Eco Updates plus Not-So-Happy Hens

 Rain Rain I am sick of Rain!!!

I really feel sorry for our hens of late as we are having so much rain. It is driving me crazy and for the first time in a long time I am really looking forward to summer. I am more of an autumn girl and although I enjoy summer I don't love the heat but right now I would be happy with some sunshine and warmth. And less rain.

A couple of weeks ago we had bad flooding and a number of houses in our neighbourhood got flooded out and so did our chicken coop.

Our poor girls. They coped quite well but things got quite wet and messy.

My husband and I spent the good part of our Saturday afternoon digging trenches and trying to steer the water out of our chicken coop. Well, my husband did the digging but I did help with other things. Eventually we installed a flexi drainage pipe down one of the trenches and out into the garden which worked really well. It took awhile but we got there and eventually our not-so-happy hens were quite happy again.

You can see here that a lot of water is pooling by the garden outside the chicken coop. We are fortunate to have drainage up the back of our section to stop flooding but water was coming down the slope and flooding into the coop. That's how much rain we had. It was the worst we had ever seen.

Oh dear, what a horrible mess. You can just see my husband in the corner trying to pull through the flexi pipe from the outside into the coop. We then dug the trench properly behind where the hens are and ran the pipe along that about a foot down, then we managed to get it out under the fence to the garden on the other side where it drained out. It worked!

You can see here it is all drained and cleaned up. We raked the dirt back over evenly and already the hens were a little happier.

Finally, a clean dry chicken coop even though it was still raining heavily. The drain was starting to work by this stage which was a huge answer to prayer.

Happy Hens! In the front of the photo you can see there is much less water pooling in front of the garden and door to the coop. We were very happy too!

We spoke to our neighbour after and he told us about some houses up the road that had flooded and there were major slips. The road was a river. We were stunned at what we saw.

I really felt sorry for the owners of this house and unfortunately the flood waters had flooded the bottom level of their home.

I am so grateful that we only had a chicken coop to clean up and deal with not our home. 

On a different note, a few weeks ago I wrote a post about how we were making some small changes in our efforts to be more eco friendly in our home. I haven't been able to do a lot but I did make one extra change and that is I swapped out our micro-cloths which I learnt are not that great for the environment after all.

I was pleased to find some natural cloths at our supermarket.

These are made from natural wood pulp and cotton and have zero micro plastics. They are brilliant. They are super absorbent and I love using them. They are actually the best dish cloths we have ever had. They are biodegradable and should break down in our compost when we are done with them, in about 9 months. They clean up easily in the dishwasher too. 

I am very happy with this choice.

Things are quite crazy all over the world at the moment and so I hope you are all safe, whether you live here in the southern hemisphere or in the northern hemisphere. Keep well and healthy.

Thank you for visiting and have a blessed week.

Love, Fiona

"For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life." John 3:16