Taking advantage of sunshine, the son and I placed some strategic stepping stones from our patio gate to the chicken and duck yards (they share a wall). The son is in charge of their daily chores (mainly feeding/watering) and he was slipping on the too short grass; now we can all safely traverse without any more damage to the lawn.
As a result however, all domestic birds are locked away in their yards until spring. The grass just can't take any more abuse. The two ducks have had regular free range until now, though the eleven chickens haven't had much, sadly. While they have a fairly large yard, it's got no greenery. I'm trying to keep it topped up with wood chips to soak up the mud/poo (an uphill battle). The ducks like mud, so I'm not quite as concerned with the state of their yard at present. If it gets too pooey, they can have some wood chips too.
Our two oldest hens, Rock and Cookie, are still with us at age nine; if they make it to April, we will be able to celebrate their tenth birthday! Before these two, the oldest chicken age we've ever experienced was six; Rock and Cookie are true record breakers. The son asked me if we would be getting any new rescue hens (of our flock, seven of the eleven are rescues) and I think we will wait till we're back down to around six chickens or so. Rescue hens in particular are fairly short lived (getting to age four is pretty good and we get them at around 18 months old) so it's not outside the realm of possibility that we will get new ones in the coming year. It's not been quite a year since we adopted the Birthday chickens.
I'll be taking my Christmas blog break from now until January; I'm hoping for as much homegrown food as possible for our festive meals. I'll be back with my grand total of food for 2025: have I beaten last year's record? I'll try to get a last few things harvested and tallied before the deadline and we can find out together.
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