RIP Tiny Hen

RIP Tiny Hen :( 

She died in her sleep this morning :-(  She didn't look poorly last night, just a bit tired with the heat. I think she may have been trying to lay an egg and just died. She looked very peaceful.

I am making a new flower bed full of bee attracting flowers and she (her ashes) has been buried in the middle of it.

Tiny Hen, small but top hen in every way. She was still terrorising the cats and trying to get into the house yesterday

 This is what she looked like back in March 2012

Tiny Hen became a house hen  this time last year, she became very weak and was being bullied by the others to the point of terror and had stopped eating or drinking. I brought her inside and gave her food, water, love and cuddles. Gradually she recovered and grew her feathers back and became a very feisty, bold little hen:)

Tiny Hen was rescued from an "Barn" system, so she  lived crowded together with thousands of other hens, under artificial light, inside a huge shed. Never seeing daylight or going outside. "Colony"  or "Enriched"  eggs mean the hens are also shut  inside a small cage, inside the huge shed.

If you do buy free range eggs already  - Babs, Bunty, Titch, and Marjoram the ex battery hen thank you from the bottom of their hearts , as do I.

If you don't - please - for the sake of hens like Babs, Bunty, Titch and all their sister hens still in barns and cages - switch to buying free range eggs - it is the only way to make sure that the eggs you buy come from hens that have had a reasonable life. 

Tiny Hen was very sweet, I loved her a lot and I am very sad that she has died, but I am very happy to have given her 15 months of freedom, love, friendship and sunshine.

RIP little hen, fly high and free.

Thank you for reading :-)

RIP Yarrow Hen

RIP Yarrow Hen, who died yesterday evening. She had a good life, well lived. With us she had had 18 months of freedom, after her 18 months in the cruel battery cages.

As those of you who have followed my blog since 2012 will know,  Yarrow was a very special girl; even amongst hens who are ALL special to us, she was a little star. I  am very sad to lose her and miss her hugely, already.

She had been "winding down" for a few months and I am so glad she had a really good last day in the sun; sitting on my lap and being cuddled and told how much I loved her; sitting on the ground in the sunshine soaking up the rays; being cuddled by her flock who all came and collapsed all around her as only hens can do. 

Despite all this, and despite having a normal morning yesterday, by  the afternoon Yarrow was obviously suffering  (not able to walk around, deep purple coloured comb, gasping, not able to eat even the treat of unlimited mealworms). 

I can normally dispatch chickens who are in distress or injured but  this time I found myself unable to kill my pet hen Yarrow, for which I feel ashamed (as I should have been able to help her when she was suffering, but could not). So, I quickly took Yarrow down to Mike our Vet, who agreed her time had come, due to a  combination of failing heart/old age, and who ended her suffering kindly and quickly.

Mike, who as a newly qualified Vet helped Yarrow to recover from a broken leg during his first few weeks at our local practice, has been such a help over the last 18 months.  With all the issues the ex battery hens in my little flock have had, especially Yarrow, he has been such a help, for which  I thank him so much. And I especially thank him for his kindness and understanding as to why I was crying over the death of what many people might dismiss as "just a hen". He was lovely, as are all the staff at our local Veterinary  Surgery. We are very lucky with them.

We buried Yarrow hen  in the wood today, in the place where many other feathery friends are also buried. She liked to furtle around in the wood and it seems a good place for her remains to be buried. I heard my first Skylark of 2013 as we were filling in the hole. Appropriate, I felt.

Fly high, little Yarrow hen and know you are missed and were very loved indeed.

RIP Coriander Hen

Coriander Hen died :-(

She had been poorly  since Sat, and had been living inside in a cosy box in our kitchen. She seemed to have improved a lot yesterday and I was quite hopeful she would recover. But then she died this morning.

I am very sad :-( But I am mainly sad because I thought I had managed to get her well again, only to have her die, which is the really sad bit - after all she would have been dead 2 years ago if I had not got hold of her
f rom the free range egg farm.

