No picture yesterday - a wipe-out of a day after celebrating our progress in the FA Cup meant it was late before I even thought about a picture!

Our little clan of animals gives us both huge pleasure and sometimes pain. When we get it wrong (like when we lost a lot of our bees in the late summer because they starved – we’d been told you should NEVER need to feed in the summer because they will always have a food supply but the weather had been so poor they had no supplies at all), we take it very seriously and try our best to get it right next time.

We lost two of our chickens in the few weeks leading up to Christmas. Terri and Sherri, our two Light Sussexs, succumbed on consecutive days to a stoat. When we lost Sherri, we thought it was a natural death because of a tumour on her leg so when we found her body we didn’t realise she’d been attacked…..until the next morning, when Terri was found in the same position and with some evident damage to her little body. We felt their losses really badly and as well as getting added protection on the hens’ coop, we also went out and strengthened our flock back to six chooks.

Now we have Mo (who you’ve met), Dusty, Martha and Lennie, who you may also have met on DMs pages and now Jack and Hill, named after famous racing drivers Jackie Stewart and Graham Hill because their feathers have a petrol-like sheen so they have been named “the petrol heads” jointly.

When we got the newbies, they were already laying and with no fuss at all they’ve become a part of the flock.

After Christmas, I spotted Hill over the “road” climbing the stairs to our little flat, whereupon she settled down to lay in the sunshine. They seem to like spots with a good vantage point for laying. I went out, picked her up, spoke quietly and gently to her as I carted her back to the coop’s nestboxes and deposited her in there with a stroke of the neck and instructions that this was where a good hen should lay. Five minutes later, I found her making her nest on our sofa in our sitting room. Again, I repeated my gentlest insistence on her using the nestboxes provided…..

I came inside, leaving the door between our utility room and our garden open so that we could hear Archie knocking to come in when he’d finished his morning border patrol. The next thing I heard as an almighty banging and crashing in the utility room and when I poked my head out there, she was on the work surface, above the washing machine, shoving off stuff she didn’t like the look of onto the floor – paintbrushes, curtain rings, dog food tins all went down crashing and clattering onto the floor.

Since that day, four of the hens have decided that they will lay in the utility room, sometimes on the work surface and sometimes in this pink trug bucket, that I usually use in the garden but has been pressed into service as a log carrier of late. The eggs were all being laid onto relatively hard surfaces and so several of them were cracked at the tip. DM hit on the idea of a dog towel as a cushion for them.

This morning, Hill got into the bucket, then Jack joined her a bit later. Hill went off a short while later shouting her head off and another half an hour later, Jack did the same. When I went out, I found their beautiful eggs, surprisingly quite different despite them being the same breed…..Jack’s is smaller and more purple in colour, while Hill’s is massive and very speckly.

It does make me wonder why they’ve chosen this site for laying in. If you listen to hen experts they will tell you they always pick quiet spots where they won’t be disturbed yet they chose to lay in the house in a main thoroughfare between the house and garden so they’re frequently “forced” to flee while we’re going in or out. Do you think they could just be trying to make our lives easier?