John from Going Gently was recently given some battery chickens to, I believe, fatten up as meat birds, he is calling them "Ghost Hens". Go over and take a look, then come back here and see what commercially reared free range hens look like at a year old when they are due to be culled.
These hens were purchased, by a friend of ours, from a free range farm for £2.00 each. The ones he didn't buy were packed in crates and sent for slaughter.
Not sure if these photographs show clearly enough but these hens are frightened of the open space and are huddling round their house. You can see they are in a dreadful state. 
We're at Midsummer and what a glorious week it's been hasn't it?
Bit of innovative recyclying here by Granary Poultry
John Gray asked for some more about the quail, so this is for you John:Quail will fly straight up if startled thus making it well nigh impossible to keep free range, for their own saftey. They like to scratch around the floor and don't need flying space.
They lay throughtout the Spring and summer, usually one egg a day each, sometimes two. I'm told that one can tell which quail layed which egg by the markings on the egg as they are always the same. They don't go broody and they won't sit on their eggs so if you want to hatch them you'll have to use an incubator or a bantam.
We sell our surplus eggs at the farm gate for £2.00 a dozen. We don't have that many so we'll never make a fortune but I guess they pay for themselves. We find that lots of people want the eggs for hatching, ours aren't fertile as we don't have a cock bird. It would appear that they are primarily hatched as food for raptors, in fact our birds were destined for owl food when we bought them. I understand that they are culled at six weeks.
They are endearing little characters and their call is quite charming however they really, really don't cope well with stress of any kind.
Stressful situations like overcrowding can lead to agression which if blood is drawn can end in canabalism. If you have a sick bird I'd always recommend seperating it before the others literally peck it to death.
We have a "sick bay" where three hens now live peacefully together, each one of them had to be removed from the main hutch for a variety of reasons and it seemed safer not to try and re-introduce them when they were fully recovered.
They are fed on chick crumb, layers pellets, seed, corn, scraps etc. They love a bit of greenery and I actually grow chard and spinach near their hutch just for them.
The hutch has flower pots turned on there sides for little resting places, leylandii branches for shelter and some old CDs/DVDs hung from the caging to give the quail something to peck at rather than each other.
They do need constant access to water which can lead to a bit of a problem as they will walk in the water.
The wet feet then pick up bits and before you know it you can end up with a quail with a ball of "soil" set like concrete on it's toe. This has to be carefully soaked and removed or the bird will end up losing a toe.
That's all I can think of for now, hope it helps.
Pom Pom left a comment on one of our weekly roundup posts over at Renaissance Vintage Notebook asking to see a photograph of our Silkies ,of course we are only too happy to oblige.
Looking back to the first Silkie post I do hope that the rather glamourous photograph of a Silkie didn't lead anyone astray, ours will never win a rosette at a chicken show, but, boy are they cute.
Rediculous but cute.
And John I'm working on the quail post.
It's been a busy week getting ready for the Easter hols at Renaissance HQ
with little being uploaded to the website www.renaissanceshop.co.uk.
It didn't start well with the news of Elspeth Thompson's death, so sad.
But we've had a reminder of new life with our quail starting to lay again, very seasonal.
And Marmee the photograph of quail eggs is just for you.
We went all Eastery over at Renaissance Childrens Notebook with Easter Gift Bags,
Flowering Bulbs for Easter and How to Make an Easter Chick.
And all wistful over at Renaissance Vintage Notebook with a sort of if we had a real bricks & mortar shop we'd stock:
Flowers in vintage containers & Crochet Blankets, Bags & Cushions.
And now of course it's April ,we had to mark April Fool's Day with a little joke or two,
and Easter is upon us.
We'll be spending it together, the whole family is home this weekend, bliss.
Wishing you all a very happy Easter.
The winner of our Georgette Heyer giveaway is Jeanne of Tales of a Cottage Garden we'll pop the book in the post to you Jeanne next week when we have your postal details.
So this week we have successfully rehomed (fingers crossed) our juvenile cockerel and been rather amused by a report from the Sun about chickens killing a fox , you should read it for yourselves the puns are really groan worthy.
Since the beginning of March it has felt really Spring like and we've turned our thoughts to window boxes, and displaying Spring bulbs indoors in vintage china pieces. We've also been looking at a tutorial for making floral necklaces.
Whilst in our dreams we've visited Pedlar's castle in reality we've spent some delightful time watching the boats on the North Norfolk coast.
Far more mundane but never the less worth a mention, we renewed our car tax online, it was very simple to do and personally I would highly recommend it.
There has even been time for some reading, I've been dipping into Gisele Scanlon's The Goddess Experience and I've finished the first of my Georgette Heyer dectective / murder mystery books. Which leads me nicely to the announcement of Renaissance's first giveaway.
Footsteps in the Dark by Georgette Heyer
I've finished reading it and would like to pass it on to someone else, so if you'd like to read it yourself please leave a comment over here at Renaissance Newsletter.
If there is more than one person interested in the book we'll do a little draw and announce the winner next Friday in our weekly roundup.
Wishing you all a lovely weekend and good luck in the giveaway.
So as regular readers will know all these little chicks made it to maturity but only one survived the severe winter and what did it turn out to be?
You've guessed it a cockerel!
And one that really likes the sound of his own voice.
Yesterday we moved him to the orchard, to a large chicken house with run and lots of hens.
Unfortunately the large chicken house and run is also temporary home to a trio of fancy fowl, I forget what type, and what was the first thing our youngster did?
Why he went and picked a fight with the other cockerel...
Fortunately no harm was done this time.
Fingers crossed, we're lucky, our little flock lives in town and we don't (yet) have urban foxes here. Sadly though a friend has been less fortunate, he had 13 chickens killed last night.
Reynard went on a killing frenzy.
Lock up your chickens my friends, it has been a long hard winter and Foxy Loxy is hungry.
