The chicks were 12 weeks old on Friday 30 November, and boy can they eat!!!  They tuck away 2-3 20kgs bags of pellets per DAY!  How any small producer can make any money out of selling them I don't know!  We had to buy another tonne of food and I've had to put the price up a bit to cover it.

Apart from that, and the fact that when it gets dark they just stand in the run and we have to go out and round them up like sheep, they are fine.

They are supposed to be white, but they are getting varying degrees of brown in their feathers.  Hubby said he likes the brown tinged ones better, so that's what we'll have in the new laying flock.  I want at least 2 dozen to keep my few customers happy.  At the moment, our POL's are only laying 4-9 eggs a day.  A fitter at work buys all they produce at the moment.

He said he lost one customer because he said the eggs were small and he can buy bigger and cheaper ones in Morrison's!  I did tell the fitter, the small ones were the first eggs from the POL's, but people who only ever buy shop eggs don't realise this, they think they start off big!  They also don't realise that they lay less in the winter.  I told the fitter that they are laying less because of the shorter days and the cold, but a couple of weeks later he was going on holiday and he asked if he could have double orders!  (Bit difficult when he buys all they lay!!)

I'm hoping I'm not going to lose another chick.  I went through their house yesterday to make sure all was well, and they'd emptied a food container, and tipped it off its hook and chain, but the hook was nowhere to be seen!  Hopefully they've buried it under their poo!

Occasionally I still get a feather pecked chick.  Don't know why, they have a bigger house, loads of food and water, and they go out in the run!   But as they are still growing, I'm going to need another shed or something very soon.  Keep looking on Ebay or freecycle, but nothing ever comes up near enough to get it.  We only have an estate car!