Despite all the rain (which is showing signs of slackening off), things are finally looking up and spring is round the corner. As well as the daffs which have been with us for quite a while, the yellow crocuses have followed the purple ones and are now in flower.

However, the real harbingers of spring are the fruit blossoms. Like last year the apricot was first followed by the almond. We won’t have any fruit from either again this year because although we did buy another apricot for cross pollination, it is still too young as is the almond.

The plums are showing no sign of flowering, which is not necessarily a bad thing as we hope they flower when there is less chance of the rain knocking the flowers off.

Meanwhile we are back to full egg production. The old hens are still in semi retirement only laying one or two between them per day but the youngsters have filled the void. We get 3 every day, which is a little strange as there are 4 of them. Maybe one is a dud? As you can see the eggs are quite a bit smaller than the ones from the oldies.

The oldies have completely destroyed their run which looks rather devastated but we have adopted a new strategy with the youngsters. As you can see they are constrained in their run. We move this every few days so they get fresh grass and the grass where they have been gets a chance to recuperate. We also did it because they are ‘at that age’ where they want to stretch their wings and can quite easily fly/jump over the fence. It’s a bit of a faff. I wonder how long we will keep it up.

After a number of trips to the vet with the big hairy one, the vet reckons she has got atopy – it’s an allergic skin reaction which makes her lick her paws and is probably the cause of her often infected ears. It’s not too bad at the moment – the scratching and licking is usually just in the mornings for some reason and we are now used to cleaning her ears every day. And she is still full of life and obviously happy so we are not worried that much. The (slightly) smaller hairy one is still up to her tricks and recently she has presented us with a rabbit’s foot (for luck?) and a pig’s trotter (??!).