Friday night I started designing JJ's mittens. He wants a pair exactly like mine, and flippantly I agreed. That was last winter. Now, every time I see him he asks how I'm getting on with them, so I thought I'd better get started! Knitting them will be simple, but I've never designed anything before and getting the scale right is proving challenging. Luckily I was good at maths at school.
I've been on all poultry duty this weekend. They are such a funny bunch. First I let out and fed the shared eight hens, then I did Turkey and her little friends. I was sure the chicks were growing by the second! At one point I couldn't find the chicks when I went to check on them. I looked everywhere, in all the hedges and was getting concerned when I found myself back at their shed and could hear them tweeting. They'd gone into a little pen surrounded by wire mesh and couldn't get out (or maybe the were pretending but they were in there a long time), so I coaxed them out with food. At breakfast time the different gangs all swapped food: Turkey was eating the chick food so the chicks started eating Turkey's pig food as well as the layer pellets. Then the eight shared hens turned up and they all wanted to eat the chick food too.
The photo above is Henrietta at our kitchen window. I could hear a scuffling sound coming from the kitchen and this was the cause of it.
I've had a good weekend, but I'm looking forward to next weekend even more. I have four days off and I'm planning to mostly go nowhere and catch up on home stuff.
We knew our hens must be laying elsewhere when our egg count dropped from 7 per day to 3 or 4 or 5 per day. And yesterday Detective Inspector McCulloch caught Malcolm in the act and found three separate cashes of eggs, resulting in the above crop! We think Malcolm herself has recently started laying. What a great find! They were all underneath some very private bushes.
I took the above photo on my morning walk. I love the wooded area near where I live, beside the pigs. It's quiet and serene and choc-full of nature.
Hagos is home today for 16 hours. I took the day off to be with him. He and Meg are in bed, catching up on sleep :)
I never tire of looking at the colour and variation of the eggs our hens produce. Big and crinkly, small and geometrically perfect, white and pointy, brown with a speckled bottom.
When I collect the eggs I feel as though I'm collecting precious jewels. And even though each day's eggs are comparable to the day before's I still marvel at them all.
