Cheery's country living adventure

Cheery_Daff · 18 March 2018 at 11:11PM

Evening all :hello:

Hi Redo :hello: Hadn't realised you had chickens too :j Not planning to have enough to give ours collective names, but perhaps they'll all look the same and have to have interchangeable names?! :eek: :rotfl:

Edwink, hello :hello: lovely to meet you

always plenty of room for another one in here, if you're happy enough on the floor

(although actually we now have more sofas than people in our house thanks to a recent Freegle acquisition! :j )

I hadn't realised there was an MSE chickens thread! :j I will pop over there forthwith and learn hopefully all I need to know

Thank you for your mortgage free encouragement :j I know exactly how it feels as we paid Mr Cheery's previous mortgage off a couple of years ago so have had a good couple of years of throwing over £1000 a month into the savings pot :eek: :money: Of course quite a lot of that has now been eaten up with estate agents and solicitor fees amd stamp duties - but it gave us enough of a cushion to have CHOICES, and to do various bigger jobs in the new house (like hopefully getting rid of a wall).

It'll be a while before we're mortgage free again but I'm looking forward to it immensely! :j

We are still stranded at our friend's house :eek: Been here sice I finished work on Friday :eek: well, technically we're not housebound - weve been to several antique shops, Wickes and Ikea today :rotfl: but we still can't get back to our own house as it is in some kind of arctic wilderness and several roads are still closed :eek:

Poor friend whose house this is is herself stranded in Wales :rotfl: so this has been like an unexpected city break in a homely holiday cottage :rotfl:

Some spends today

£7 on lunch for both of us in the Ikea cafe

Actually counting this as a bargain as we sat there for nearly two hours plotting and scheming our new garden, and had tree free drinks refills each

:rotfl:

£26 on the cheapest wheelbarrow in Wickes. Mr Cheery has been keeping an eye out for a free/second hand one locally for literally months to no avail, so we bit the bullet. It'll be well used as soon as the snow stops. Annoyingly my sister rang this evening and when I mentioned it she said 'I thought mum was saving her old one for you?' First I'd heard of it :rotfl: but if she's right, i suppose it'll mean we have a spare for when people come to help

Also stocked up on a bit of food (including a £1.50 pizza for tonight's and tomorrow's tea). Got receipt somewhere but cosy under a blanket right now...

Oh, and an £8 clothes rail and £2.50 for 4 teatowels from Ikea. Not too bad, amd that should be all our clothes hung up now without the need for an actual wardrobe

We'll be using one of the spre bedrooms as a walk in dressing room as soon as the floor is fixed

:rotfl:

Going to ring the building society tomorrow to make first overpayment, and check I'm ok to just transfer over in dribs amd drabs as and when. Will also check whether I can opt for a monthly email statement (suspect unlikely).

Right, enough waffling - I'm off to check out the chicken thread :j

redofromstart · 19 March 2018 at 10:42AM

Cheery, we had them for a few years, started with 4 lovely hens from the local farm, then after that added standard browns so we went up to 8 which was too many eggs really (probably six a day - March to October) but easier to have a big flock to start with than try to introduce new ones later. The warrens are fairly identikit brown hence the borg name. We were back down to 4 when the blasted fox struck and took the lot one day sadly and I haven't had the heart to get new ones since.

If I had the land I'd be rescuing pigs - micro pigs that have outgrown their homes. They are just lovely animals. One day I will have enough trees and a stream, and pigs who would be as happy as the proverbial pigs in muck

Really looking forward to reading about what you do.

rtandon27 · 19 March 2018 at 10:50AM

Oh Cheery - stranded in the city!!!:eek:

I feel for you - roads here are impassible too - best thing is to stay put, wherever that may be!

Karmacat · 19 March 2018 at 6:12PM

Stranded doesn't sound good! Stranded in the city ... not too bad :rotfl: I'm very glad you're safe. It does make me think about if you had chickens, and maybe other livestock (even a cat or a dog) :eek: its really a different world, isn't it! Very exciting to learn about.

greenbee · 19 March 2018 at 6:21PM

I'm very envious of the space Cheery, although realistically I know I couldn't deal with it. Like redo I'd have pigs if I had the space. And maybe a couple of sheep for lawn-mowing purposes.

Interestingly someone locally found a very friendly black pig on their doorstep the other day, and the RSPCA thing it was a pet that had been dumped. They've taken it in, which is lucky for the pig. So you see, you might be able to get free pigs as well as rehoming battery hens!

Karma's right though - once you have livestock then being stranded away from home becomes more of a problem, unless you have friendly neighbours who you have a reciprocal deal with.

