Haha chickens, I win!

Mum and Dad came over on Monday and helped put up a fence to keep the chickens in one area away from my patio, and they don’t seem overly unhappy about it, so now the patio is clean (well, kinda, still needs pressure washing), and I planted some herbs in a place i can easily get to them from the back door while i am cooking. yay!

They have trees for shade and digging around under, grass for scratching in and sunbathing in, and the old fire pit for having dustbaths in, what more could chickens need! Oh, and since I took the pics I’ve put a few paving slabs in so I don’t have to walk over wet grass to get the eggs in the winter, and so they have something to grind down their beaks and claws on if they so desire.

g4
g3

patio

Now I just need to work on the main area of the garden, cos it’s raaaather untidy.
g1

The area where the chicken run was will be partly taken up by a wooden swing seat, but I’ll need to either plant some grass on the rest of the bare soil there, or put in some plants, and i have to do lots of weeding and trimming of plants around the pond. Still, it’s getting there slowly!

And the veg patch is looking awesome, even if it is mostly filled with tomatoes, I guess I’ll just be freezing a lot of them! I did pick my first real crop last night though (well, aside from radish and herbs, which don’t really count), 2 green and one yellow courgette. I fried them with butter and black pepper then mixed them with pasta and sundried tomato pesto, and they were reaalllly yummy.

g2
pasta

Peeeektures

This is what my patio looks like most of the time. All the gravel round the edges pushed all over the place, and shit everywhere. I do like having free ranging chickens, but I really wish they’d just leave the damn patio alone. And no amount of sweeping helps, cos as soon as it’s clean, they go digging craters in the gravel again.

gard3

So I decided they need to be fenced off. The side of the garden by the hedgerow has some of their favourite areas in…it has the trees they can sit under when it’s too hot, a patch of ground they like to sunbathe on, and the old fire pit that is filled with ash that they love to have dustbaths in. So today I put up some canes and string to mark off the area they’ll have, and mum and dad are going to come round next week to dig holes for the posts and help me put the fence up.

You can just about see the string line in these pics…the scaffold hammock frame is going to be dismantled and their house will go there, and they’ll have the whole end of the garden from under the trees to the veggie patch fence. The place where their house is now will then be empty, and it is the perfect place for the wooden swing seat mum and dad are getting rid of when they move…woooo…I love swing seats!

gard2
gard1

And speaking of veggies…they are going well! Dad found some spare wood in his garden so built me another bed, which I’ve put a few tomato plants in. Eventually i’ll plant half of it with asparagus, but my asparagus plants are only about 2″ high at the moment, so I’ll keep them indoors in pots for a while longer.

gard5

Everything else is going well…the wind made a gap in the fence a couple of weeks ago, and the chickens got in and destroyed all my beans, but i bought some more and fixed the fence, so it shouldn’t happen again. And I almost have foooood! This one should be ready in a couple of days, and the yellow ones on the other plant are starting to fatten up too.

gard4

Aaaand, here’s some more awesomeness from my garden. In this case, by ‘garden’ i mean ‘zoo’, and by ‘my’ i mean ‘Banham’. I don’t wanna fill this blog with tooo many pics, but there are a handful more on my flickr.

zoo12
zoo7
zoo3