Hello from Sunny East Sussex :o)

Hi bloggers, sorry I am so slow on the updates just lately. No excuse really apart from the amount of time I have been spending down the garden pottering around. I have put the first coat of blue (for the sky)on the inside of the chicken coop and have now run out so need to get off to Wickes for another tin sometime this week. At the moment the top half is sky blue and the bottom half is woodland green. I need to incorporate some hills so it is not a flat landscape I think. I have decided on a sunny happy scene which will show the sun, flowers, butterflies, fluffy white clouds and maybe a few bespoke chicks dotted around on the grassy area. I have also been busy painting the outside of the coop green, so it blends in with the garden better. What a chore!! I haven't enjoyed painting boring green for two days I can tell you!!

For Mothers day, Grant brought me a little silver locket with Mum engraved on it, I love it and will treasure it forever. Kellie got me a black metal cockeral weather vane that I wanted for the top of the coop :o)Clint is going to put it up for me, hopefully this weekend. Whilst I have been painting the coop, clint has been sorting out the pond. The first job was to cut the dreaded bamboo plants down and paint them with a weed killer that takes it back to the root. It has to be painted within 15 seconds of cutting or else the plant doesn't take the sap back down to the root and it won't have any effect (I bet you didn't know that peice of useless info!!). We have decided on a rockery, incorportating a waterfall into the pond. this is going to take a long time to build and has to be done on a shoestring budget due to the sheer cost of the chicken coop!! It will be worth it and I don't mind helping Clint do it, as he has had a bad back for a long time now and isn't allowed to lift anything heavy.

As it was such a nice weekend we let the hens out of the coop into the garden, they loved this. We put them all up onto the raised bed with bark and shrubs on it and they spent all afternoon scratching about and looking for insects. A couple of them even had a dust bath and sunbathed....how cute this hen behaviour is. I was quite shocked at how much they like to scratch around and am thankful they won't be going on our grassy area!! A couple of times they did venture over onto the grass but were swiftly put back onto 'their' piece of land. Two escaped into my neighbours garden too, I had to run round next door to ask them to put them back through the hedge, then promptly put a bit of wood across the gap in the hedge :o)
Here are a few photos I took of the hens sunbathing at the weekend:o)