Cheery_Daff · 20 March 2018 at 9:13AM

We have arrived home safely :j :j

:rotfl:

Redo - must be dreadful when the fox gets all your chickens

Going to do as much fox proofing as I can, but I do want them to have the run of all our fields (they'll have about 3 acres each :rotfl: ) so we have to accept they might get got at some point. Still, they'll be rescue chickens, so I want them to live properly free for a while

You're right though KC - good job we don't have livestock yet :eek: On this occasion we did know there was snow forecast - Mr Cheery had to be somewhere else on Saturday so he joined me in the city on Friday and we stayed. If we had livestock, I would have come home from work on Friday, he would have left for the city, and then he would have been stuck there, and I would have been stuck at home... So this time round we could theoretically have managed it, but it would have been more faffing, and I would have been stuck here for several days by myself... Needs a bit of thought...

I don't know what I'm going to do with the space either

Not pigs

The previous owner had them apparently, and they've churned up a lot of the ground til it's almost unusable for anything else, big boggy peaks and troughs - although maybe they'll break down in the frost and settle a bit. Hope nobody dumps a pig on our doorstep :eek: :eek: Mind you, you can't just drive past here so someone would very definitely have to decide they wanted to give it to US, and we'd likely see them coming :rotfl: Can't imagine someone's going to bring one up the footpath, but I'll keep an eye out just in case...

Popping in to report a very rare NSD yesterday!! :money: I don't have those very often, being a fritterer

:rotfl: But yesterday I was working at my friend's house, and then drove home, and didn't go near a shop all day! :j

Will try to repeat the experience today - in work for a meeting this afternoon but lunch is provided and I'll take a snack to get me through the afternoon so fingers crossed...

Karmacat · 20 March 2018 at 11:09AM

Cheery, won't you be putting the chickens into a henhouse at night?

Cheery_Daff · 20 March 2018 at 1:38PM

I will indeed! But there are various options related to that. We could just have a hen house for night, and in the day time let them roam completely free. Or we could have a henhouse with a small run giving them some outside space during the day, and then we could let them roam free when we're during the day (although there's still no guarantee the fox won't get them of course).

I'm planning to build a large aviary style run with a roof and a hen house inside. That way if we're away for a night or two, we can shut them safe in the run and they'll have access to both inside and outside space without us having to open and close everything up, although obviously we will do if we're there.

But you're already pushing at the limits of my chickeny knowledge

so these things may be neither possible nor ideal and of course I will be putting time and effort into chicken research before we get any and not putting our feathered pals in the path of danger if at all possible!

(But I'd still rather they had some time to roam free rather than being shut in a pen, even if it's a big one. But we'll see how that goes). But I won't be leaving them to completely fend for themselves!

Just driven to work for a training course (and a free lunch...). Was very tempted to try to park close to the office - I don't normally as it's 4 hours only and I'm normally in for more than 4 hours. However, that would have involved paying about £3, so I've parked down the road and will walk about 15 mins each way instead. Tis my ambition to never pay for parking if I can possibly avoid it!

greenbee · 20 March 2018 at 1:56PM

If you don't clip their wings they can fly up into the trees - a friend has a small flock that roams free and they roost in a holly tree. The fox can't get them. Unfortunately she frequently can't find the eggs...

Cheery_Daff · 21 March 2018 at 8:39AM

That might work then greenbee - no need to clip wings here and we've got a few trees they could escape into... I think experimenting will be the key (and I've joined the MSE chicken keeping thread for advice

)

Didn't manage a NSD day yesterday as Mr Cheery asked me to pick up some wine on the way home from work. Paid at the self service checkout thing so the woman had to come over to verify my age. Took one look at me and pressed the "customer is clearly over 25" button :eek: :rotfl: :rotfl: I mean, I'm well past 25

but I think it's the use of the word 'clearly' that made me laugh :rotfl: "customer is quite clearly old" :rotfl:

Up early again this morning, and could see the sun rising over the hills so made myself a quick cuppa, got into the poncho I dug out yesterday, and headed outside to watch. Gosh it is SO beautiful. Leaned over a gate for a while, then took myself to the top of what's going to be my veg field and crouched down leaning on a dry stone wall (there's still a bit of snow and it was far too frosty and damp to actually sit :rotfl: ) Could have stayed there for ages. House was silhouetted against the sky and I could just imagine the whole field full of cabbages and flowers.

Ambled about trying to figure out the best place for the greenhouse, and then it started going really misty so I came back inside, started a fire, had some breakfast, and am now sat in the study meant to be getting on with some work, but actually watching the chaffinches and great tits in the tree outside the window

I bumped into an old neighbour yesterday who asked if I regretted moving away from our lovely old street to the middle of nowhere. I think I can safely say no (although you might want to ask me again in a couple of hours after the buildings regulations guy has been :eek: :eek: :rotfl: )

Cheery's country living adventure

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