What a winter it has been – and still it isn’t over.
We have had house-sitting problems. We had to leave to come back to London and work at the beginning of November, and left the house in the care of a young man we shall just call BGW. BGW was clearly a troubled young man, and despite instructions, he never managed to master the stove. So, come December, when it started to get really cold, he abandoned ship. For three weeks in January, the house was cared for by a lovely Australian couple, who kept it warm, cut the hedge and mended the burst pipes – but at the end of the month, took up the offer of a house-sit in Lanzarote. Who can blame them.
So for the last few weeks it’s been empty, and we’ve left the hens unattended. We give them food and water, and have a light-operated gadget which opens and closes their door, and they seem to have survived. In fact, not only have they survived, they’ve been laying eggs all through this freezing weather. I go over as often as practical to clean out their run, collect the eggs and top up the feeder, but it’s not at all satisfactory. We are still looking for the right house-sitter(s), and I’m working on better designs for a fully-automatic, free-range poultry system: my summer project being to build it!
