Small Revolutions: Voluntary Simplicity in Devon

Golden [something] Hen

Spent most of the day helping get the hen houses ready and wired up to mains light for the winter.

The new hens are lovely and are Golden something or other.

For simplicity I have opted for calling them Golden Delicious.

We have to keep them in for 4 days so they get their HPS (Hen Positioning System) aligned. Otherwise they'd be roosting everywhere and we'd lose them all to foxes.

After that, we have to wait until they start laying.

I am reliably told by an expert with some 50 years of hen keeping experience that there are three ways to tell when hens are about to lay:

1. You can feel 2 bones at the back, if you can only fit one finger between the bones, they're not ready. When you can fit 2 fingers between, they're ready to lay. However, I am not that interested in finding out that I would want to feel 100 chickens.
2. The dangly bits (I have no idea what the name is for them, let me know if you know) which start off pink, start to turn red.
3. They start 'singing'. I'm not sure what they sing, but that's apparently what they do.

So there you go, that's what I've learnt about hens today, even if I don't know what breed they are...

New Chickens

Well, after having let my account expire and not being able to retrieve my content until I re-subscribed (bugger) I've now pulled together the readies to get back into my blog and subscribe for another year. Had I thought about it earlier, I would have migrated to Wordpress which is free. Never mind...

I spent today cleaning out the hen house for the arrival of 100 new chickens.

The old chickens had been laying for two years, weren't very nice to each other (peck, peck, peck all the time).

So they're in retirement over the hill.

I'll be glad to get the new chickens because it's been a bit embarrassing going out to the field twice a day and bringing back 3 eggs a time.

Hopefully now there should be enough for all the orders and some left over for me to take home. Our organic eggs are cheaper than the supermarket and taste a lot better (must be all the foraging they do).