welsh hills again

Go away, can't you see I have chicks to look after? Oh my God, I have lost one.  Nobody ever tells you how hard this mothering business is.  I need eyes in the back of my head. No, it's OK.  All present and correct again.  Why don't you just go away and leave me alone?  I have work to do and you are really not helping.

Today we had four eggs from our five hens.  I am busily eating poached eggs for breakfast every day but we have now got to the stage where I can't keep up.  Tomorrow I shall bake lemon drizzle cake, one for us and one for the weekend's visitors to the cottage, and that will use up a few more. Here is today's collection: the dark brown one on the right is from our Welsummer hen.  The little white one is from our little white Wyandotte bantam. The paler brown egg at the back is from one of the Frisian bantams. She is a little larger than the Wyandotte but the eggs are way bigger.  With Wyandotte eggs you need a couple to even notice they are there. And the brown egg on the left is from our new hen, the Buff Orpington/Welsummer cross who is intended to be our broody this spring so that we can hatch some more chickens.   She is lovely, a real old farmyard hen, and I am looking forward to seeing her clucking and fussing with chicks in tow. I always use the dark ...

I arrived back from London last night tired and cross and with lots of work to do today. There is an email from my friend who is hatching the chicks: fifteen out now, would I like to come and look? So this afternoon I left my computer muttering to itself and went up to see. A few weeks ago we had a beautiful drive through the spring green and the trees down the Welsh border to a farm near Chirk where we chose four breeds of chicken. We came back carefully nursing egg boxes on my knee with twenty six fertilised eggs for hatching. Fourteen went into the incubator in P's dining room and the rest went under a broody Buff Orpington and we held our breath. Ten days ago they began to hatch, the eggs shaking gently and cheeping away like little toys. The ones in the incubator did better than the ones under the hen as the hen was inclined to get up and wander away, not the most attentive mother. One of P's Welsummers also became broody so she took some of the eggs from the Buff and now ...