Rain and poultry........
Charlie
Hello Everyone,
The rain as always has brought hope, and it's a wet world still today.
The wind remains in abeyance and we're pleased, because normally if we
get rain we get wind twice as much which dries everything out. Here the
evaporation rate is about one and half times the rainfall.
The Pekin bantams look messy. Poultry are a large part of our life. We
have about 50 Pekin bantams of all colours and we attempt to make
certain that these colours will continue to be available, by placing
some breeders of a particular hue into breeding arks. Being pure bred
and bantam on top of it, they are not efficient egg layers, but they
bring a great deal of pleasure and interest to each day, so much so
that they need not justify their place here any further. They do of
course. Apart from the eggs they produce, they help to keep the insect
numbers down in the garden. Though not as much enjoyed as insects, they
also keep the snail numbers very low, and earwigs and such are no
longer in plague proportions, in fact these are seldom seen at all.
These little birds have another great attribute for anyone who has a
garden. They hardly scratch at all. They may be bantams, and many
bantams have a bad name for the amount of ground they cultivate, which
isn't the case with Pekin bantams. The garden is full of worms when the
season is wet and we love the worms and all the good they do for the
soil and are not happy to see them harassed. So only the most careless
worms fall victim to our colourful, animated garden gnomes. The birds
dress out as a small carcase, but flavour is the same as any breed that
has free range access. Another endearing feature, no less important
than any of the others already mentioned is; as the birds wander
through the garden they fertilise the soil allowing it to nourish our
plants.
The birds are mainly free range, arks are used to keep the mothers and
babies together and out of harms way till they are a little larger. The
hatchings are very small, able to walk through 19mm holes in woven wire
or weldmesh. The arks are also the places where the broodies are kept
while they hatch out their clutch of eggs. A picture attached shows
one of the arks which is populated by a mother hen and her 5 chicks at
the moment.
But must go to chip some horehound plants.
Be well,
Charlie
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Registered Linux User:- 329524
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If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the
conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life. .....Henry
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