Peace resumes

A truly handsome fellow but too blinking noisy! 

The cockerels have gone! Mr D had had enough, so emailed the lady who had left us the cockerels (admittedly without us requesting her to) and asked her to take them back. This was the email he received back...

Needless to say, it has caused many a childish titter at the double entendres! 

We are now back to five of our ladies and five of their ladies and all is peaceful with the world in chicken land. They are all laying well and enjoying their male-free environment. I intend to improve their chicken run, but I need to get a tree surgeon to remove the ten or so pine trees that are in there first. We brought our own coop which our ladies are using and there are a few other enclosures in there already. I cleaned about 4 inches of chicken poo and sawdust out of them the other day. Not sure when they were last cleaned out thoroughly. I need to rebuild one of the structures as the nesting  box is actually sliding off the side of it! At least they are well enclosed and have loads of space to scratch about in. One of their chickens hasn't yet developed a comb and seems to be the runt of the litter. At night time, she has taken to roosting in the pine trees rather than with the others. The first night she did it, we had no idea where she was. We had even sent Jet in to the run  to flush her out with no success. I then had the thought to look up and sure enough, there she was, a little white blob in the branches above my head. Bless her! 

Unfortunately, Jet seems to have developed his infection again. Yesterday afternoon he was obviously in significant pain and couldn't put any weight on his leg. We took him to the vets and they gave him morphine, antibiotics and kept him in. They will do an X-ray on Monday and we will go from there. The poor soul had just started to make some progress with his leg movement and strength. This is going to be a long haul. 

I haven't done anything much outside yet in terms of jobs - some clearance and cutting back. Fortunately they had cut the lawn before they moved out which was very helpful as our little electric mower is definitely not going to be adequate! I'll borrow my brothers petrol mower for now and then we  will look at buying ourselves a ride on. 

We have had a constant steam of visitors over the last three weeks, which has been lovely  as it has  given us a good excuse to explore the local area, but I now need a period of time to get organised and finish off some of the jobs we have started. Next priority? My youngest needs to be ready for school on Wednesday and we need to book our son his flight to America next month.