Tuesday, November 14, 2006

You can never find a slug when you want one!

Our new chickens arrived 2 days ago. In a package deal fit for the urban chicken of the 21st century they arrived, equipped with ergonomically-designed and fox-proofed accommodation, enough organic food for a month or two and accompanied by Very Nice Man, expert in chicken husbandry to give us a crash-course in hen-holding, wing-clipping and mite-treating: skills I previously had never known I needed.

Peggy and Fabienne took to the their new home like ducks to water, or like chickens to an Eglu, quickly establishing a pecking order (Peggy first) most curious to behold a and engaging in the bizarre habit of dust bathing: this a manoeuvre involving shuffling one’s feathery bottom in the dirt then flapping dry soil into your armpits (wing-pits?). Not a bath that would, to the onlooker, seem to make a chicken feel fresh as a daisy but clearly nonetheless refreshing to our Pegs and Fabby.

We are advised, by the Very Nice Man from Eglu, that chickens like to eat slugs and snails. This a Good Thing……..not only for our garden but for marital harmony. Many the disagreements between Iain and I over the course of our 15-year marriage about whether slug pellets should be used on the garden.

One might think that Iain, as a hosta-lover, would be keen to see the slugs off by means fair or foul, but not so. Iain has a humanitarian (slugitarian) approach to slug control, previously trying the upturned grapefruit method, the death-by-intoxication-beer-in-a-saucer method and his very own picking-them-up-one-by-one-and-moving-them-to-the-rose-patch technique – all of which have less than moderate success compare to the chemical warfare (thick layer of blue pellets) approach favoured by myself.

So, in an attempt to make the chickens feel welcome, we set off on a slug hunt around the garden. On any given day prior to the arrival of our chickens we might have seen a dozen 4”-6” juicy slugs sliming their way across the patio. Not to mention the hoard of them lurking under the hostas and behind the shed. But the arrival of our hens must have been broadcast widely across the local slug community, causing them to flee their usual habitat, for, despite an extensive and probing search, neither slug nor snail was to be found anywhere in a 500-yard radius of chez-nous.

Unable to secure a sluggy snack for our hens, we resort to a can of sweetcorn, upon which they gorged greedily before depositing a grateful blob of guano on our undernourished lawn.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi welcome to the world of Eglu's and chickens. We've had ours for 19 months! Everyday is lovely. We all get together on the forum if you're interested.

Have fun!

Buffie

Anonymous said...

Delighted you are now a chicken fancier too! We have a flock of 20 (give or take a few), the most majestic being an exchequer leghorn cock. He's several months old now but still no cock-a-doodle, although he's had a few half-hearted attempts. They are great fun to watch. You have many hours of fun ahead! Jon X