A moulting Henny and other hennish doings!

I have had a very strange experience today! Earlier on today I had Ginger the Hen tap on the back door, squark meaningfully at me ( anyone who has hens will know what I mean!) lead me across the garden to the hen paddock, stand squarking by the gate till I shut away the chicks and let her in, and then she LEGGED it for the hen house and the nest box...to lay an egg....

I think that's quite clever!

Poor Henny! She is loosing her feathers at an alarming rate and is quite miserable and bad tempered with it all....she even had a go at Ginger, her very best mate! When she shakes herself, a cloud of feathers surrounds her.

You can see her bald bum in this one!

This one was taken half an hour later by which time she had lost all her tail feathers.

Feathers litter the floor and run of Cluckingham Palace! Genghis hen peers out of the nest box at me.

Sweetie is moulting as well, but she seems to have grown new feathers before shedding the old ones, so is not looking TOO threadbare!

This is Number 1 cockerel, he is always the first out and the last one back in the run at night, he refuses to go back in with all the others and I have to chase him round and rounds the Eglu run, until he deigns to go in.....typical male!

Teeth!

Hmm we must have offended the Tooth Gods/Fairy here at Compost Mansions!

I had to go and have a very big filling yesterday, not a pleasant experience as I react badly to anaesthetic and am always a bit nervous about how I will be.

Compostman has to have a wisdom tooth out today and Compostgirl has another very wobbly tooth. AND Tom Kitten has a Canine about to come out!..( Shouldn't it be "Felines" for cats?)

Intercessions to the Tooth Gods/Fairy please?

I have an ad on my blog

Some of the sharper eyes amongst you may have noticed I have an ad up on my blog, linking to The Recycle Works. I have been a big fan of them for a long time: I use their wooden compostbins which work REALLY well and was impressed that they were made of FSC timber and were NOT treated with nasty CCA wood preservetives. So far I have used the bins for 6 years and they are still going strong! I have ordered many items from them and have ALWAYS been impressed with their products and services.

One of the very kind things they did was to donate a childrens wooden compost bin to my local school fete as a "Build an Compost Bin" competition prize. So when they launched an Affiliates scheme a few days ago I was very happy to ask if I could join!


This is what The Recycle Works has to say about itself

"The Recycle Works Limited was established in 1995 by Sylvia Hopwood. The Company set out to address the matter of recycling within the family and in particular recycling Organic Waste. Separation of Organic Waste prevents poisonous leachate and monoxides from forming when in contact with the various metals in the waste stream. The Scientists do not really know, but these poisons may contaminate the earth for hundreds of years.

We are fortunate to live and work in a beautiful part of the country in the Ribble Valley and on the doorstep of Britain’s only European Designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, The Forest of Bowland We are also particularly aware of, and only buy raw materials with accreditation to Fair Trade, FSC wood, and sourcing of European woods from well managed and sustainable forests.

You are safe with our secure on-line ordering system, see our Terms & Conditions. We will never pass on your details to a third party Privacy Statement. The Recycle Works is continually developing the range of products and adding good, new and innovative items. We manufacture many of the products we sell. This gives us a unique range of items to offer to you. We also address separation and sorting items.

Main Product Groups:

* Home Composting
* EM (Effective MicroOrganisms) & Healthy Living
* Vermicomposting
* Organic Gardening
* The Magic Range
* Kitchen Waste Recycling
* Water Recycling
* Sorting Waste "

So, IF you want to shop at The Recycle Works, if you clink on the linky here, and buy something from them, I will get some commission. It's that simple, I don't get any details about you or anything, I just get a bit of credit from them for being the means by which you went to shop with them....

More Slow food.

Slow Cooker did its stuff again tonight, we had spare rib chops with onion, apple, leek, carrot, celery, mushrooms and peppers, cooked in home made cider and some sage...

It used 0.75 Kwh and took just under 4 hours, 2 hours on high and the rest on low heat. Food miles either feet (from our garden) OR 5 miles away for the Pork!

YUM!

More fabulous colours

Another glorious day yesterday! What is the weather doing? This is the best weather we have had since April, certainly better than anything the so called summer provided. I WISH I had left the sweetcorn on the plants now, they might have ripened a bit more!

I have been out in the garden again ( no surprise there!) and in between various hen and vegetable related chores I took some random shots of colourful things around our garden.I hope you like them.

One of the Spindle bushes in the garden. SO colourful, it almost glows!


Close up of the Spindle seeds
Copper beech leaves in the sunshine.


The cyclamen at the base of one of the weeping Silver Birch trees.

Bryony berries climbing up a clump of bamboo. Beautiful but dangerous!

These are rose hips! They climb up a contorted willow in the wood, and these are at least 20 feet in the air! I guess the lack of light has made the wild rose scramble to the sky.