Giveaway! Wells chicken feeders and drinkers review

Unfortunately rain prevented the patio works but look what turned up today:)

Some new feeders and a drinker for me to review from Wells Poultry

Easy to put together and with a clever locking tab and slot mechanism to make sure they stay put together.

The indoor feeder I have been sent holds 3 kg of food, plenty to keep the Ginger gang and the Young ones happy. 

The drinker I have been sent is a good size - 3 l and again has the locking mechanism. The hens seemed to enjoy drinking from it.

But the best thing in the box from my point of view is this  2.5 kg Delux Plastic Outdoor Feeder

Slotted together really easily, feet lift it off the ground and UFO style roof looks to keep the food dry

 

The hens loved it and after leaving it out overnight in the rain, the food was absolutely dry the next morning :)

Excellent product , comes apart for cleaning really easily and does what it says it will   :)

And even better - I have three of the 2.5 kg Delux Plastic Outdoor Feeders to giveaway! Just leave a comment on the blog or on the Facebook feed and you will be entered into a draw to win one of these excellent feeders from Wells Poultry 

Terms and Conditions for the Giveaway - please read!
 

• To enter, you must leave a comment on this post or on The Compost Bin facebook page post
• Only one entry per household please
• Entries close at midnight on 19/09/13
• You must live in the UK and be over 18 years of age.
• The winners need to email me their address, so I can pass on their details to Wells Poultry to send out the Feeder to them.
•  Wells Poultry is the promoter of the competition.
• The information you provide will only be shared with Wells Poultry in order to send you your prize. 

Good luck and get commenting :)

Cute chick flicks :)

Nutmeg has been teaching the chicklets to dust bathe ( and nearly buried them a few times!)

And Blackie caught a worm - almost as big as him/her. S/he ran around peeping with excitement and fell over it a few times :)

Rocket Gardens Constant Garden - update on the plants and harvesting!

The weather here over the weekend was mostly ok, sunny and rainy on Saturday, Sunday was dull but dry so I spent a lot of the weekend planting up raised beds, re- potting plants into larger pots and generally doing lots of garden related jobs outside. When it rained I ducked inside the polytunnel to pot on plants - have I said how much I love my polytunnel? I think I have, a few times. 

A lot of the veg plants I planted out, or potted on, were the remains of my second and third delivery from my Rocket Gardens Constant Gardens selection of veg plants - I put them as small plug plants into pots where they have grown well but it is now time to put them outside in their final places in the ground. Today into the raised bed I planted out various brassicas, some celery, leeks, onions, chard and spinach, some french beans, beetroot and more salads. Several weeks ago I planted out onions and leeks (in another raised bed) and last week I put in the runner bean, pea, pumpkins and courgette plants.

All these plants are growing strongly and for several weeks now we have been eating salad and spinach or chard from the plants which were already in the garden or in the polytunnel (on my salad bar). I picked the first peas last night :-)/

As I said in my last post, I had to come up with some way to protect the raised bed I am planting them in and I am still very pleased with the results :-) It is easy to unpeg one side to plant more plants or to harvest some.

After all this activity I still had quite a few salad plants left over, so I came up with a way of using some "alternative" containers for planting them in. I know lots of people don't have the space to plant veg in the ground that we do here, so I thought it would be good to show how well plants grow in all sorts of containers, and not just plant pots!

I have a friend who gives me lots of these plastic mushroom trays which get used here for all sorts of things. They are quite shallow so I decided to grow some salad plants in them, which don't need a huge depth of soil.

 I lined the tray with newspaper, so the growing medium stays inside the tray.

I added the growing medium (a mix of Fertile Fibre coir based  and Moorland Gold reclaimed peat certified organic, but any good peat free potting or general purpose mix would do)

Looking down from above to show how I spaced the salads plants out. I was aiming for a "pleasing to the eye" pattern, which also gave all the plants space to grow.

As always I had feathery company around me. Sweetie the Speckledy jumped up to see what I was up to

 Naughty Sweetie! She tried to eat the herb plants I had just potted on! Gerroff!

Finished planter :-)

Lots of lovely cut and come again salad leaves, to add to the salad bar in the polytunnel..

I planted  up an unwanted wicker basket three weeks ago with celery plug plants from my Rocket Gardens delivery #3. I lined the basket with an old compost bag and punched some holes in it for drainage.

 

The celery is doing well and putting on lots of growth, and tastes delicious ( I sneaked a stem yesterday)

The Strawberries which came with the Small Fruit Garden are so wonderful! Juicy and plump and huge :-)

The fruit bushes from my Small Fruit Garden are all growing well, still in big pots as I have not yet decided where to site my new fruit garden. Need to think about that, so as to protect it from the chickens.

I am so impressed with the plants I have recieved from Rocket Gardens, they are all growing well and are tasty varieties which we enjoy eating :-) I am also very impressed with their customer service, as when I told them about a couple of plants which were a bit sad in delivery #3  I was sent replacements by next post and they thanked me for telling them, so they could do something about it :-) Which was nice :-)

I am expecting delivery # 4 of my Constant Garden in the next week or so, so I had better get back out into the garden and plant out the rest of the last one, and think where I want to plant out the next lot ;-)

I am enjoying being a Rocketeer!

Monday snow

Hello, all :-)

The Hens finally ventured out today, they were slightly mollified by my leading them to a patch of green grass ( I cover up patches of ground when it snows, so I can uncover grass especially for them!)

But then they went and sat grumbling in the Barn for an hour.  Ungrateful girls that they are, they jumped into a wheelbarrow of used bedding and flung it out all over the floor of the Barn, for me to find and clear up later.

And then they all trouped back inside the Mega Hen Pen and sulked.

I think they don't like the snow :-)

I also found that the netting on my netted Kale bed had collapsed with the weight of snow, damaging quite a few plants :-( so I picked off the broken tops and we will eat Kale for the next few days - the tops are deliciously tender and the side leaves will be turned into a kale, potato and chorizo soup tomorrow I think. Hopefully the side shoots will re grow on the stems still in the ground.


As there has been a slight thaw Compostgirl went to school ( both the school and the school bus obliged!) and we managed to get our car out of the drive and out of our (very icy indeed) lane onto the (clear) main road and into Ledbury to do some bits and pieces of shopping at lunchtime - I went to a charity shop and nearly got a lovely cashmere jumper, but someone else just beat me to it :-(

The pavement was very icy in Ledbury and lots of people were walking on the roads - dangerous but understandable I guess.

More snow forcast for here tonight so after chores we sat inside by the fire watching "Father Brown" and drinking hot chocolate. Anyone else watching "Father Brown" (on BBC1 at 2.10 pm) Really good!

Stay safe and warm, everyone.

Hungry Chickens...be afraid...be very afraid.

For all of you who have EVER wondered why chicken keepers go to so much trouble to keep the chickens out of the vegetable garden.

As it has been SO wet here, the hens have been shut in their run rather a lot. So I thought I would give them a treat. This was a pot of  Kale which I put in the chicken run.

Watch...

"Let me get at it!"

5 minutes later...all gone. See the bare stalks!

And that, dear Readers, is why I DON'T want the feathery ladies ANYWHERE in the veg garden or the Polytunnel!