Years on the board5
SheffieldSouth YorkshireFlock of six since 2021
Pinned up since 2021
Four years of keeping six hens in a back garden in Sheffield: building the coop twice, red mite, winter laying and light, a fox at the fence, and a tally of feed against eggs actually collected.
This is the sheet off the shed door for 2025, redrawn. Each stroke is twelve eggs. The empty end of the year is not a problem to be solved, it is what six hens in a north-east facing garden do between the middle of November and the third week of January. The best month was May with 134.
Four of them so far, each written in the week the thing happened, with the numbers as they were rather than as I would have liked them.
FlockNo. 4
A fox got into the run in October 2025. What it found, what I changed in the fortnight after, and how badly the two replacement birds were received.
Written 6 Oct 2025 · about 8 minutes
LayingNo. 3
Winter laying in a north-facing Sheffield garden, three years of egg counts on the shed door, and the feed ledger set against what actually came in.
Written 19 Jan 2025 · about 9 minutes
HealthNo. 2
Birds refusing to go in at dusk, grey dust in the perch sockets, and six weeks of treating the woodwork rather than the hens.
Written 9 Jul 2024 · about 7 minutes
CoopNo. 1
Two weekends of plywood in March 2021, eighteen months of cleaning it on my knees, and the second-hand shed that fixed most of it.
Written 14 May 2023 · about 8 minutes
Written on the inside of the door
I keep six hens on a strip of back garden in Sheffield and write down what actually happened to them, including the winters when the tally sheet stayed empty and the summer I found mite in the perch ends.