Kate

I have had to give up competing with my children in most matters. The day son J threw away the two stabilisers on his first push bike, my cycling days were numbered. Daughter Kate overtook me on things connected with the garden when still in her teens but I did at least think that in terms of industrial size chicken enterprise, I had the future for myself alone.
 
However, at the weekend when hubby Barry was over the border in Northern Ireland camping at the North West 200 motorbike race (200mph on a road circuit!!), she also seemed to have slipped over the Brexit-prepared border controls to get herself some Cream Legbar, Bluebell and Sussex chicks from Clogher Valley Poultry. All British hens, I might add but foe how long?. I hadn’t even heard of Legbars and Bluebells until the photos appeared on the mobile that evening.
 
So now she has added some fresh young blood to her stock which includes a few “thrown out” girls that were destined for slaughter having done their two years lifetime work on a conventional chicken farm. Poor mites were in such a poor condition that wound spray had to be put all over them before the knitted woolly jackets were fitted and they learnt to scratch around in the earth for food.
 
So now I think we need to level the playing field. My daughter has well fenced in large areas that her chickens are kept in and have the life of Reilly but don’t get to ruin the rest of her flower and vegetable gardens. My chickens are totally free to destroy everything in our garden and they do it with great success. So far I have only managed to keep the greenhouse free but the day will come when I forget to close the door.I have now put a sheep net around the vegetable patch but at least one has managed to fly over it.
 
So today I attacked a scrub area next to the vegetable garden that anyway needs to be tidied up. This will hopefully keep the girls busy and in particular the worst culprit, a white Sussex hen shown in the foreground of the photo. She is the dirtiest, most vicious of the whole troop and fears nothing with her claws that she seemingly sharpens every night. We don’t name our chickens as with around 30 it gets difficult. But this one is easy to spot – she is always filthy from her work and continuous sand muck baths. As my daughter is also a Sussex girl having been born in Chichester, this hen is now named Kate in lasting memory of my daughter’s unfair mud-slinging tactics.