Eggs-asperation

Wednesday 13th June 2012

Before my tales of woe, this is my first significant harvest of the year.
They were lovely with sausages.

Eggs-asperation
Well, the chickens are down to one measly egg a day between the lot of them and I really don't know what's going on. Since they were laying at full capacity on the shortest day of the year, I suspect they've just gone off lay as it approaches the longest day of the year...ummmm...something wrong there, isn't it supposed to be the other way round?

Not only that. Remember that dozen beautiful blue eggs I collected about three and a half weeks ago. They're now three days late hatching...in other words, scrambled and fried! Not a single hatchling out of twelve. Something must have gone seriously wrong, either at the chicken end of things or at our incubator end.

As the for chicks which we have managed to hatch over the last few attempts. The vast majority seem to be cockerels! Only four new hens to lay eggs out of fifteen chicks that we did actually manage to hatch.

Let's hope that Chick of Elvis, who has somehow managed to acquire NINE eggs to sit on, has a bit more luck. They'll be hybrids, not the beautiful mixed flock of rare breed hens which I am aiming for, but at least they might lay some eggs!

So overall not going too well on the egg front.

Slugging it to the slugs!
If only they were like slugs. It seems that for every one I chop in half with the trowel another two spawn. Tonight, in one hour, I got over SEVEN HUNDRED of the blighters. Multiply that by one nibble each and it's a lot of damage. So my plan is to have a concentrated attack on them every evening, which usually means means me getting a drenching. They've certainly enjoyed the wet conditions this year. And to think, last year I only saw about a dozen all year. They must have been lying dormant in the soil.

Look what they've done to my lovely Globe Artichoke seedlings.
They got past the milk carton.
I've now applied a liberal sprinkling of slug deterrent - just in time.