We have just come home from six weeks touring Spain and Portugal. A fantastic experience, but I missed some of the developments in the garden, arriving home to daffodils, flowering currants and baby garlic which is ready to eat. However, one event we missed was much more sad. A dog got into our garden and killed almost all of our chickens. Our garden is not fenced and our house sitters had let the hens out of the run to wander around freely - exactly as we would have done ourselves. Unbeknown to them a dog walker with whom they had become acquainted with had allowed their dog to run about unsupervised in our garden. He got to know there were chickens there and took his opportunity to kill three of the quartet.
Our poor house sitters were devastated, but they were in no way to blame. However, the remaining hen, Blackie, would quickly have become depressed on her own, so they very generously went out and bought her a companion. We have named her Pauline, which is a compound of our house sitters' names. She is a darling and, on her second day in her new house, she laid her first ever egg. As she is still a pullet the first eggs she lays will be very small - see the photo below which compares Pauline's first ever egg with a standard size shop bought egg. Each egg will get bigger until, within a few weeks she should be laying lovely big eggs with deep golden yolks - and probably 5 or 6 of them each week! She will then be a fully formed "poule pondeuse" - or laying hen.
Poule pondeuse is the description you need to look out for if you are buying hens in France this spring - this ensures that you, too will get a plentiful supply of home grown eggs.
Later this week we plan to go to one of our local markets and either buy or order two more hens, which will give us more eggs than we can ever eat, but we love giving them to friends as they make a refreshing change to the usual bottle of wine when you go to visit someone. At Langon market, a little to the south east of Bordeaux, there is specialist chicken breeder who, we hope, will be able to provide us with hens laying white, green or blue eggs. We love having hens which lay eggs of different colours as we know which hen to thank for her eggs every morning and they look great piled into a dish or egg box. Never fear though, the eggs inside are just the same as one another; it is just the shells which differ. Pauline lays standard brown eggs, but she will be a high volume layer. Blackie lays very dark brown eggs. So we need a couple of contrasting colours.
Meanwhile, by happy coincidence, 10 days ago our wonderful roofer rang and asked if he could start work re-roofing our poulallier (hen house) immediately as he had a 4 day window in his diary. "Yes please!" we replied. That night the two hens took up temporary residence in the (fenced) fruit garden and work began the following morning.
Our poulallier is an old stone pig sty (porcherie) which was a very common traditional farmyard building. Every small farm kept at least one pig which was fed on scraps and left overs and then slaughtered and eaten (my step-mother always said that the only bit of a pig that was never eaten was the squeak). The family pig was a vital part of small scale semi self sufficient farming entreprises and a major supplier of protein.
Porcheries are falling into disrepair and we wanted to save ours as it is part of the property's heritage - so it has been traditionally re-roofed as you can see from the photos below. The hens now live in about as much luxury as we do, but they are very happy and the second morning after their transfer back to Cluckingham Palace, as I have nicknamed it, Pauline laid her first little egg - just for us.
What a lovely read Sue. I’m sure your new additions will be very pleased with their hen palace.