mercedes, new chickens and a broody american..

We had an avocado tree that had grown from a seed and was about as tall as me. Note the past tense. The culprit is in the background there, innocently munching on grass like she was supposed to in the first place. I was fortunate enough to have picked most of the best leaves off the basil to be frozen in readiness for the coming months before Mercedes decimated it too. Lucky she is such a sweetie, otherwise I might be tempted to listen to my father-in-law's espousing the virtue of goat at (or perhaps more correctly, on) the table.

We have a new clutch of chickens to keep the old boilers company. They haven't started laying yet but when they do we will have an absolute glut of eggs. If the broody american doesn't steal them. She has been sitting on her eggs for two weeks now and we found that she was stealing the other chook's eggs to add to her clutch. Oscar's dad came over the other night with a special light and we checked all of the eggs to see if there were actually any chickens inside them. Of the 12 she was sitting on, only two have chicks. No disappointment for me - who want's a hundred chickens anyway?