Chickens In The Snow

It snowed just enough to cover the floor a little and leave footprints, so I just couldn’t resist taking a photograph of our chicken’s foot prints in the snow.

I imagine this is the first snow that the chickens have seen, and they seemed happy enough scratching around in the snow - although they did seem to spend a lot of the time alternating between standing on one leg or the other!

Chicken Snow Footprints

As you can see in the photo, there’s still the usual ‘chicken poo’ on the patio problem, but this is something we’ve now accepted…

We basically scoop up the chicken poo and put it straight on the compost heap.

Speaking of compost heaps, our three bin compost system now has a load of compost that included the the first batches of chicken manure / bedding and general poo gathered from around the garden.

The importance of which will soon be disclosed; as we’ve now managed to ‘get’ an allotment - that’s the good news.

The bad news is that the allotment site is a ‘virgin’ allotment site. Although the site is council property, it has never been used as an allotment and so the ‘ground’ is basically a couple of inches of what I would in my uneducated manner call ’soil’… The rest is clay - of the kind I reckon you could make models with!

According to the allotment and gardening books, clay is a very fertile soil, but requires A LOT of compostible material to be dug into it.

Just how much compostible material is required I kind of under estimated until I attempted to dig my first vegetable bed…

For now I’m just going to console myself that it’s too ‘frosty’ to do any digging on the allotment and leave things until they’ve thawed out a bit!