Argh, I hate fox mating season! Not for my hens - the run is like Fort Knox, my builder proudly proclaimed you could keep Tigers in it... - but at night when they shriek it gets my dog barking... And then the neighbourhood is awake. They are so blimming loud! How do you tell a fox to "get a roo...

Oh absolutely, Bob. I remember writing a poem as a teenager about how we are born with all the eggs we will ever produce, and a finite number of beats in our heart... The onward March of our internal clocks... Cringe worthy stuff! Anyway, for sure they won't lay forever. But while they do, I'm enjoy...

Awww thank you for the lovely comments. You are all so sweet!

This afternoon I saw one of them discover the dust bath for the first time ever - she is quite a small shy hen and last to do anything - and I was genuinely touched to see how much she was enjoying herself.

Hens are making me happy!

I'll tell you... In a minute ;) I just re-read the article on this site. It said if I had 5 ex-batts it would be typical to get 3 eggs a day in spring, and 1 in winter. "That's fine!" I thought. And I did indeed adopt 5. That was a month ago on 13 March. For the first few days one hen laid...

Hiya, I've got one for my 5 ex-batts. It works fine! The first week, I weighed it down with a stone, so they learnt where the food was. Then I stopped weighing it down and watched to make sure that each of them was confident to use it. At first the most confident hen would use it and the others woul...

Pretty much all my jackets have (unused) dog poo bags in them, one ended up with dog biscuit crumbs in too, that was a pain to get out of the seams.

Then there was the time when we emptied the washing machine to find, among the clothes, a very clean bag of poo... Thankfully still knotted shut...!

Just a thought about the height of your stump - if it's low then good, if it's a bit on the high side then maybe have something next to it... Hello! Good point, thank you. It is quite low, less than a foot for sure - and because the tree was rotten when it was taken down, the stump is more of a C s...

Great! Thank you so much to everyone who has taken the time to reply (and to welcome me!) - hugely appreciated. I'm reassured now - I'll plan to give my girls the biggest run I can and won't worry about including the stump. To be honest it is dead space in the garden anyway; I just stuck a planter o...

Hi, I'm planning to adopt some ex-batts, have done my research, have been assured I have enough space, etc. However it occurred to me that next to where the coop and run will go is some dead space in my garden which I could maybe incorporate into a longer run. It includes a tree stump of a sycamore ...