Several of our friends have been part of the back-garden chicken revolution for ages, and so when some of them decided to upgrade their chicken house from v expensive to eye-wateringly expensive I jumped at the chance to buy their old housing at a knock down price.

It’s taken a few weeks to get the garden ready, and it also didn’t seem fair to stock up on livestock shortly before going on holiday.

But last weekend, with the garden and hen house sorted out we popped along to Hens For Pets out near Ikea to get our chooks. They’re “point of lay”, apparently, but it might take up to five weeks before we get any eggs.

The girls seem reasonably well settled into our garden now, scratching around the bark and hopefully avoiding the poisonous ivy and elderberries growing perilously close to the housing.

The first days, the birds seemed pretty nervous, and we could hear them clucking when cats got too close. Our own cats don’t really seem to have the bottom of their garden in their territory, but it seems to be a free-for-all for a coterie of black and white neighbour cats. Now it seems that both the chickens and the cats have figured out their can’t get through the wire of the run and although both are fascinated by each other, the chickens have stopped the cluck frenzy and the cats have stopped trying to rush the run.

The morning/afternoon routines seem reasonably easy to handle, but I haven’t done a weekly mucking out yet. We’ve only been able to fit the coop a fair way from the house, so the biggest thing I’m worrying about right now is forgetting they are there.