She was an ex commercial ginger hybrid hen who, because I took her on, had nearly 2 more years of a good life, so really it is not too sad that her life has finally come to a natural end iyswim

She was not an ex battery hen, no...but an ex commercial free range hen ( oh yes, THEY need the same rescue plan as well as ex battery hens - they get killed at 12 -18 months as well...but sadly are often overlooked because of the even worse plight of their ex battery hen sisters.) 

And actually ex free range hens don't neccessarily have that much better a life! OK they are not imprisoned in an A4 sized cage, but still can have had a very limited life and indeed Coriander was in a terrible state when we got her.

But...what a 2 years of extra life she got! Living with us,  in a wood, life of riley ( who WAS he?) , petted, loved and pampered....chasing cats and squirrels, dust bathing, raids into the house, raids into the veg patch - what a great life...

She has been buried on the edge of the wood in a place she used to like to dustbathe.

RIP Coriander hen - much missed, never forgotten

A very productive Sunday

Another beautiful if cold day here, have so far managed to achieve all I have tried to do , without it going wrong, blow up, die, try to kill me or in some other way injure me...or just plain not work.

So a HUGE improvement on yesterday!

Have cleared a flower bed of all the old seed heads and dead stuff ( now all eaten by birds) the new growth coming means I need to clear away the dead stuff, finally. Rather sadly I found the remains of Henny and Ginger hens whilst doing so, :-(

I moved 2 hen runs and dug out the droppings, trodden down chippings etc, composted them , put back the runs and laid down new chippings for the feathery ladies.

I managed to re capture the wild Legbar pullets and put them inside the ( newly cleaned out and freshly spruced up) Eglu house and run. They seemed pleased and relieved to be back inside, to be honest!

I dug out 3 compost bins full of compost and composted bark chippings, ready to put in the soon-to-be-made raised beds on the veg patch.  I am going to try a strip with raised beds and see if I get a better yield from them than the bare soil beds next door, by growing the same crops in the raised bed and in the flat bed.

Did 4 loads of washing, and got 2 loads dry OUTSIDE!!! oh deep joy! I have been drying washing on the kitchen dolly and it is NOT the same as air dried stuff...

Also have measured up the area where the Mega Hen Pen is going to go, and discussed what I want with Compostman, and what materials we wil need to order for him to make it.

Have eaten various meals, tidied up, sorted out some fabric for a quilt, have looked at my soap making supplies longingly but decided I have no time at the moment! Ditto making any creams or balms. I will just have to make some time some other day!
I have lots of work coming up which I need to plan and prepare for, also the next phase of the Teacher training starts on the 22 Feb (eek!)

Wish I did not need so much sleep...if I only needed 4 hours a night I could get SO MUCH done...but sadly I need around 8 hours on a "Normal" day and often more after I have had a busy few days....the revenge/legacy of the CFS/ME I suffered for so very many years....

Am going to go and sit down and watch "Being Human" in a bit.

Coincidences, Freecycle and the power of love.

I answered a post on Freecycle Hereford which popped into my inbox a few days ago offering a roll of weed suppressing fabric and I was in luck!

Both I and the person offering the fabric have been having email issues, so on Tuesday I got an email from another person, who turned out to be the wife of the offerer.

At the end of the message telling me how to collect the fabric she asked "how are the hens" and signed the message "Kim".

I wondered for a bit, then thought maybe the lady was "Kim from Hereford" who sometimes leaves comments on here....so would know about my hens...as I couldn't think of ANYONE else called Kim who I know...

I called her number and it WAS! She had recognised my email address and thought it might be me!

So I went into Hereford with Compostman and Compostgirl on Wednesday, to have a family medical appointment and then we walked across town to a lovely little craft knitting and fabric shop called Badder, where I met the lovely Kim and got my weed suppressing fabric and handed over some eggs from "the girls" as a thank you. Compostgirl was enchanted to meet a 9 month old Labradoodle called Bruno ( who was SO cute, just like a big sheep and so friendly!)

We had a good old chat with Kim and then we left, to go back via High Town. Compostman went off to collect some AV kit ( more on this anon) and Compostgirl and I walked through the very lovely Hereford High Town to look at a Council run Safety fair, Safe, Sound and Sorted, with advice on car seats and bullying and fire safety and all sorts of things...Compostgirl got given a very nice rucksack and some traffic leaflets and stuff, I got an anti bullying t shirt, we both had a go at plate spinning, then we met up with Compostman and all three of us had our photo taken by Wyvern FM look at number 323 in the gallery for a bigger image!





and we admired a stilt walker....



