Nothing much. Just Chickens.

Wednesday 27th July 2011
It is show week in about twenty days or so. All the shows in Orkney are within a period of about 10 days. We have got a couple of chickens entered in the Burray and South Ronaldsay show and in the County show.
You are supposed to have them all nice and clean for the shows and I have never tried cleaning a chicken up. (I dont suppose that I am the only one. When did you last bath a chicken?)
Anyway I thought that before I tried washing one of the chickens that we are entering in the shows, I had better test my chicken washing technique. We therefore picked out the worst scruffiest chicken and decided to clean her up as a test.
I was even allowed to do this in the bath. (Don't worry Barbara. Mum made me clean the bath out later so there are not to many feathers in it now.)
You are supposed to use Lux flakes but I have not been able to get any so we grated up some pure soap. Robertson's store in The Hope said that they didn't normally sell Lux except at show season for washing cows and the like. I thought "well it is show season now, so where are the flakes" but I was much to polite to point this out to them.
The scruffy chicken did not seem to be delighted at having been selected for a good clean but we managed to give her a good scrubbing up and several rinses so she was at least a bit cleaner. She was then put in a cage with a heat light to dry her off for a day before being put out again. It seems to have worked OK and she does not look so bad but I think that I may just give the show birds a little rinse instead of being quite so thorough.
We also got all the chickens wormed with vastly expensive cattle wormer (At a lower dose) and the show birds are now getting eggs and cod liver oil in with their feed.
We are not getting a lot of eggs off them at the moment as many are to young so if this continues we will have no eggs left for ourselves as the chickens will have eaten them all. ( There seems to be something slightly wrong with my method of keeping chickens.)