The weather has been bad, very bad! I’m not talking about snow – we haven’t got any – no I’m talking about having had the wettest winter since….since we arrived in North Devon – so wet, that we have springs coming out of the ground where we have never had springs before!

I put my exbatts into what I thought was quite a large run – 20′ by 12′ – and in no time at all they have turned it into a muddy mess, ducks couldn’t have done a better job.

Last week they got given some extra grass to play on, but this was only going to be temporary, and it was only going to be a matter of time before this disappeared as well.

Much against the finances of the day, we have invested in a nice 6′ * 4′ shed, and the exbatts have been moved where they will shortly be joined by my oldies – a light sussex and a couple of marans, well past egg laying duties. I want the exbatts to sort out territory first, so that they have the upper hand when the oldies move in!

From here, they will be fenced in a small area for a week – no grass to mess up – and after that they will have the whole 11 acres to explore. They won’t explore it all, but they will have so much grass to play around on that they won’t mess up any of it.

Lucky birds!

As if we didn’t have enough chickens – we already have 3 coop-loads!

One coop is what I refer to our main chooks – our laying chooks – mostly Wellsummers with a couple of marans and a black rock in there – 9 hens & a cockerel!

Our next coop has a few oldies – a cockerel, two marans and a light sussex – the light sussex still lays an occasional egg – she really ought to be in with the main chooks but she kept escaping, so we left her with the others. As time goes by this group gets smaller & smaller as time catches up with them!

We have one other coop – before the arrival of the exbatts – and it contains my young chooks – those that have been hatched out of my incubator – we have 3 hens & a cockerel, plus a couple of stray hybrids that belong to my neighbour who prefers to be with us for some reason.

In total we had 17 hens & 3 cockerels but were getting only 3 eggs a day and we were starting to disappoint a few customers so time to get some more chooks.

Through Twitter I heard about the “great cull” of ex-battery hens that was due to happen at the end of 2011 as they made way for new cages and new birds and thought “I could have some of those” and signed up to collect 8!

So, on 29th December, I went over to BHWT, which amazingly is in North Devon, to collect my 8 girls! Of course I didn’t just pop over – I had my appointment time and was amazed at how well organised they were and they had cars coming through every five minutes or so to collect the girls that had been “rescued” the day before!

Unfortunately, the weather was atrocious when we got them home and I suspect that they wished they were ducks or had been taken to a home that had indoor space. No, they were housed in a spare coop with their own run, shelter underneath the coop to keep out of the rain, and were thankful for the fresh air and opportunity to stretch their legs!

Today though, some 9 days later, the sun shone, their run had dried out, they can all get themselves in and out of the coop & are already into the routine of the smallholding – they know when the corn is coming and get excited about it. You can see new feathers starting to grow and it won’t be long before they’ll be as strong as all my other chooks!

And for me, best of all, I get 2 or 3 eggs a day from them!

Good girls!