So despite it being a very sad sort of day for me, we all DID have a good day...and being with my family made me feel much better about everything ...

Love....as I said in my last post, that is what it is all about. I love my husband and daughter very much. I treasure the time we spend together and the small, everyday things we do. I love to see Compostgirl laughing at a ridiculously tall stilt man, and see her delight at a circus trick. I love the smile I see on Compostman's face when he spots us in a crowd, when he has gone off to do something and then come back to meet up with us somewhere.

Love....the best thing in the whole wide world and something to be said to our loved ones and to be shouted about.

15th April 1989

20 years ago today, my Mother died.

She had been in various Hospitals, Nursing Homes etc for the previous 17 years, having suffered the first of many many strokes in November 1972, during my first year at Grammar School. I was 10. I found her, I was alone in the house, gave her CPR and called an ambulance.

She was paralysed down her right side, had brain damage and lost her ability to speak, but by June 1973, after a long session in the excellent River mead hospital in Oxford, had recovered enough to live at home ( on the ground floor) to walk with a stick, could write with her left hand and had begun to learn to speak again. Her mental faculties were apparently unimpaired, for which we were all very grateful. Her doctors spoke of anticipating "a near full recovery".

Then she had suffered another stroke, on the eve of my last day at school in July 1973, and never recovered from it. She was standing at the gate watching me ride my pony and in the space of time it took me to put Periwinkle in the stable and walk up to where she was standing, she had another, major, stroke and by the time I got to her she was on the ground, unconscious.

I gave her (yet again) CPR and called an ambulance, but the damage was done. She suffered more than 20 further strokes in the next decade, each one eating away a bit more of her brain.

She spent the next 16 years in hospital (usually on geriatric wards) amongst very old, usually senile people ( she was only 48 when this happened but stroke victims are usually older....) and I visited her several times a week, more if she was closer to where I lived but sometimes less often if she had been moved to a hospital 20 miles away ( as happened between one visit and the next once, I turned up to see her and found she had gone that afternoon from Worcester to a new ward in Evesham...)

I won't go into the whole other story of my disintegrating relationship with my father during this time, his alcoholism and his throwing me out of my family home when I was 16, thus aborting my senior education and plans for a glitering Oxbridge degree for no good reason other than his alcoholism......but despite all this I kept on visiting MY MUM, because that's who she was, despite the paralysis, the inability to talk to me, the terrible surroundings, the soul destroying (for her and for me) nature of the geriatric wards she inhabited ( remember this was in the 70's and "Human Rights" and "Patient Dignity" were not buzzwords to "the management" The nursing staff were all wonderful but.....)

Mum attended my wedding and looked very happy to do so, she obviously approved of Compostman ( who wouldn't!) she showed lots of love and smiles whenever I went to see her (and oh however often I went, it NEVER felt like enough...)

but finally, her poor organs gave up the unequal struggle to cope with a semi paralysed body...and she died in the early hours of 15th April l989.

I was in the throes of my last week of revision for my University Finals for my Materials Science degree when this happened, I had been going to see Mum every day as she got ever weaker and I knew the end was near but still, it was a shock when the call came. I remember us going to see Mum in the early hours and after she died at 5 am coming home, in a numb state, to finally get to sleep late morning, and wake up at 3 pm, turn on the TV to see the Hillsborough disaster unfold in front of us on the TV screen.

The images I saw haunt me still. Coupled with my sad frame of mind and lack of sleep they took on an even more nightmarish quality which I can still clearly recall today.

I understand, to those who so tragically lost 96 loved ones at an innocent, pleasurable occasion like a Football match because of "officialdom", why this date is so sad and why the injustice still burns....

because I lost my Mum as well, today, 20 years ago, and whilst the circumstances are oh so totally and horribly and tragically different....we all lost loved ones on the 15th April 1989.

I can never forget this date. Nor should I. Nor should any of us.