In June 2007 we lost Henrietta and Yoko in quick succession.  Penny and Chelle seemed a bit lost on their own, and we didn’t want them to lose interest in life, and felt that it wouldn’t harm anyone to have a few more hens in the household, so we returned to the same farm from [...]

Yesterday we returned from what can be described as the best holiday we’ve ever had.  We had gone camping in Dorset and attended a family wedding, and came back just before the skies dumped their rain clouds on the country.

This afternoon as we were looking out at the garden, Annette noticed an unusual shape on [...]

Yoko lived and died with her foot on the gas pedal.  We cannot forget what a character she was.  She was the first one up each morning, the first one to push her way through the enclosure gate to get to the worms in the garden, and the last one to bed each night: and [...]

On Friday 11th May 2007, Henrietta was diagnosed as having a liver tumour, and so we had to have her put down. She had been slowing down for a few weeks, but we thought that it might be due to old age or the warm weather (or both). On Friday morning we found [...]

We had a very unexpected and unusual surprise on Christmas Day. Daniel had gone to raise the hatch door to the hen house in the morning, and (as usual) the first one down from the perch was Yoko. She skipped out towards the food hopper but then did a double take on something [...]

We’re starting this page to keep all of the hens’ strange eggs in one place.

Biggest Egg
Alien Christmas Egg

I got the rat! I got the rat! I got the rat!

It only took a month, most nights with 5-6 traps outside, and I tried chicken, sausage, raw lamb, suet, mince pie, corn, hen food, bread, cake, potato and all kinds of different baits. He finally went for some Lidl milk chocolate. He is [...]

The hens each eat about 100-150g of special food pellets which contain all the stuff that they need in their diet and they like to eat through the day so it’s not really practical to ‘feed’ them daily: if it rains, the pellets get wet and disintegrate. We keep their food in a big hopper [...]

March 2006 was the coldest driest worst weather for decades, apparently. On the first day of spring the garden was as bare as it was in January last year. That said, last summer was rather dismal anyway, for all the warm weeks in March that we had enjoyed.This year’s summer will be good. The crows [...]

Throughout 2005, we have had to deal with Penny and sometimes Henrietta being egg-bound. This is when they have difficulty in expelling their eggs. They look and feel very ill and uncomfortable, and it is very distressing all round.

We don’t know very much about the condition, but understand that it is due mainly to a [...]