She's been broody since about the 18th May, 6 weeks today. She's been a trooper, and I wish we'd been in a position to give her some eggs to hatch. She's not shown any sign of coming off the nest of her own volition, so I've taken some action.
The three youngsters have now ALL taken to laying in one of the stand-alone nest boxes, down on the run floor. We're back to nest box squabbles, because they all want the same nest box. Honestly, we have 2 cubes (althoughj 1 of them was occupied by Gloria, but Poppy manages to lay her egg each day) which each have HUGE nestboxes; and we have two roomy standalone nest boxes. And they all HAVE to use the same ones.
With the oppressive hot weather, earlier in the week we completely rearranged their free range area, so that they could have the back fence and the fruit cage. The back fence has hedging all along, and this is cool and pleasant even on the fiercest of days.
This meant that their usual area, including the pampas, gets a bit of a rest.
It was helpful because the material for DH's workshop arrived, and that took up most of the garden.
He's been building it, single handedly, for several days now. It's double walled and insulated, the floor is insulated etc etc, so it's a slow process. He used that hexagonal plastic stuff for the base, filled with pea shingle. Superb. He build the previous shed on that, and it worked really well, and we could see how well it worked when we (well, he) removed the old shed.
Minor arguments along the way "It's too small, why didn't you get a size bigger?" (Me). And various other squabbles about what was going in there, where it was going, and why it wouldn't work. It'll get sorted in the end.
It looks lovely.
