led by chickens

I didn't originally intend to let the chickens out of their run this afternoon.  It was very pleasant, weeding and pruning in the sunshine, and I am so far behind with the garden that I selfishly wanted to get on with it without worrying about what the chickens were up to.  But by three o'clock their little faces looked so hopeful that I relented and let them out.  They looked very happy as they tumbled through the pop hole, and stopped outside their house to eat grass.  Then they came and joined me as I weeded the gravel in the turning circle, and for a while I thought they were going to flock nicely.

Alas, they have turned into an ill disciplined rabble during their winter confinement.  After half an hour of regarding me as a substitute rooster, and waiting for my fork to turn up tasty morsels, they suddenly took a fancy to go into the back garden.  I had to bundle up my tools and radio, scoop up my bins of waste, one destined for our compost heap and the other for the dump, and follow them. If a fox should have chosen this afternoon to stake out the garden, the fact that I was crawling around in the front garden would not in any way deter it from mounting a swift commando raid on a chicken in the back.  I have seen foxes take chickens, and they are quick.  They don't hang about, but gallop in, grab the bird and keep running.

It wasn't altogether a bad thing being led into the back garden, since I discovered that the dark pink flowers of Prunus mume 'Beni Chidori' had come out since the last time I looked at it.  The chickens seemed quite happy and busy foraging around the base of the cherry for all of half an hour, before upping sticks and disappearing back into the front garden.  I followed them, and tracked them down to the bed by the entrance, so settled down to pull up teazel stems and tease creeping sorrel out of the gravel.  There were a few seedlings of Morina longifolia, which pleased me, but I'd barely got settled to that task before the chickens were off again.

As the afternoon draws on they gradually converge on the hen house, and while I could only see three of them scuffling around in the dahlia bed outside my greenhouse, I was fairly confident that the other two were around somewhere.  This left me back in the turning circle where I started, pulling up seedling tufts of grass, creeping sorrel, and a wild vetch whose name I don't know, and fishing eleagnus leaves out of the gravel.  At about five o'clock the chickens went back into their run, and by half past I had to admit that I couldn't see what I was doing.