Snapdragon's garden

Now I need to find out about hedgehogs

Katie appeared at the workroom door about half an hour ago with the exciting news that a hedgehog was wandering round the garden.

We locked the dogs on the workroom and went to investigate.

The hedgehog is out in the daylight, has a slightly draggy back leg though it doesn't slow him down and is very very hungry.  He's been eating a lot of worms and Katie provided him with cat food.

I now need to find out why he is out in the daylight, whether his leg is a problem and whether in fact you feed cat food to hedgehogs any more.

On another note, Dixie took her spell alone in the workshop as an excuse to mount a daring raid on Valerie's box of dog biscuits . . .

Charlie

A month or so ago Kit found an abandoned week old kitten on the road in Balfron - cars had been driving over it and one had hit its tail and back leg.

She picked it up and took it to the vets where it got jabs to help with the pain and swelling and then she took it home for four hourly feeds and nursed it back to health.

Now Charlie is a bouncy kitten - a bit skinny, a bit prone to eye infections, but generally OK - and he is staying with us for his holidays.  I fear however that the novelty of a bottle feeding kitten may lead him to regress.

Even the older members of our family seem to have taken to him.

As long as he's asleep.

I think that there will be a lot of long faces when he goes back after the fortnight.

Welcome to Sid

Last week Euan came home clutching a phone number taken down from the post office window.  Guinea pig free to good home.  We are a good home for guinea pigs so within the hour we were back with cage, food, various toys and Sid.

This is Sid - sweet chirrupping guinea pig - now residing in our spare room until it warms up enough outside. His last family got bored of him after the novelty of the G-force movie wore off.  I don't think I could get bored of such a talkative little chap with such a cutely teitching nose.

Full moons

On Monday night, walking back through the garden at about 10, lit by a wonderful full moon, shadows on the frosty lawn I thought - "what a wonderful night this would be for a fox".

On Tuesday morning I found that it had indeed been a wonderful night for whatever fox lurks in our woods.

The chicken pen was full of feathers, with horrible remains left of a light sussex cockerel.  We are also missing 2 young mix cockerels and a black rock hen.

They get locked up at night but it had probably been about 5pm when I had got round to it - obviously too late.  They must have been snatched while I sewed happily away on my machine.

Its part of keeping hens I suppose, but now I am constantly scanning the edges of the wood for something russetty amongst the bracken.  katy pointed out that we had too many cockerels anyway.

The problem with population explosion

As regular readers will recall . . . when we went on holiday this summer, all our chooks went broody and by mid July we were over-run with very cute babies.

Now those babies are growing up and the next month we shall have to separate off most of the cockerels to prevent extreme violence.

Some we will eat, there is no getting away from it and it is better (much better) than buying chicken from the supermarket.  You really appreciate a bird you have plucked yourself.

However, in amongst the mix of cockerels we have 4 pure breed Light Sussex.  they will grow up to look like this.

Stunning birds.  I would much rather re-home them - so if anyone has a dowdy little flock of hens and want some glamour . . .

Free to a good home, buyer must collect. Email me on snapdragonjane@googlemail.com or leave a comment.

By popular demand - the chicks

Peblo is my chicken.  Peblo is the uber chicken.  Peblo is the only chicken that has a name I can remember .Peblo is the fox attack survivor, hobo chicken extrordinaire.

And Peblo is also the best mother hen in the world.

Here are her latest brood.

3 balls of fluff which she promenades with round the garden once a day - the rest of the time she pretends that she is safely locked inside the fruit cage.

The only problem is that since the fox attack - 5 years ago now - Peblo has refused to go into a chicken house - most of the time we don't know where she roosts.  Now she is passing on these vagrant ways to her offspring.

The 2 black hens and the cockerel here are Peblo's last brood from June - they live on the woodpile - perched up high under the eaves of the shed.

Long overdue post - sorry Ben and Diana.

Last year - for our anniversary - Euan and I bought ourselves a chicken house.  A chicken house which would look attractive and Country Livingish rather than the slightly wobbly "artistic" and often a bit drafty kind of houses our poultry was used to.

We decided to buy the house from Ben Grist at Oakdene coops and as you can see it is a beauty

We were so pleased with it that I told Ben and his Auntie Diana that I would blog about it . . . but with one thing and another, builders, mud, recalcitrant chickens and so on there never seemed to be a nice enough photo.
Last week we moved it up to the garden so that we could introduce Mummy Sussex and her brood into it .
As you can see she is a discerning matriarch - but she was impressed.
Very impressed.

ooops - here we go again

Need I say any more

Born yesterday and cute, cute, cute
But it does rather add to the mayhem - we have baby birds everywhere - you can't move about without tripping over them - we have run out of proper houses and at night they are now in a selection of guinea pig hutches and plastic boxes.
Oh but aren't they cute?

Mother Hens

The ridiculous number of chickens in Snapdragon's garden this year has shown me beyond a doubt that all mother hens are not the same.
Peblo - our black maran - is THE best mother - selfless, caring, protective.  If I give her some food she makes sure that each of her chicks has a piece before eating herself.
She is chief mother hen and shepherds her chicks around beautifully.  Gives cats the evil eye - she is a force to be reckoned with.

The nameless chicken with the surprise chicks is also a great mum - she only has 2 and spends most of her day making sure that they don't get under the feet of the other hens - she pushes them under the run gate into the orchard and then flies over herself.
They spend their day pecking about the undergrowth, 2 tiny yellow fluff-balls, only returning home at dusk.

The light sussex with the large brood is totally different - she eats all her chicks' crumbs before I finish putting it down - she pecks at them, she won't let them into the house, she is not a contented Mum at all.
I don't have a photo as she is in a permanent bad mood and attacks my camera.  Perhaps it is the stress of the large numbers.
However I do have a photo of the chap who caused the chaos
Cock o the walk.

Beyond a joke.

Well obviously our trip to Orkney allowed the livestock here in Snapdragon's garden to get a bit out of hand.
Look who just came to introduce her new brood.
Nope that is not the same chicken as a few days ago with ever so cute day old chicks.
This is another - she had been nesting over in the damp field in amongst the brambles.
We now have 25 chickens (16 under a month old) and a duck sitting on a nest.
Euan has ceased to find the situation amusing as we are running out of suitable accommodation.

But isn't she cute?  And very proud!  She nudged them about 100 yards to come and say hello to me.  well more likely to come and say "Where is our tea?"