All the breeds you mention are pure breeds and good layers, so a mix of those should result in a good healthy laying hen. I guess Arberaker is Cumbrian for 'a carefully selected assortment'.

Never heard of that as a breed Laallee. Is it a pedigree breed or the name of a breeder of hybrids? There are a few strange sounding Dutch or European breeds that occasionally make it over to the UK- could it be from there?

I don't think linseed oil dries very well and it may soak to the outside and lift off and paint. I wouldn't use bitumen asit seals the wood and stops it breathing so condensation and mould will be an issue. Damp and mould in a coop will give rise to some horrendous respiratory infections, so that's ...

You may need a step Sally, so the chicks can get in and out of the door more easily? From my experience I would avoid using aubiose until they are 3 months old. We used it with 2 or 3 week old chicks and it cut their feet to pieces- lots of bandages required. We used to rear ours from day 7 on kiln ...

Our hens are now ancient Tweetypie, but still laying a few. You may have heard of the recent heatwave in Europe which affected us as well. It hit 38C here and that immediately triggered all the layers to stop laying and in many cases they stopped eating as well. Now it's a lot cooler (30C) I've noti...

The French government tried to pull the same stunt as the UK Hen-Jen and remove the index-linking of pensions. Faced with a €30 a month reduction this was one of the reasons for the Yellow Jacket protest movement. French house wiring is notorious Rick, the reason being that trying to balance the pha...

Well Rick, you will be surprised to learn that houses in France are usually 3 phase so the wiring is very complicated. Even worse than that they are limited to 3 KW per phase unless you pay massive amounts for more. So balancing the kettle with the immersion heater is very important or the overload ...

The LED lighting here is sold in two colours Rick. 4000K is blue-white and good for work areas and 2700K is a warm yellow and best for anywhere else. We found the former too bright for our dark house so everywhere has the latter. Our electricity is freezers and fridge mainly. The freezers are in the...

86% which I thought was very high figure for us, possibly because we have oil central heating. One thing is certain, we can't do any more. We only heated the house for three months over Winter and it's set to 16C- either side of that we had a small log fire for a few hours in the evening. It's fine ...

Hello Shadrach, from a rather warm SW France- I think you may be closer to us than we are to England. You have a similar arrangement to us, or rather what we had as we are running ours down now. We started 10 years ago and brought 28 chickens to France 7 years ago to live in 8 coops. 7 cocks but onl...