The Cottage Smallholder

Hi i would like to introduce you to the girls in our garden ,

Agatha  Bagatha and Tabatha are our vicious raptor type carnivorous guard bantams ,trained in the art of cluckfoo .

But seriously the arrived after a family friend heard we were looking for a couple of chickens .As they were already a close triple-some we got a job lot ,we hastily built a coop and within the day they were ours .

Our big worry was our other vicious beast namely sally the terrier cross,and boy was she cross when they arrived. you see she owns the garden the hedges the lawn the mineral and air space rites to our garden and all surrounding areas in fact what she sees she controls,luckily she is crap at catching things ,she stalks birds in stealth mode but she growls all the while she is doing it .so the birds just look at her in disbelief and fly away before she pounces , crap for a hunter but it amuses us ,Anyway back to the chucks we hastily wired off a small bit of garden to introduce them to their new home and, and sally !! , they watched sally and sally watched them and the tension worried us .the next day i needed to move them to their permanent home so i shut the dog in the house and did my shep impersonation to heard them into the new run . i was surprised i think i only covered 3 or 4 miles in the process , well it was ten yards away ,just as i had two of the three in i turned to see a Mexican stand off behind me ,agatha and sally beak to nose OH S**t

Who do i grab first , it must have been a couple of seconds but felt like a fortnight,then they both turned and walked away , not the excitement we expected but a great relief . since then they have been great ,the chucks pinch sallys biscuits and she pinches their worms ,horrible to watch but true.

the intention was to pen the gang most of the time in a good size run but as they get on with the dog they get full run of the garden.

We were getting a regular supply of eggs with Agatha being the forerunner but she had a prolapse last week and after a bit of searching the web i cleaned it and put it back with lashings of preparation H this took a couple of attempts but after being in quarantine for a few days we let her back with the posse and fingers crossed she is ok so far the vet said he could put somthing in but if she layed it would reocure so the web advice won ,fingers crossed,

,just hope she lays off the laying for a while (no pun intended) until she gets back to full health.we dont mind that she doesn't lay we mainly got them as pest controll , but i must admit the cakes the wife makes with the eggs are a bit scrummy

yours  MOS