30 Days Wild - day 17

The moment we've all been waiting for has finally arrived, the cinnabar moth eggs have been hatching all day! We have watched for most of the day, it has been extremely exciting.

At first there were just one or two tiny caterpillars just a few millimetres long. If you click on the photographs to enlarge them you can see the empty egg cases looking like little bubbles and to the left of the hatched caterpillar another one eating it's way out of the case.

Then there were a few more, yellow when they first emerged and covered in tiny hairs. No sign of the familiar orange and black stripes yet.

The children have been so excited to be able to witness this first hand, you can see the caterpillars have started to eat the ragwort as they are filling up with a green colour.

Not many left now, this photograph was taken at around six a few hours after the first ones emerged. You can see that some of the caterpillars have eaten a lot and are mostly green, others which have just hatched are still yellow.

I wonder how long it takes for them to get their stripes... I guess we'll just have to keep watching.

30 Days Wild - day 16

It's been a very exciting day, much watching and much anticipating, the cinnabar moth eggs have been changing colour all afternoon. If you have been following I posted a photograph yesterday of the eggs and they were all yellow. We were hoping to see them hatch but the light is starting to go and I expect they will all be hatched by morning.

This first photograph was taken about three in the afternoon, some of them appear to be darkening. The next photograph was taken at about six in the evening, you can definitely see a difference.

If you look carefully it looks like a tiny hole is appearing in one of the eggs in the centre of the shot, where a little caterpillar is eating it's way out.

I will keep you updated as we know more and try to get some photographs of the newly hatched caterpillars.

30 Days Wild - day 15

We are half way through our wild challenge and it has been a very exciting adventure. We have been waiting for our cinnabar moth caterpillars to hatch and I think it's going to be any day now as this close up photograph shows something visible inside the eggs.

We noticed a lot of ants farming aphids in the wild flower garden, in fact they seem to be all over the plants.

Bees are everywhere, each bee seems to have favourite flowers. This one likes the foxgloves, long hairs can be seen inside the flower like a tickle chamber.

Finally I'll leave you with our friend from yesterday eating his dinner again.

Chicken Update

Lots of exciting news since the last chicken post, we had our first egg on march 16th from Ginger much earlier than we expected. So that was a big surprise not only to us but also to the chicken who was caught short and laid it in the middle of her run with a very confused look on her face.

The egg on the bottom is our first egg from Ginger, the egg on the top is for size comparison, it is a medium free range egg and only slightly larger. It was about a week later we started getting eggs from Dotty, then another week after that that Zelda joined in, rather dramatically as her first two eggs came just an hour apart with no shells.

This was a few days worth of eggs at the beginning of April, as you can see a different size and colour from each chicken, very handy for recipes requiring different sizes and the children love to pick out the egg they want for lunch. The chickens have changed quite a lot too, their combs and wattles have grown as has their tameness.

This is dotty now, she lays the caramel brown speckled eggs and loves to sit next to you on the garden bench especially if you have food.

This is an updated photograph of Ginger, layer of the first egg, she lays quite large medium brown eggs and is quite vocal.

This is what Zelda looks like now, she lays the light creamy coloured eggs. She is 'the boss' chicken and a regular escapologist, my husband has had to raise the height of the run several times. When she escapes she usually just digs for worms and grubs in the veg beds, although once she was caught eating the cabbages.

This is a very common view of the chickens, always digging about. They are currently watching my husband making some changes to keep Zelda in.

The chickens are very curious creatures, what ever you do in the garden, they are right there with you especially if you are digging or weeding. As soon as they hear the back door open they come running up to greet you, or should I say frisk you for food.

The children have been having the time of their lives spending time with the chickens and can often be found in fits of giggles, worm in hand being chased round the garden by three chickens. This has also been very educational for them and they have learnt many new things, one of their favourite jobs is collecting the eggs while they are still warm.

We now get three eggs every single morning and got a very large surprise the other day as you can see above. The egg was huge and weighed almost double that of some of the other eggs, it was laid by Dotty and turned out to have a double yolk.

Here is another picture of the large egg next to two of the other eggs I had in the egg box. We are all enjoying being chicken keepers and especially loving our three little feathered friends at the bottom of the garden.

New Arrivals

We have wanted some chickens for a few years now and finally this week saw this dream come true when we welcomed three young chickens into our family and I thought I would introduce you to them here. My husband managed to build the coop from some new pallets he was given you can read about it here if you want to, he is currently making some minor adjustments to make the run area larger, although they will be spending some time free range in the garden.

This is a photograph my eldest daughter's boyfriend took of our girls just after they arrived, I think they are wondering what is going on and are just as curious about us as we are about them. Firstly I'll introduce you to my youngest daughter's favourite one, she has named her 'Ginger', she is an amber ranger and the smallest of the three.

Ginger

My eldest daughter and my son both like our largest chicken best, she is a bluebelle and my son has chosen to call her 'Zelda', she is quite bossy with the other chickens but a little shy with us.

Zelda

The last one is our speckledy hen, according to the children this one is mine to name so say hello to 'Dotty', she is the bravest one and was taking corn from our hands the very next day.

Dotty

We have only had them a couple of days and already they just seem to fit right in, the children appear to be new 'chicken experts' and my youngest daughter calls them 'her girls'. I will never forget the squeals of delight when she found that they would take corn from her hand and it was soon declared 'the best day ever'.

Dotty

They are point of lay chickens, which means they are young and haven't started laying eggs yet, we have a few weeks to wait until that happens, so there is enough time for us all to get to know each other better. Really cannot wait to see how excited the children are when the first egg arrives, much squealing I expect!

Here is our self appointed chicken guardian, although I suspect he is only here to sun himself as he did not look too impressed with the very large birds that are now at the bottom of the garden and has been keeping his distance. Well, that was our exciting news this week, will keep you posted when the first egg arrives.

Easter Egg Baskets

My youngest daughter has recently expressed an big interest in making an Easter egg basket to put chocolate eggs in, so we thought we would have a go at making one. As we are keen to re-use and recycle things we have decided to make the egg basket from an old juice carton.

As you can see in the photograph, I have cut the top off a juice carton and used a piece of stiff card for the handle, fixing it to the basket with a paper fastener at the side. The base of the basket can be made from many things like boxes or plastic milk bottles, if you require a bigger basket the juice carton can be cut length ways.

Now for the decoration... here your choice is unlimited, we have decided to liberally smear watered down PVA glue over the basket and stick little pieces of multi coloured tissue paper to it. This will hopefully cover the pictures on the juice carton, if you wanted an older theme this could be decorated with decorative scrap book paper or indeed fabric.

These are the finished baskets, the children have scrunched up little balls of tissue paper to decorate the handle, after the basket is dry you could decorate with little Easter pictures of chicks or bunnies. We have put some spare tissue paper inside the basket to rest the eggs on, but shredded paper would work well too.

Then you just fill with little chocolate eggs and you have very happy children, these little baskets are ideal for the egg hunt.