We took advantage of the good weather over the weekend to move the chickens run. After a very cold, wet autumn and winter their run was looking very worn. Moving them should give it time to recover before we move them back again, sometime in early spring.  We put their electric fence round some different, interesting features for them to explore, including 9 of our raised beds and some trees and bushes for cover. So far they seem very happy with new surroundings, and are loving scratching for food in the beds. We are hoping they will also help us by weeding, digging and fertilising these beds over the next few months, till we need to use them again.

A couple of days ago we had the first real snow of winter and since then the temperature has hardly crept above freezing. The garden is looking very wintery. I don’t envy the hens though. They had never seen any snow before this week and were not very keen to check it out on the first morning. Last night the temperature dropped below -9 Celsius and actually froze their automatic pop hole so they were shut in till we let them out. We’d better make sure it doesn’t freeze open at night ! I’m impressed by how hardy they are and they are still typically laying 5 eggs per day. They will need to be hardy though, as the sub zero temperatures are forecast to continue for the next week or so.

The wet weather we’ve had in the last month or so has brought surprisingly swift end to our work in the garden for this year. Weeks of rain have taken their toll and there are many jobs that we haven’t been able to finish. The last proper outdoor task that we did complete, was to prune our fruit trees at the end of October. Since then, however, we have not been really been able to do anything. We totally failed to plant out garlic or broad beans, or dig in manure and cover up the unused beds for winter. More work for next year, I guess !

The natural soil in our garden is clay so all the rain meant large puddles of standing water all over the lawn making any real garden work impossible. There was also quite a lot of standing water in the chickens run which they quickly turned into a mud bath. We had to rearrange their run to avoid the muddy pools and so far their new area is relatively clean.