We arrived back from our holiday expecting to find our plots waist deep in weeds and the coop extension still to do. Instead we arrived back to some weeds, but nowhere near as bad as I thought – it appears the unending rain has been so unrelenting that the weeds didn’t have much of a chance.
But even more exciting was walking to the bottom plot to find a quail coop with a massive new extension but the chicken coop extension well on the way to being finished! Geoff the Allotment Fairy strikes again!
With their new extension, the quail seem to be much more settled. Even better, the patches where they have been moulting but haven’t been re-growing new feathers appear to be improving. With their new enclosure, their feathers are starting to grow back and they seem far more perky. The outdoors bit seems to be the most popular with the quails spending lots of time there rather than their nest box.
Our chicks continue to grow – they have been moved in with Cliff’s new chicks so they have more room. Unfortunately it looks like our suspicions about one of the chicks being a cockerel seem to be correct. This means we can’t keep him but a local farmer will take the cockerels from the site and sell them to breeders. It also means that we are one chicken short of the 12 we are allowed, so we are about to enter negotiations with Cliff and Steve about buying a cream legbar chick.
In the next week, when Geoff reappears and the coop extension is finished, we will move our new chicks into the extension so they have more room to live and can get used to being near the fully grown birds. As yet they are still too small to go in with the chickens.
We started on the weeding to discover the potato plants that appeared from last years forgotten or undug potatoes appear to have produced truly massive potatoes! Now to sort them before eating them!
In the batch of potatoes we found some amazingly nobbly specimens – I have never seen potatoes like these before!
Plan for tomorrow is to completely clean out the chickens as we have found several mites again today. Weeding is of course top of the agenda as is picking our beans that have been growing massively in our absence.
The Good Life Crewe 
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