Meet the girls who give us our lush eggs. Let me introduce you. From the left: Irma (cream legbar, blue eggs); Martha (maran, dark brown speckled eggs), Dusty (blue andalucean, white eggs); and Tina (also cream legbar also blue eggs). The two legbars are just under a year old and the other two are maybe four years old so are almost at the end of their main egg laying life. Their productivity levels tail off as they age and although they can live to be 10-12 years old, they will probably only be laying 1-2 eggs a year by then, if they live that long.

We love the bright yellow legs of the legbars, not to mention those wigs. They’re all named after great soul singers (Irma Thomas, Martha Reeves, Dusty Springfield and Tina Turner) because even though their egg-laying cackle is not very soulful, their general chit-chat to one another as they mooch about the garden is really beautiful.

Wouldn’t you think that they don’t have much in the way of personality and cunning? They do, after all, have tiny brains. You’d be wrong though. If they are running short of food in their food hopper, Dusty will come and find me and tell me they are waiting to be fed. I can even remember a day when I was sitting on the sofa in the house and she came and knocked on the window to tell me they wanted food! Since Jack and Hill died, she's become top of the pecking order and it's her job to come and tell us of problems. She's sort-of like their shop steward.

They can be surprisingly cunning too. We were in the garden once doing some work and I noticed one of the hens running across the garden with the others in hot pursuit. David went to investigate what it was that she had that the others wanted so badly. It turned out to be the severed head of a baby rabbit. She was NOT prepared to share her bounty with the other hens, she wanted it all to herself. Of course she didn’t kill the rabbit herself – we assume that a stoat had done that or possibly even a buzzard – but she was delighted to be in receipt of such a tasty morsel.

They love to eat snails but won’t touch live slugs, although they will happily eat the drowned ones from my bucket when I’ve been out collecting from the veggie garden. They especially like the salted ones although I have stopped salting the water since discovering that increasing the salinity of land is a really bad idea.

When I take the dogs into the field to play ball, they follow us out and have a mooch about to see what they can find. As soon as they see me walking towards the field gate, they form a procession behind me. They are such brilliant companions.

You will note the piles of earth on the lawn behind them - we are suffering badly with mole problems at the moment.