Cold enough?

Okay, we're done with the cold weather now. The birds are flocking to feed from the peanut feeders which I had to fill twice yesterday! I don't blame them for not wanting to search for food when there is a ready supply here. In fact if I didn't have to go out to work I would happily stay home and eat all day. Even so, those little green shoots are still pushing their way through the frozen earth, amazing how they do it really, isn't it? Soon all this freezing weather (worse still, it's minus 45 - 50 degrees with the wind chill in parts of Canada and America) will be a distant memory as lights grow longer and nights are shorter. Just imagine how wonderful those balmy evenings will be when you can sit outside till 10 at night and still be warm? Hard to imagine, I know but it's there, just around the corner. For now I'm wrapped up in all my clothes, my dressing gown, a pair of socks and furry slippers, sitting by the wood burner and my toes are still like blocks of ice. Warm milk and brandy, anyone??

Chicken poo!

If you're a keeper of chickens you will know that it's imperative to keep their surroundings clean and pest-free. Good hen-husbandry or housekeeping helps the chickens fight off red spider mite and other parasites which can kill vulnerable hens. On a day to day basis you need to clean off their droppings board (hens do most of their expelling of waster matter overnight hence a board that sits underneath their perch that you can easily slide out to clean is better than letting it drop onto the floor) but in this weather it's proved slightly problematic. I can slide out the droppings board from under the hens' perch but the droppings have all frozen onto the board itself. I've been out there trying to chip off a mound of chicken poo with a trowel to no avail. Sigh!

Winter continues........,

This morning we woke to temperatures of -4 degrees. As always, with a coating of what seems like dusted icing sugar over the garden, it looks very pretty but, brrrr, is it cold!
I spent ten minutes in my chilly conservatory with the neighbour's cat, transfixed by the sight of a myriad birds flying in and out of the shrubs, latching onto the feeders, swopping places with the ever present queue of blue tits to hammer away at the peanuts. The cleverer ones nip down the feeder tube and take an entire peanut in their beak. Luke is filling the peanut feeders (two of them) every morning. As I look out now there are three birds on one feeder and two on the other with three in the shrub, one standing atop of the broom handle and one flying from one feeder to the other. They are incredibly industrious but it seems a nicer life than getting into a car every morning and evening to work all day to earn enough to buy convenience food because there's not much time to cook by the time we get home. On the plus side we haven't got a hungry cat in the shadows, waiting for a bird to land close by. The shrub looks like it's dancing with it's branches swinging when a bird either lands or takes off from them.