It's wet & muddy outside....but it's dry inside at last!

Tonight our barn is resounding with the sound of ....... SILENCE. Blissful silence! No more fans blowing noisily away, no more dehumidifiers with their incessant, annoying humming! We're officially dry enough for the machines to be taken away. Which means that the insurance company should be in touch tomorrow to explain what happens with the repairs now.

There should be a shower here.

The bathroom needs putting back together.

New carpets & skirtings need to be fitted.

Walls need to be reconstructed & decorated.

It's amazing how much damage a water leak can do! But I'm very hopeful now that the place will be in a fit enough state for Mum & Dad to come & share the festive season with us, even if things are going to still be higgledy piggledy when Eldest Son comes home from Uni for his Xmas hols this Sunday.

It was also fairly dry last weekend, which meant that I got to spend some time with the new cockerels in our little field. They are coming on really well. Their plumage is getting more & more impressive as they grow bigger by the day. They are still young enough to be fairly meek, but grown up enough to hold their own with the hens now & strut their stuff about the field! What I'm most pleased about is how friendly & gentle they are. This, of course, I can't take the credit for. It's down to the way my friend Andy reared them - with love & kindness. They are hand tame & it's lovely to feed them corn from my hands (youngest son loves it too!). They are certainly more gentle than some of the hens, who shall remain nameless, who fair take your skin off when they come to enjoy a treat (ok it's the ex-battery girls, but it's not their fault. They're not so used to being fed from a caring human hand!).

Here's the gorgeous Merlin, the Copper Blue Maran cockerel, strutting his stuff! His colouring is stunning, shades of grey perfectly offsetting dramatic flashes of copper & gold. Of the four he seems to enjoy my company the most for some reason & is usually to be found close by me.

And here is mild mannered Mr Dorking, a Silver Dorking cockerel. He's a delightful, charming soul. He fixes me with calm eyes that seem filled with wisdom & knowledge - of what I'm not quite sure. I'm sure he will sit down & tell me one day!

This is handsome Snapdragon, showing off the beautiful green sheen in his feathers. He is a Welsummer cockerel. He's a very busy chap, always on the move, running about the place like some kind of action hero. Super Cockerel maybe? He's going to be quite the dandy.

And last, but by no means least, is Spicy, also a Welsummer. His nickname is Baby Spice at the moment, because he seems to be the 'baby' of the boys and therefore, it follows, the one I feel most clucky over. I'm sure he doesn't thank me for it, but I keep telling him that one day he is going to be so magnificent that it his nickname will seem ridiculous & we will laugh about it!

It is so lovely to have them as part of our flock and to be able to endlessly chat & share pictures of them with Andy, knowing he won't get fed up with me! Hubby & sons often look at me with that 'yeah, so it's yet another picture of one of the chickens' look.

Of course, certain of our feathered friends have enjoyed all this wet weather and are having trouble understanding why I am not quite so pleased with all the mud they have created!

Daisy & Seymour the Aylesbury ducks have made what they think is a stonkingly good mud slide into their pond! Hmmmm!

Its no good looking so innocent - I know which one of you has been dabbling again!

Something exciting happened at the weekend. Dear Izzy Whizzy, my Cream Legbar hen finally, at nine months old, stayed still long enough to lay me a beautiful blue egg! Hurray! I can now fill an egg box with pretty coloured eggs for my friends.

Every time I write about my critters it makes me beam from ear to ear & reminds me of just how much happiness they bring to my heart. True blessings from Mother Nature, each & every one of them & treasured beyond measure.

Possibly the smallest hen's egg ever...

This evening middle son collected the tiniest hen's egg I have ever seen!

It was soooo cute! I've photographed it in between a 2p piece & a normal sized hen's egg so you can get an idea of just how little it was. I'm guessing it's one of our pullet's first attempts.

The pullets have all been enjoying free-ranging with the bigger hens since we released them into the flock. They were excepted into the ranks without any bother, much to my relief. They have remained extremely friendly, in fact they can be down right kamikaze at times as they run right under your feet when you're carrying heavy feed or water buckets! It was brought to our attention recently that they may not all be pullets as we'd assumed.... they weren't sexed so some may be cockerels. Which, since the sad demise of our bantam rooster, is not necessarily a problem, but I'm watching them closely trying to fathom out which are definitely hens & which may not be. Some of them do seem to be darker coloured, with a more upright gait & with longer, kind of straggly tail feathers. I have no idea how you are supposed to tell for sure, until they find a voice that is - then we'd know! They are very approximately 17 weeks or so old so maybe it should be more obvious by now if any were cockerels? I'm paying close attention as I want to make sure that if it proves necessary we have the correct ratio of hens to cockerels to preempt any fighting. I'm not 100% sure what that ratio should be, but from advice that's been given to me about 5 hens per cockerel seems to be the suggested number. If anyone could help me out with this I'd be ever so grateful.

We now have 20 chickens in total, as shortly after Rodney passed away our oldest hen Belter also died. At first I was really anxious in case something more sinister was going on here. But both had shown no sign of illness e.g. pale comb, nasal discharge, etc. & had just simply slowed down & then gone to sleep. I always use Poultry Shield once a week in 'Chateau Des Oeufs' so I was as sure as I could be that red mite was not to blame here. The rest of the flock all look vigorous thankfully, so I'm now assuming it was coincidence that they both come to the end so close together. Or perhaps she pined? Is that too fanciful a thought?

Anyway, on a more pleasurable note, I started off some Elderflower Champagne using Holly the Land Girl's recipe from Newhouse Farm.

The elder flowers infuse in a mixture of sugar, vinegar, lemon & water

I'll let you know how it turns out!