They grow so fast!

The chicks have only been hatched since the beginning of the month and look how much they've grown in such a short space of time. This week, having realised they are proper little birds with wings and feathers they are doing their best to fly (see video at the bottom of this post).

Learning how to find food.

Look we've got feathers and everything.

Some are blue.

Just as Tardis gets them all nicely lined up one wanders off.

New arrivals

Tardis has spent the past three weeks sitting firmly on a clutch of ten eggs. She's been chatting to us as we build the polytunnel and crooning chicken songs at her brood. Then on Sunday...

Six of the ten eggs have hatched - two yellow, four blue. The blue ones are Blue Orpingtons, the eggs of which had spent time in a fridge before Tardis got to warm them up again with her underparts.

It didn't take them long to find the bowl of chick crumb.

Snuggling in a box while the broody pen is cleaned out.

Life in the Preseli Hills

It doesn't look much yet....

It's raining so I can pause and tell you what Life IS in the Preseli Hills at the moment.

When wondering what on earth it is I do all day I can only conclude that I am currently a full-time gardener.  I'm clearing an area 12 feet by 20 feet plus three feet all round in which to put up our second polytunnel. The bits for that arrived on Thursday along with two lovely books on polytunnel gardening which I'm trying to avidly read but every time I pick them up something intervenes.

Clearing the area requires wielding my Chillington hoe and hoiking out barrow loads of nettle roots. The patch is where the hens have been for the last decade or two and the soil is deep and rich and fertile. Nettles are always a good sign as they love to grow on the best ground.

While I dig three of the hens chat happily to me and Mrs Broody chuckles to the ten fertile eggs she's sitting on. I peer into her broody pen and she looks like a big fluffy cushion with a beak.

One of the interruptions to my polytunnel reading has been regular visits by a flock of sheep - a mix of white and black Mountain sheep - which are hell bent on joining us on our small farm. They should be on our neighbour's land but since he only has cattle fencing the inevitable keeps happening. This morning they broke through our fence again (they always break things on the way in) so Brian is now an hour late for work and has spent a couple of hours chasing sheep and putting in new fence posts. Our own sheep are quietly eating the lovely grass in our other fields and growing (the lambs) or recovering from lambing (the ewes) and don't need much looking after at the moment.

Another daily thing is to bring in the ponies. Bullseye has to come in during the day so he doesn't eat too much spring grass and get laminitis so Itsy, who can get hugely fat just looking at spring grass (I know how she feels but in my case it's cake) stays in with him to keep him company. Pippin who is not inclined to either fat nor laminitis stays out in the field on her own (much neighing) or, because she's old and wise, she gets to wander around the farmyard and hayguard eating lots of lovely lush grass (and hopefully not escaping into the garden).

When I'm not doing all of the above I'm pulling bracken from the eight acres of hay meadow. We can't spray (organic), or mow (no mower) or do any of the other bracken treatments that are supposed to work, so we're weeding it by hand. Actually Mum's done most of it so far as I've been distracted by other important things (like a Tweetup with Lins, Chris and Kath) but there's plenty still to do. (If anyone feels like popping over to give us a hand I pay in cake, roast chicken dinners and chicken curry suppers!)

In other moments I'm planting seeds, pricking out seedlings and potting on the bigger plants. I have lots ready for the new polytunnel - including cucumbers, melons, squashes, tomatoes - the little polytunnel is bursting at the seams. Its new role is for propagation and the growing will be done in the new polytunnel. All I need to do is to finish digging it and then put the thing up... other things allowing of course!

Brand new hens

Two white tails, two black.

Our brand new lovely hens have arrived. Brian fetched them from a farm in Llandysul on Tuesday - in a box identical to the one the puppy arrived in (no wonder I thought he'd be hens when that box arrived).

These lovely ladies are Calder Rangers, a cross between Rhode Island Red and Light Sussex. They're also known as Gingernut Rangers (note how they match my hair colour!) or Columbian Blacktail and they supposedly will lay up to 320 eggs a year.

They're now snug in the new hen coop ready to go off on chicken tractor* duties around the veggie beds once they've settled in.

*Permaculture term for using penned chickens to clear weeds from vegetable beds prior to planting.

Chicken update

Our six new hens are doing very well indeed. They have settled in quite happily to their new life and have realised that, like Nick Park's Chicken Run chickens, there's more to life than just laying a daily egg.

They came from a free range egg unit near Tregaron that had been producing eggs for Tesco and needed to clear out 3,500 or so of these hens to make way for a fresh batch. The farmer had to get rid of them or, on February 23rd, they had an appointment with a slaughterman at a chicken sandwich paste factory.

So homes were needed for 3,500 redundant layers. A tall order you might think, but this is where the local Freecycle network and Brian's colleague Neris came into the equation.

The farmer had been offered 7p for each bird from the sandwich paste factory. Instead he offered them at £1 each on Freecycle.

Neris heard about the birds' plight and decided to get involved. She works with Brian at police HQ and was in the position of being able to publicise the chickens' plight to every single police employee throughout Dyfed and Powys. She has friends working for both Ceredigion and Carmarthenshire county councils too and they passed on the details of the hens to their colleagues. Neris was a determined woman; she made sure everyone knew about the birds; she even arranged collection for some.

Although the farmer was selling the hens at £1 each, he gave many away; we wanted and paid for four, we got six. He did that over and over again. I should imagine that anyone who went there for a bird or two got a few more than they bargained for. So he must have made about 50p per bird overall instead of the 7p he would have got from the chicken paste manufacturer.

It is now the end of February. All 3,500 chickens missed their appointment to be transformed into pots of chicken sandwich paste. In the end the farmer was left with 80 birds which he has kept on as layers to scratch about in a spare field and lay the occasional egg for farm gate sales. I think he was probably a little overwhelmed at the way the whole thing snowballed. He never expected to get rid of 3,500 unwanted birds, let alone have so many of them make new homes with members of the local police force!

But it all starts again. At the end of March he is to restock with another 3,500 point of lay pullets at a cost £7 each to lay eggs for Tesco and in 72 weeks time those birds will be old has-beens too.