Good morning chickens

It's frosty this morning. I didn't think it would be given how rainy and windy it was when I went to bed. It looked like another windy weekend. But instead, it is sunny with quite a bit of frost on the ground. That's good because the roof on the new hen-house is going up this weekend and I would rather have frost than wind.

At the moment I have 27 hens and two roosters. Well, one of them is the rooster - he rules the roost and the other boy is a cock (which is short for cockerel which is something I never needed to know when I lived in the city). I can hear them now, singing "Let-Me-Oudda-'ere!". I lock up the hen-house each night so that the evil monsters cannot get in and eat the chickens.

At the moment I get around 20 eggs a day which isn't nearly enough to keep up with demand. It's funny because every third driveway along our road has an egg sign out. I wonder if everyone has this problem and are constantly running out of eggs or is it just us? We are one of two houses I know of where you can see the chickens from the road. So even when we don't have the sign up, random people are always popping by to purchase eggs.

That's why we are building the new hen-house. I have fifty day old chicks arriving later this month and plan to have two flocks of chickens instead of one. My neighbour has some bantam-cross cocks/roosters that they are giving us tomorrow which should do really well at keeping the new hens safe.

Why the roosters? Three reasons: First, they are necessary if I want to hatch out some of the eggs. Second, they stop the hens from fighting too much. Hens are just like high school, so that tells you just how cruel they can get. And third, roosters are excellent for defending off predators. These ones have lots of experience and are willing to do battle with a hawk on behalf of their hens. They also make a lovely noise in the middle of the night: "Let-Me-Oudda-'ere!", "Let-Me-Oudda-'ere!"

The new hen-house is a lot fancier than the first one. We have taken all the lessons we've learnt from the first flock and used them to design a chicken palace. Now all we need to do is to find helpers to put on the roof.