Signs of Life in the Garden

I've been pleased to spot some signs of life returning to the garden this week, so I thought I would share them with you.

The few bulbs I managed to plant in the Autumn are showing and the pansies are still flowering

Erica Carnea Isabell, a Winter flowering heather which does not require acid soil.

Chickens and Sprouts

Once I cleared out as much of the muck and old straw as I could yesterday, I put down some new straw and gave the chickens fresh water.  Then I threw a sprout plant into their run, minus the few decent sprouts on it.  I thought I'd take a photo of the chooks attacking it.  Notice they seem to find the earth nearly as interesting as the leaves, but poor Robin had trouble getting a look in where the green stuff was concerned.

Cleaning Chickens

Chicken keeping can be a very enjoyable occupation. There are all those lovely eggs to start with and the birds themselves can be an endless source of amusement, but there are some aspects which are not so enjoyable.

Chickens are messy.  They eat constantly and so they are constantly depositing their droppings on the ground, and their droppings are usually fairly soft and smelly.

We usually remove the droppings from the roosting area daily, but by the end of a week it can do with a more thorough clean.  We also like to put fresh wood shavings (these should be the dust-free variety sold in pet shops etc) in the nest box as even when no-one has spent the night in there little bits of mud and muck are brought in on the birds' feet when they lay their eggs.  If a bird does spend the night in the nest box we try to scoop their droppings out before anyone lays an egg, although sleeping and egg laying tend to take place in different parts of the nest box, thankfully.


Today I gave the chickens their weekly clean. Once I'd scraped all the muck I could from the floor of the roosting area I spread the sawdust from the nest box over it to make cleaning it a bit easier and once I'd removed as much of the old sawdust as I could from the nest box I replaced it with a generous amount of clean sawdust.

The nest box is the section on the right.

On your marks . . .

Then I had to start on the lower quarters. To do that I had to let the chickens out and they couldn't wait.












As the chickens are currently on the patio we have put straw down, which absorbs some of the muck,

Very mucky straw.

so that needed raking up

 

and putting on the compost heap.

The Big Garden Bird Watch

blue tits in our magnolia tree January 2009

Happy New Year, and welcome to Notes on a Garden's new home.  I have a new e-mail address, so I had to make a new blogger account, but thankfully I was able to move my blog across.

The New Year may have only just begune, but it's already time to prepare for the Big Garden Birdwatch again.  The RSPB would be very pleased if you could spare an hour next Saturday (29th) or Sunday (30th) to count the birds in your garden.  It's a good way to find out just what is happening to our garden birds.

To increase your chances of finding out which feathered friends are living in your neighbourhood you could put out plenty of birdfood and top up water dishes to encourage them to pay your garden a visit.  This is a good thing to do regularly at this time of year, anyway, to help our garden birds survive the Winter.

Apparently early morning is a good time, but any time will do.

You can find out more about how to take part here.

Apologies to readers of my Green and Generous blog, but I thought it was worth repeating here.

Winter Quarters

This afternoon hubby and I moved the chickens to their Winter quarters, which means off the grass and down onto the patio, nearer the house.  This means the chickens won't be in such a mud bath, and we won't have so far to go in inclement weather in order to see to them.  We found out last year that putting straw down helped to keep the mud and muck under control as well as making it easier to clean them out.