gardens with chickens

The chickens did not live up to my previous favourable report of their behaviour.  I let them out at two, which was with hindsight too early.  They joined me for a while on the gravel in the turning circle, scratching about for things to eat while I weeded, and kept glancing at them beady eyed in case they were ripping the buds from the emerging bulbs.  But after half an hour of playing in the gravel they'd had enough, and I suddenly looked up from my task of teasing grass seedlings out from around the stems of Asphodeline luteus, whose strap shaped foliage looks not completely unlike grass except that it is a different shade of green, to discover that all my chickens had gone.

I tracked them down to the sloping bed in the back garden, where they were once again busy scratching about, so I went and got a rake and the shears and went on raking oak leaves from the daffodil bank and cutting the remaining long grass.  That's a job I'd have finished comfortably before Christmas if I hadn't overdone it and sprained my arm.  I realised that I was now down to four hens, but since there hadn't been any screaming I presumed the fifth was around somewhere, and we hadn't suffered a visit from the fox.  Also, Black and White Alsatian Killer Cat was sitting in the driveway entrance, looking vaguely antagonistic as he usually does, but quite calm.  Alsatian Killer does not attack chickens, but I don't think he'd sit impassively in the face of a fox attack.

The sloping bed kept the chickens happy for a while, then they headed downhill to the bog bed, which is not especially boggy at the moment.  It was one of their favourite places last year.  I never imagined that hens would enjoy paddling in mud, but it turned out that they did.  I fetched buckets, some secateurs and the pickaxe, and busied myself chopping down old iris foliage, pulling up weeds and chopping out a piece of bamboo which had escaped beyond the ring of galvanised lawn edging intended to delineate where it is allowed to be.  I'd been meaning to do that for ages.

Then the chickens tired of the bog bed and went back up the hill to the front garden.  They move quickly once they get going, and by the time I'd collected my tools and emptied the bucket of weeds I'd temporarily lost them again.  In the front garden they rejoined the fifth hen, who was standing in front of the hen house.  Maybe she'd popped in to lay an egg, and when she came out they'd all gone.  After that they stayed in the front garden, and I was able to return to what I'd been doing originally, having left a trail of sweepings and prunings behind me stretching the length of the garden.  That can be the trouble with gardening with hens.  You do a bit of this and a bit of that and don't finish anything, but I suppose looking on the bright side I'm unlikely to sprain my arm if I never stick to doing the same thing for more than half an hour.