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Drum roll...
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(Impending sense of tension and excitement)...
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(What could it be? What could it be?)...
...
THE CHICKENS!
(What, was that it? Vague feelings of disappointment, world-weary angst, and ennui.)
Yes, this epoch-shattering posting features the intersection of two previously parallel blogospheres, in which the chooks take a dander over from their blog to check out all things vegetable-related.
Last weekend Amanda decided that what we really needed to do was to take the chooks (also known as 'the freeloading b******s' since the egg supply dried up) to the allotment for a bit of free-range scratching about. A mini holiday to refresh their psychic batteries and re-focus the laser-like concentration required for the generation of eggs.
The idea was to give them a bit of a change of scene, let them scratch about for tasty grubs, and in return they could do a bit of fertilising. Perhaps this would spark them back into production.
We couldn't actually let them go totally free range, because they would inevitably wander over some of the gurus' patches, leaving a trail of devestation and pooh in their wake. And so we knocked together a temporary corral out of some leftover pallets.
Then followed the poultry transportation process. Amazingly we don't have any equipment specifically for carrying a bunch of chickens about, so we had to improvise. We put them all in a capacious garden waste bag, stuck a bin lid on top, and carried them down the road to the allotment.
We then let them get on with it within the confines of their holiday accommodation.
Amanda had done some prep beforehand by digging up some grass in the middle of the pen, so that they had a head-start on scratching-about related activities. Abi helpfully hopped about pointing out nice juicy worms to the inmates.
We left them to it for a few hours while we did some digging for the runner beans. We've put in a couple of two-metre long, spit-wide, manure-filled trenches where we'll plant the seeds at the appropriate time (for which, read 'we haven't read that far in the book yet').
So, the idea was to give the chickens a little holiday. Did it work? Hard to tell, really. I suspect they were freaked out by the transportation, and baffled at the change of scenery. There's no sign of a massively increased egg yield in the last week, but perhaps it helped. Who knows how often our plot will be graced with their presence in future.
