Well, 2008 already!  Where does the time go?  I'm sorry I've not been around much for a couple of weeks, been busy with the chooks and Christmas and making sausages and cooking up different recipes.

But here I am!  Well, another 3 pullets went to a new home last Saturday, and another 58 going out this Saturday coming, and I haven't even put my advert in the paper yet!!!! It's all down to this blog!  The ad is going in next Tuesday, they charge you £10.58 just for a tiny little advert.  Disgusting!!!

My 2 largest cockerels have just started to crow now.  Sounds like they've got a bad cough lol, luckily we don't have too many neighbours here!!!!  But the little one still looks very petite and henlike, even though her comb and wattles grew very large weeks ago.  We named her Rosemary after my friend on the allotment forum!  But hubby has promised he won't put Rosemary in the pot!

We also put up orange barrier fencing around a larger part of the garden, as their run was turning into a mud bath, and you would have thought the chooks were black rather than white!!!!  But they ate most of the grass in there after a week, so to give them even more room, we put the barrier fencing from there into the polytunnel, and now they have 504 sq ft of dirt to dust bathe in!!!  But at least the dirt in there is dry.  I did have some perpetual spinach in there, but its not there anymore 

The first night they hung around in there a bit, but now they know the way back to the henhouse when it gets dark!

I'm glad some of them are now going, as we were worried about them overcrowding, and we still get the occasional feather pecked one.  I had one the other day that I thought was going to die, but I've made her a little run in the big greenhouse and she has a big cardboard box to sleep in.  She seems okay.  I sprayed her first with the purple spray, but she pecked that off, now i spread petroleum jelly mixed with liquid paraffin over the wound, and she is eating and drinking, so fingers crossed she will be okay.

We've been watching Hugh Fearnely-Whittingstall's Chicken Out programmes.  Hopefully at least some people will watch it and realise what a sad short life lots of chickens have, but we are worried that its only people like us that do grow our own and know what it is like to have fresh home produced eggs and meat that will watch it.

Actually, I did pick up on something the Irish stockman said when they were restoring the shed.  Hugh was going to put up a perspex wall so you could look from one end of the shed into the other.  But he said to Hugh, don't do it as the intensively reared chicks will get stressed seeing the daylight through the other side and could start cannibalising.  So although my chicks have had CD's hanging down etc to play with and get out into the run and polytunnel, their house, which used to be the goat shed has windows!

So I wonder if that has something to do with them pecking each other, when daylight comes and I haven't let them out yet?

So I've been down there painting the windows in to make it a bit darker, hopefully that will stop them, and once this lot go at the weekend, there'll be more room for them to play when they are inside.

So many people don't know how their food is reared, and unfortunately, many don't care.

I also hear of people talking about the 'greedy' farmers, but programmes like this highlight lots of things, like one farmer on a programme was saying that he only makes 3p from one chicken, so that's why so many of them HAVE to rear so intensively to make a living.  When you go into the supermarket and see free range eggs at over £2 a dozen, do you think that the farmer gets most of that?  No, he doesn't, he gets about 50p!

But don't let me get on my bandwagon.  I used to work for the National Farmer's Union years ago, and discovered first hand what farming is all about.  The big boys survive, after all, if you grow 250,000 chickens and get 3p profit, that's better than if you've only got 2,000.

Most people don't think about it though do they?  You go into a shop and buy a bit of lamb, or a pint of milk, then you go home and you have a nice meal, but do you ever think that the farmer who's animals produce that meat and milk, works hard for his money.  When people sit down on Christmas Day and enjoy themselves, the farmer still has to go out and milk his cows, feed his animals. 

But so many of them are being priced out of the business by cheap imports.  One man on Look North News some weeks back said if the farmers don't like their jobs, they should go get another one!  Jobs aren't easy to come by, but farming isn't a job, its a way of life!  Many farming families have been farming for a hundred years or more!

Still, mustn't bore you, or you'll never come back and read my blog again!

I'll let you know after the weekend how things went.