Moving on.
In lots of ways, I want to get that last entry further down the page, metaphorically and literally.* This afternoon the small girl and I went to visit our remaining two hens, Nutmeg and Cobweb, who are currently on holiday with e. We had a very nice time, despite the origins of the reason for our visit, and the hens are clearly doing fine; Nutmeg is even laying still. Cobweb, of course, being an Araucana, is completely mad still, but then that’s nothing new. Anyway, the small girl enjoyed feeding them, and talking to them, and a resemblance to various of our other hens didn’t hurt, although we have explained to her that part of the reason for the chickens’ holiday is that we are worried that the fox might come back to visit, and that foxes and chickens can’t be friends. It’s been a tough week, and having the aged parent here didn’t really divert attention from it so much as highlighting another area of life which is far from satisfactory, to wit: the relationship between AP and small girl, or lack thereof. (That’s a whole nother post, but basically he doesn’t seem to know quite what to make of her, and she, as a result, is a little stand-offish, which creates a wholly inaccurate impression of who she is, normally, with people who really know her.)
Anyway, that is a rant for another day, and for now, I’m happy to see our hens still standing, and OK, and alive. Quercus and I are still miserable about what happened, and the garden is horribly quiet without the chooks about the place. We had had them for three years, and seeing the place without them is just wrong. I think we are tentatively agreed that we will have some more hens while we live here, though we have yet to work out which changes we’ll make to make the run more secure (and, of course, how we can make me less forgetful; I feel unspeakably guilty, predictably, and I think I will full-stop, to be honest, when I think about what happened). I think we’re both prepared to go quite some way to try to ensure that this doesn’t happen again, whether that means an automatic chicken gate (which sounds rather like a bizarre political scandal, doesn’t it?) and electric wiring, or just tonnes and tonnes of ordinary chicken wire, or a moat and guard dogs and machine guns on watch-towers or what. But I feel better in my head when I think that this is not the end of the line for us as hen people, so we’ll continue to work out the details while I try to sit on my hands and not push Quercus before he’s ready.
We’re also trying to use what happened with the hens as an incentive to sort out the garden. A few weeks back, we tidied intensively in one half of it, before rotovating and sewing a mixture of grass, clover and camomile; it’s getting quite green out there (though let us not speak of the insanely healthy-looking rhubarb which has survived this ordeal, having played dead for several months prior to our decision to just cut our losses with it…) and it’s made us appreciate how nice it would be to have outdoor space that didn’t involve old nails and rusty bits of ex-roof. A garden, one might call it; I hear these things are catching on these days. So, it looks like our plans are changing from focusing entirely on the inside of the house, to sorting out the rest of the exterior work and creating a garden, not least for the small girl to have somewhere nice this summer. Hopefully, part of this will be creating a secure space for some more hens. And then retrieving our two from e.
In other news, next weekend we are getting a dining table, bringing us dangerously close to civilisation! In the kitchen! There will be pictures! We are going to Quercus’s mother’s for this, and a weekend away seemed like a rather nice idea given that we’ve had a week of horribleness. So, Weald & Downland here we come.
* And thanks for the sympathy on my last post; I really appreciated it, and it did go some way to stopping me feeling a complete and utter arsehole.
I read somewhere that shepherds use donkeys to ward off wolves. I believe the wolves are frightened off when they see the donkeys in the flock. You don’t need dogs with machine guns. You just need a bigger animal to mix in with the crew. Maybe an alpaca?
Oh c’mon. You could spin its wool and make beautiful sweaters…
Good! Looking forward to green pictures – my fingers are itching to garden but the sun on our back bit is so intense it kills most things. Still, herbs and veg in pots are still alive (as of this moment) so we might get lucky this year!
I missed commenting on the last post but also sympathized. We had a goose that was taken by a weasel, we think, and it was ugly. I readily admit my husband took care of the gruesome remains and I let him. In our case too we had gotten complacent about not battening things down as tightly as they should have been, and the goose paid for it, poor thing.
That said, I also wanted to echo Claire–in talking to others they have said predation is a given when you keep livestock. It will always happen some day and so, although you certainly do your best to prevent it, having livestock needs to be an acceptance of that fact. Nature is grim and ugly sometimes, and it’s taking too much on ourselves to think we can stop it from being that way.
Due to our location–out in the woods, and goose house not very easy to make more secure–I decided to give up the remaining goose to someone else. I think if you have a good place for livestock, it’s better to keep on, but our area was just too conducive to predation.
My sympathy on the whole chicken thing, the teenage son of good friends was asked to let my parents chickens out and in while they were away – he arrived one evening to find them strewn across the garden in pieces – he’s now a soldier, I hope the chook fiasco didn’t push him that way! Anyway, foxes need to eat too – that whole circle of life thing – and your chooks had a very nice life, console yourself with that. Re. very small children and relatives – can be a bugger, Seb is a bonny little chap until older members of my husband’s familly hove into sight, then he sticks his tongue out and looks utterly vacant, his nose starts running and he fills his nappy with something smelly. Bless the babes… At this age they need time and contact to connect with people and if your AP is not at ease around wee ones (how was he when you were a sprog?) then it’s coming from both ways. Just remember the cardinal rule with sproggans – everything changes all the time…
my father is the same way w/little ones. he has never cared that much for small ones running around (babies & young toddlers). he refused to even touch my daughter until she was closing in on 3, & has yet to hold his great-grandchildren (not that he has much opportunity living across the country). however, as children get older, they will make thier place w/AP as my daughter has done.some people will never be touchy-feely. what mattered to my daughter is that my father is *always* like that–no game playing, no bribery, it’s just *him*–& that she can deal with. quite right–foxes & chickens are only friends in stories
! good luck w/the garden, looking forward to photos! as talented as you both are within, the garden should look lovely!
Mmmmm…rhubarb. I’ll bet you have some mad good recipes involving rhubarb. Do share when you feel the whimsey!