Give a warm welcome to....

Barbara (top) and Tomasina, my two beautiful new hens. They have been at RCC for three weeks and have settled in nicely. We only had 24 hours of bickering before a new pecking order was established. Naturally, Margot is top hen. Equally unsurprising news; Eli is bottom of the order. He’s so uniformly hated by all three hens that they manage to corner him in the greenhouse and chase him up the tree every time the four of them appear in the garden together.

Max doesn’t fare any better. This afternoon Tomasina gave him a sharp peck (in her defence, he was asking for it), forcing him to retreat to the safety of the command centre (shed roof) to dream up a cruel and unusual act of revenge he’ll never manage to execute.

Gerry, our recently departed hen, may be gone but certainly not forgotten. Mr Swift and I have decided to grow a tree in her honour, so I am currently trying to source a dwarf cherry tree that we can christen Gerry the Cherry. Think she would have appreciated the comedy value.