I haven’t minded dealing with the chickens in the winter, but this last few weeks has been difficult. I don’t mind coming back on my lunch hour to deal with them before it gets dark, and I can cope with the swamp at the bottom of the garden, but the water freezing up has not been pleasant to deal with. Having to defrost their water probably doubles the amount of time it takes to do chicken related chores, and my hands are so cold that they hurt after cleaning them out.

The other day when I came back to clean the chickens Victoria was still in the nest box laying. I cleaned out the coop, and then she was finished just as I was about to go in. I looked inside the nest box and there were 3 eggs – 2 of them were still nice and warm. I walked back to the house with an egg in each hand which was a lovely way to warm my fingers up!

The best way to solve both problems would probably be to put down a load of woodchip in the run, but that will have to wait until next year. For now I have added this lovely board walk so that I can get to the coop to clean them out without sliding around in the mud.

Check out my lovely board walk!

The other thing that I have done recently is invested in a basket for collecting eggs. This is a little thing that has made a big difference to my cleaning / egg collecting routine. Before I had to collect the eggs, climb back over the fence with them (hard when you have 6 eggs in your hands) and put them inside. I would then go back into their area and clean up. With my basket I can do it all in one go, and I don’t end up dropping the eggs in the mud!

This is such a time saver

Soft Shelled Eggs

I had a few soft shelled eggs when the girls first started laying but I thought that was the end of it. Today when I managed to drag myself out of bed my girlfriend told me that there was an egg in the run. I managed to get it out of the run without letting the birds escape but it was already cracked. Then when I got home from work today there was only 1 egg in the nest box and that was cracked too! Today wasn’t a good day for eggs!

I have no idea why this egg was laid here...

This egg was laid in the right place but had a thin shell and was cracked

I am wondering if they have a calcium deficiency – I put some grit with oyster shell down in the run so hopefully that will do the trick. I’m not convinced though as they have had access to grit since I first got them.

Today when I got home I decided to fix this before I let them out. In the end I decided to pull all of the planks out and attach the left over weldmesh to the planks. I then put them back and twisted the ends of the wire mesh around the existing wire fence. Now the back of the garden is looking a lot safer. Now there’s no way for the girls to escape…

After dinner I looked out of the window and Meg had managed to get over the netting and into the main part of the garden – looks like their little enclosure isn’t so perfect after all! I can’t figure out how she got out – I’m not sure whether she jumped the net or jumped up onto the coop roof and then down the other side. Hopefully if she does it again I will be watching.

On the plus side, when I got home from work today there were 3 perfect, un-cracked eggs in the little nest area that I made inside the coop.

Yesterday I got an odd egg in the nest area. It was rough and had lots of red/brown speckles on it – I though it might be Daisy’s first egg.

Is this Daisy's first egg?

This morning when I let the chickens out there was already a cracked egg in the run (I wrote about it in my previous post) so when I came back at lunch time to see this I was pleasantly surprised:

Eggs in the nest area

It looks like the nest is working and the egg on the right it the biggest one I have had so far!

The Bad News

After I cleaned out the chickens today, I was doing a bit of gardening when I heard a flapping of wings. I looked round and Victoria had managed to fly over the netting that I put up yesterday. I chased her around the garden for a bit until I finally managed to catch her and put her back over the other side. As I was putting her over, I leaned on the netting and the string snapped! Well that lasted a long time!

I blame Victoria!

I took down the netting and decided to think out a way to improve it. I decided that the next attempt would need a stronger chord, and would need to be higher off of the ground, so I got out my drill and some bits of wood and this is what I came up with:

Version 2 of my net fence

This is much better than what I did last time – the rope is a lot stronger and the fence is a bit higher. It looks like the rope is not tight enough but this is as tight as I can get it. The reason that it sags is that the netting is pegged tightly into the ground and is pulling down on the rope. If I tightened it any more I think the wood would snap!

The other advantage to the new setup is that it is easier for me to get in and out. Where the netting attaches onto the coop, I have purposefully left the bottom quite loose – instead of being pegged into the ground it is attached to the coop about 1 foot off of the ground. This means that when I move the flower pots off of the bottom of the net I can just about squeeze under it without having to lay face down in chicken poop.

It nearly worked

I did get 2 un-cracked eggs but I wasn’t really happy with it so I decided to stop being lazy and screw the pieces of wood down. Now it looks much better.

Now it's not going anywhere!

Last week I got fed up of the girls trashing all of my flower beds so I decided to put up some netting. I constructed a frame out of some bamboo canes and some string and put the netting over the top of it. It has worked surprisingly well and the girls have not tried to scratch through it once.

I lashed the bamboo canes together with some string - Ray Mears would be impressed by my efforts.

At the weekend 2 things happened which made me think I need to upgrade my netting. First of all the girls dug up one of my plants that was outside the netting (it looked like pretty tough but now I think it is dead). Then I planted lots of vegetable seeds in various containers and I realised it would be too hard to stop the girls destroying my crops. Since I was in the mood to get stuff done today I decided to use the remaining netting to fence off half of my garden.

I put up some string between the coop and the fence and draped the netting over the top, pegging it down into the grass. This sounds simple but it was extremely windy and I bent a few pegs. I then put some left over weldmesh on top of the coop to hopefully discourage perching on it (and jumping down the other side). I also had to block off the gap down the side of the coop – when you look at the photos bear in mind that this is temporary and pretty much an experiment. If the girls stay in their section I will do something better and make it more permanent.

It's not perfect but it seems to be working.

This should hopefully stop them from jumping on the roof

A professional bodge job - the less said about this the better!

The only problem with this setup is that it makes it extremely difficult to get in and out of that part of the garden. Part of the netting is held down with some large flower pots – I have to move these and squeeze underneath the net (it is pulled very tight so I can’t lift it very high) and try not to lay in any chicken poop. If this goes well I will redo it to have a proper gate.