Bye Bye Chickens

Today is a day of mixed emotions as I prepare to say byesey bye to our two chickens, Matilda and Coconut. We homed them in March. They are exbattery hens and so we took them in, along with another hen, Mavis. Sadly Mavis died a few weeks ago now. She was always the weakest of the girls and I'm glad we got to give her some pleasure in her last few months. The other two are being packed off to pastures new today.

They are going to live with a good friend of mine who already has chickens and turkeys and is happy to take them in. She also has lots of room and so they will just love living there. That's been our main problem with them being here - room. Our garden is not big. At the moment they have around a quarter of it fenced off and they have reduced it to a muddy bog :( When we took them in I had this idyllic picture of them pecking around the grass, coming to sit with us when we had a snack and even popping into the house to watch a bit of telly. How wrong I was! lol

To start with they did have free run - do you have any idea how much poo 3 chickens can produce!???! There's no end to it! They also ate everything in sight including all our herbs, shrubs, plants and flowers in the garden. It was a scene of total devastation! We have replanted now but this is the reason the chickens are now fenced in at the bottom of the garden. It was just a waist high fence to begin with but then Matilda decided to learn to fly over the fence - there's now a netting roof and they are totally fenced in. They are miserable down there and spend most of their time pacing up and down. If you go in to sort them out they now peck at you which is a turn for the worst, we don't want the Bean having his eye pecked out and so we have made the decision to let them go.

I'm sure I will be a little sad tomorrow morning when they are not there but I'll be equally happy to have my garden back knowing that they will be much happier in their new environment.