A couple of days ago I got the biggest egg yet – there is a photo of it in the entry for 14th May. I ate it this morning in a bacon and fried egg sandwich and it was a double yolker!
Double Yolker
The Big Egg
May 16th, 2009 .Securing the Garden
May 14th, 2009 .At the back of my garden, in the area that I have fenced off for the chickens there is an old wire fence. It’s pretty sturdy but there was a small gap at the bottom of it, so before letting the girls out for the first time I laid some old bits of wood in front of the gap. Yesterday I was watching the girls scratch around out the back and I noticed that the gap had reappeared – the girls had scratched away so much of the soil around the base of the fence that the wooden planks had dropped down and made a gap big enough for a chicken to get through.
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.
Good News and Bad News
May 12th, 2009 .The Good News
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.
More Cracked Eggs
May 12th, 2009 .When I let the girls out this morning there was another egg on the coop floor with cracks on it. This time Victoria had laid it in the opposite corner of the hen house – I think this is because she laid it before I let the girls out and there wasn’t enough space for her to get to the nest. I am seriously considering buying an automatic pop-hole opener. Either that or I will need to start setting my alarm for 4:30am!
Nests and Netting
May 11th, 2009 .Well the nest area worked to an extent but they still managed to push it away and make a bald spot.
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.