Stephen O'Connor's Blog

It would be easy enough for me to write a whole blog about the weather.  I live in Scotland after all, it’s a country obsessed with weather, mainly because it’s usually always bad.  So I shouldn’t really have been surprised that I can’t remember getting a full day of sunshine in the past 3 weeks while I’ve been off work.  We did get lots of rain, which I’m personally blaming on all the silly news reports in June suggesting that there may be a hose pipe ban being enforced.  Ha!  As if.

What the wet (and mostly warm) July weather did provide was some fantastic conditions for growing carrots, courgettes and juicy red strawberries.  It also provided the much needed water for the best crop of spuds I’ve had since I started growing my own veg 3 years ago.  So summer crops have been fairly good, and as always, tasting amazing. 

I did have a bit of a traumatic time at the beginning of July.  I offered to “chicken sit” a friends two hens for them while they were away on holiday.  Having hens already, I presumed it would be an easy task, just put their two hens in with ours and look forward to the 5 eggs a day.  I had carried out some research and read all the advice about putting new hens in with your existing flock.  It stated that they would have to establish a pecking order, and that at first there would be a little tussle, and to look out for bullying.  The hens arrived on the Friday, and when introduced to each other, there was a little wrestling went on, but we stepped in, made sure they just got acquainted.  After a while, they seemed to calm down, and were getting along fine.  All eating and drinking as expected, and even getting 5 eggs laid on the first day.  The problem came the next day when my family and I all attended a family wedding.  I opened the coop in the morning, topped up their feed and water, and all was well with the hens.  We left our house around midday, making sure they were safe and secure.  The wedding was fantastic, and we all got back to our house in the early hours of the Sunday morning.  The coop door had not been closed as no one was home, and when we went to close it over for the night, one of my friends hens appeared to be bleeding from her head.  She was refusing to go into the nesting area of the coop, so I had to put her in a make shift box to keep her safe, and upon checking the inside of the next box I found the other hen was already dead.  My 3 hens had bullied both of the new hens, injuring one of them and killing the other.  I was devastated.  Calling my friends to tell them what had happened was a difficult thing to do, but they were very understanding and forgiving. 

The good news though, is that the poorly hen, after weeks of pampering, has recovered and happily laying eggs and acting normally.  She does however have a bad bald area on the top of her head, which caused me to nickname her “Fryer Cluck”.  Her little “monk” hairdo looked very sore, but does appear to be healing.  Lesson learned though, you can’t just put hens in together and leave them.  They need a lot of monitoring in that early stage, and some new advice I was given included the idea of letting the hens see each other but keeping them apart by chicken wire or a cage of some sort, until they get used to the other hens being in their territory.  I’ll know for next time! (if there ever is one).

Other news in July included a wee trip out to Dunoon with my band, DIY and decorating in the house, a little trip to Jamie Oliver’s new Glasgow restaurant and booking next years holiday for the family to go to Florida for 3 weeks.  All very excited about it, even although it’s costing us the equivalent of a brand new small car!

My friends and I also said goodbye to our good friend Duggie.  He has moved out to Melbourne, and we had a nice night out to give him a send off.  It was very emotional for us all at times throughout the night, but with the wonders of the internet and skype, he’s never going to be all that far away from us.  I know he’s going to do really well out there, and maybe I’ll be blogging in the next few years about my trip to Melbourne to visit him.