Full quota

Today the chickens fully earned their keep by giving us four eggs. Just as well, since we've spent the day building a better fence to keep them in their patch. It turns out that Zella is a bit of an escape artist.

And here's what we made with them (rhubarb and yoghurt cake)!

Hens

 We've been talking about getting chickens since before we were married, but here they finally are!

I think this might be a picture of Zella and Super Hans...

They're impossible to tell apart unless they are all together.  Buttercup has the yellowest legs, Super Hans is the bossiest, the chicken with no name is the reddest and Zella is the other one.

...but it could equally be the chicken with no name.

This weekend my husband is building a fence to keep them out of the garden, since it turns out I really don't like feathers or flapping.  With a phobia of butterflies you might have thought chickens would be a step too far, but it seems I don't always think things through.

One of them rewarded us with an egg this afternoon which was surprisingly freaky.  I know eggs come from chickens, but to have come from one of our chickens is almost a step too far.  Luckily the children are fighting over who gets to eat it.  We have no idea who produced it (although my money is certainly on Super Hans) so we're not sure who gets to claim ownership.

Flower bed

Catching up now on all the things we did over the summer - this was one of the first - bringing the old flower bed back to life. We killed all the existing stuff and have now put in a geotextile underlay with lots of bark chips on top. It's got automatic watering laid in there too, so it hasn't been too much work to maintain over the summer. Weeds are amazing things though, and they still manage to poke through the slightest gap in the bark chips...

Water water everywhere

The obsession with pipes continues - this is but a small part of the garden watering system we've been putting into the garden.

It's spent the summer watering the tomatoes and our new flower bed, but I have greater plans for it...

There's a couple of conduits built in the concrete wall supporting the balcony - they were previously used to get water to and from the old swimming pool. I plan to use them to get the house cave-drain through the wall and down to the bottom of the garden where there's a real drain (underground).

We'll also take a garden water pipe through the wall to get the water out into the rest of the garden and down to the bottom of the garden where we'd like to put the chickens.

It's all getting a bit industrial..

Just bought a large electric breaker for taking down the concrete wall in the garden... no action shot yet - it's still in the post.

It's a monster. Thank you Amazon.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B002QRSO4O/ref=oss_product
(gift wrap available.)

There's a garden at the bottom of my garden!

After some work - we've finally got the bottom part of the garden (the bit next to where the pool was) in a state where we can plant a lawn. We've hacked out I don't know how many bushes, trees and bamboos, mulched them into compost (with the fantastic Bosch tree chomper) and killed most of the remaining foliage - none of which was grass. We did this over the winter and got rid of all the remaining rubbish in about 40 cars loads to the local dump.

This was followed by a rotovation, an epic stone hunt (the kids helped), burying of some pipes to transport water around the garden, and days of raking to try and level out the bumps. Along the way we found a water source (the same that flows through the village), a barbecue and paved bit, and an old border (which now has some tomato plants in it). We've added a swing set, a sandpit and a little wooden house for the kids to play in.

The grass seed is now sown according to Alan's careful instructions, so now it's just a matter of watering and hopefully we'll have a new lawn in a few weeks!

No more pool

Finally caught up with the pool on the blog - this is me yesterday chopping up the pool with my other big chopper (angle grinder). Sadly the photos don't quite do justice to the stream of sparks shooting out from between my legs, but Kerry tells me it was quite alarming... It turned out this was the easiest bit of the whole job, as the sheet metal chops us fairly easily.

The whole pool is held rigid at the top with a rim which just unscrews and lifts off. The posts at either side are connected underneath the pool by big steel ribbons to stop the base of the pool from splashing out at the bottom - another job for the angle grinder.

Finally we got everything in the car and away to the dump - and now we almost have a whole new garden! Just the concrete wall to go...

No powertools required

And here's the explanation for the bouncy decking.. the posts holding the decking up all go into blobs of concrete with big spiky rods in them. But they're rottten at the base.

I managed to break almost all of these posts just by pulling the away from the base with one arm.

This was how it looked last weekend - most of the decking gone and the garden starting to take shape...

Getting my chopper out at the pool

Ahhh.. if I can't hack my career in demolition, at last a good career at The Sun awaits...

We've spent a couple of weekends now unscrewing the decking around the old swimming pool. Despite being quite bouncy, some of the wood on top is still in reasonable condition, so the plan is to save it and build some raised beds with it. Every plank is screwed every couple of feet into the frame, so it's taken a while but we now have a reasonable collection of wood.

I couldn't handle the thought of more unscrewing, so eventually I cracked and bought yet another Tool, a Bosch PKS 60 A circular saw which made the job of "unscrewing" the decking rather easier. I say I cracked, but clearly this was just a good excuse... the fiddly bit was getting the hundreds of screw-laden spiky bit of wood to the dump.

Tiiiiimber...

First on the list to reclaim the garden are the evergreen trees next to the pool -  they were probably planted when the house behind us was new, to give a bit of shelter for the swimming pool.

But since we aren't going to have the pool, and the neighbour now has a big hedge, they don't really serve any purpose, so we've chopped them down. It was great entertainment for the whole family.

If only I could find a suitable Tool of the Week to help get rid of all those branches...

Winter has arrived!

Winter has finally arrived and we have a nice dusting of snow in the garden and some pretty cool stalactites on the dormers! Hopefully more snow will come later this weekend and we'll be able to make a snowman.

Our cool roofing company (Ferblanterie Gessienne) have just called to say they'd had a look on our roof and would like to add snow stoppers (the technical term) on the dormers to stop the snow slipping off and making a pile on the tiles in front of the window. How good is that!