Hi guys
We're city types who moved to the country last summer looking for a better quality of life. We have a converted stable block in the heart of a small south Ayrshire village and we've been busy adapting the garden to give us a reasonable sized vegetable plot and a chicken run. This year we've grown three kinds of potatoes, cabbage, cauliflower, carrots, neaps, parsnips, pumpkin, onion, garlic, leeks, and courgettes. We've peppers, cucumbers and tomatoes in the greenhouse, but our salad bed was demolished by one of our two cats

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We've built a fully enclosed chicken run with a shed for a hen house at the bottom of the garden, and in the spring we hatched 6 Scots Dumpies from eggs we bought off ebay, one cockerel and five hens. Sadly, at the start of the summer a neighbour's Jack Russell got out of her enclosed garden, into our enclosed garden and broke a hole into the enclosed run and got the cockerel and three of the hens..... We have since hatched another couple of dumpy chicks (now 8 weeks and well settled) and one Scots Grey (one week old) which we need to find a couple of siblings for. One of our original hens (Bella) has been laying for about three weeks and we're now getting one reasonable sized egg a day. Her sister (Gertie) is yet to produce anything, but we live in hope.
Anyway, a local chicken breeder suggested we might find this forum helpful, so here we are... up til now we've been making it up as we go along
