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Well look at that, not only did I find the website again I have been able to remember the password..it all bodes well.
Yesterday I mentioned a list - in no particular order- of the things I need to sort out and Chickens was on there. Well I can now cross it off as the run is sorted.
Let me give some background.... for Christmas GB and I decide we would buy one of those Freeview boxes and pay the TV tax (AKA 'A Licence') We only have a limited DVD collection, all of which are scratched to hell, and you can only watch Bob the Builder so many times (unlike The Wiggles whom I could watch unendingly as they are the single greastest kids entertainers in the world...but I digress) So we decided to get 'Television'. I had in fact enjoyed pretending to be Middle Class when people asked if I'd watched 'Big Brother' I would loftily reply 'We don't have a Television' and people would imagine us all sat round reading or having piano recitals. It seems that 'frugal' is in at the moment. No-one suspected we were in fact benefit scum* too skint to buy a licence and not brave enough to risk watching telly without one....where was I going with this...oh yes chickens.
So come January we get to watch normal telly and join in all the conversations at work which all tend to start 'did you see..last night'. I particulary enjoyed the whole Hugh fernly-Whittingstall/Jamie Oliver Chicken thing. You see I have long had a plan for my garden and it involved having Chickens and growing veg and basically being a bit 'Good Lifey' really. As my previous post points out I am a past master at plans....so as you can imagine it has come to nought.
Anyway I mentioned to a lady in work I fancied getting some chickens, I was then inudated with people asking when I was getting the chickens...(incidentally this is how I ended up married, I casually mentioned that I wanted to get married sooner rather than later to one of the girls in work, suddenly I was beseiged by colleauges asking about my nuptial plans and before I knew it we had the wedding booked ..) so when I spotted a mention in the Freecycle digest about a farmer getting rid of his year old chickens I decided to get them sooner rather than later. This of course meant I needed to prepare a home for them...
Think 'Jamie at home'...then imagine the TOTAL OPPOSITE. We are in an ex-council house (the 'ex' is very important as I am a total working class snob who pays a mortgage and wouldn't want people to think we'd been given a house because we have lots of kids...just as well we got that telly really..) We have a pretty big garden, it's 80 foot long by about 16 foot wide. The last 15 foot or so in fenced off with a lovely arch in my sad attempts to create a veg section. It currently houses a shed full of crap, lots of weeds, a wild blackberry bush, some raspberry canes and a compost bin. The next third of the garden is given over to some form of grass (not the normal green stuff, some cheapy hybrid that looks dead for 10 months of the year) and is liberally scattered with toys - broken slide, baby swing, mandatory red plastic coupe car, balls, scooters and the like. And the final third is affectionately known as 'the patio' - a sad collection of mismatched slabs and gravel, used at the moment as a hard standing for various white appliances who have died and are yet to receive a decent burial at the local tip.
So I am sure you have in your minds eye the vision of lovliness that is the Freerange Garden. So where to put the chickens? I decided the wendy house was perfect (I feel I should point out it is a wooden wendy house, not a plastic Little Tykes effort...grant me some credit..but not too much, don't want it going to my head..) The girls didn't really use it, it has 4 windows and a stable door, and plenty of room for a few chickens. So I emptied it of rubbish (broken patio set, toy cooker, crisp packets etc) tipped in a bag of saw dust, some straw, a bowl for some food and a few unturned old cupboards to give them some perching height. Then I talked nicely to GameBoy and we went out for a family day out to the farm....I really need to get a waxed jacket....
The chickens are a year old so 'past there lay by date'.. they still lay, but commercially they aren't worth keeping - hence being sold off for 50 pence each. I intended getting 4 but saw that the barn was just like the one on 'Chicken Run' where they were all shoved in together, so decided to have another two, had I the room and money I would have had more. So they spent a week in the wendy house..they seemed happy enough, even gave out eggs, but they had seen outside through the windows and I could tell they were plotting an escape...
We priced up ready made runs, toyed with idea of buying fence panels, and then I had a brain wave...why not 'recycle' the fence we have dividing the veg patch from the rast of the garden? So yesterday morning GB got his staple gun out and knocked up a run for the chooks. As I opened the door I expected a stampede...it took a full hour before they all came out and even then I had to shoo 2 of them out so I could do a full clean of the house. So now we have a run to let them out in..which is what I should go and do now really. Just need to get started on the rest of that list now...wish all the tasks were that easy, we'd be sorted in a month!
* We have been debating whether we are technically 'benefit scum' as we only claim Child benefit and child tax credit, but it does come to quite a large amount due to sheer numbers. I will have to find a daily mail reader to find out the actual definition....
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Posted by FreerangeThompson on 2008-02-17 03:10:39 | Rating: | Views: 36
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