby if you have any problems with any or all of the chickens you can take them back within a given period of time.  We had issues with Rocksy, the black Rocky Road chicken where she was squawking loud all of the time and physically attacking the other hens to the point of there being blood everywhere.  We took her back and she was put in a special "ASBO" enclosure that they have for problem chickens, where they can keep an eye on their behaviour.  Our hen house became peaceful with the other hens getting along together really well with Ginger, the smallest of them, being in charge.

As you can see, our raised vegetable bed is green, with the runner beans being good producers.  The variety are "Gigantica" I think they were called, my father-in-law got them for us and they are big runner beans.  Quite a lot of them have grown in funny shapes due to lack of growing room and with me being only small I have to keep getting step ladders out to reach the tops of the bean plants and find all these beans that have been "trapped" and grown weird.

Whilst their plants have produced beans for them ours have gone mad and I've been harvesting them twice a week, cooking half of them and blanching/freezing the other half.  We have over 11lb of sliced green beans in our freezer so you imagine what kind of crop we have had this year, so many in fact that when I close my eyes at night that is all I see, they've even been calling to me and they must know my name as they have grown in shapes of the letters, J U L I.  They obviously come unstuck when it came to the last letter though but I suppose growing in the shape of an "a" is a tall order.  Amazing!

Unfortunately the same cannot be said for the cabbage and cauliflower.  We have not had anything from them as we have been blighted with millions, and I mean millions, of caterpillars.  I got excited and took a photo of a purple cauliflower as it started to grow but it didn't get much bigger than that before it was covered in caterpillars.

We did plant some potatoes in bags and we did get a few from those but not very many.  Tomatoes, we had a few but mostly the insects got to them before we did.  We did get a few beetroot and carrots though.  Its the first time either of us have grown vegetables and its a big learning curve but at least the chickens are laying eggs so we have a ready supply of fresh eggs to enjoy.