Since I no longer have any chickens, there is an unused chicken pen in the back of the garden.   The soil is extremely good in there, with all the fertiliser and straw rotted in to the ground, so something has to be done with it. As I only have a very small area for raspberries [...]

A new start in the garden is a good idea on New Year’s Day, and since the chickens were killed a short time ago, it’s time to change the look of the garden.   It’s certainly been a lot tidier since their demise, although I’d rather have the mess. Since we no longer need to have [...]

Feeling a little depressed and upset today.    When I got up, as usual I went down the back to the chicken pen, to let them out into the garden and feed them.   Surprisingly, there were no happy chickens at the gate. It took me a few seconds to realise that there were feathers everywhere, and [...]

Holidays are great! What isn’t so great is getting back to see the grass has grown like crazy, the chickens have dug up as much as they could manage while you’ve been away, and the aphids have taken over the new shoots on the apricot tree. I won’t even talk about the weeds….. There’s certainly [...]

It’s been quite a while since our hens have laid, because they moulted this winter, and it took them months to start laying again! A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that their crops had turned bright red again, which usually means that they are about to start laying. No eggs appeared in the chicken [...]

Someone has requested a better picture of my chickens. Fine, but it’s not that easy to get the birds to pose – they’re not models, you know! Anyway, they were wandering about in the garden yesterday, and this is what I came up with

A couple of other little garden jobs we did last weekend, which added to the pile of branches, etc., waiting to be mulched, were to prune the plum and olive trees. The olive is now looking good, and is a nice shape. It will hopefully produce very well this year – last year the fruit [...]

Last weekend we decided it was time to catch up on some tree trimming in the front garden. First to get the chop, so to speak, was a tea-tree, which was getting a little too big and was threatening the telephone cable. That was cropped about a metre, so it should grow back nice and [...]

Although this is mostly a gardening blog, since I have pets, and they are often in the garden, I’ve added a category for pet posts. Here is a picture of what my partner calls “The Vandals”, wandering around the backyard, enjoying their daily freedom. They are called the vandals, because they stole his lunch from [...]