Mash 'em up

About a month ago I regaled you with my thoughts on looking after our hens in frosty weather. I mentioned that one way to help them stay warm is to mix their food with hot water, and promised that once we had tried it I would come back and tell you all about it. Following that post the weather became increasingly mild, which rather put the idea on the back-burner for a while.

This week, however, all has changed. We had 6 inches of snow on Friday and another inch on Tuesday and the temperature hasn't been higher than 1C for many days. The time had come to put the plan into action.

First things first though - the fruit netting that we use as a roof to the run was bending dangerously under the weight of the snow and threatening to drag the whole run down with it (sorry, no pictures). We removed it. We'd have to take the risk for a few days, and hope that chickens wouldn't get out and foxes wouldn't get in (so far, so good).

Now we could get in and out, we mixed up some layers mash (a finely ground mix of chicken food for adult hens) with some hot water to make a porridge like mixture and popped it in an old bowl. They have tucked in with gusto, and have done so each morning. It has been a massive hit. Hurrah!

Unfortunately its been about the only thing they have enjoyed this week. The girls have not been impressed with all this cold weather. They've been tending to spend most of their time tucked up in the coop to keep warm and have avoided walking on snow if they can help it.
In contrast, we've been having great fun and turned a large portion of the snow in our garden into a snow chicken. I mean, why not?

How has everyone else been finding the snow? 

An icy day

Winter has definitely arrived in Wales. Some parts of the country have had snow - we haven't been that (un)lucky yet. We have had an abundance of frosty mornings though.

My understanding is that chickens aren't too bothered by temperatures around freezing. They'll live in areas that drop to -20 centigrade (certainly not something we have here). They'll happily huddle together at night for warmth and don't seem bothered by frozen ground in the day. There are just one or two little things that we have to be careful about while the weather is like this.

The main problem is that their water container has a tendency to freeze over. Some days this just means cracking the ring of ice around the bottom and flicking it out so that the fresh water from inside can flow out again. Other days the ice has been more widespread and has meant we've been bringing the whole thing in and sitting it under a warm tap in order to get it all back to normal again.

Another cold weather thing we've been thinking about is a change to their food. When topping up our supplies of pellets for the girls, we noticed they were on multi-buy with mash. As far as I know pellets and mash are exactly the same food - its just that one sort has been formed into pellets to make it easier to handle. You can treat them the same and feed either as dry food, but you can also mix the mash with water for a porridge-like consistency. Several other chicken bloggers have said they make up warm mash on particularly cold mornings and we thought that sounded like a good but potentially messy idea. As yet we haven't found time to give it a go though. Maybe as we're home more over the Christmas holidays we'll give it a try - I'll let you know how we get on.