I've been meaning to blog about this for a few weeks but life keeps getting in the way! So the devils own chickens decided that the 3ft high fence really wasn't offering them enough of a challenge and the minuet my back was turned where happily hopping over it and making a bee line for my next door neighbours bounty filled veg garden! Obviously this wasn't something that could continue as at some point I would actually like to go away for the weekend but couldn't leave the escape artists in anyones care as the would take the first opportunity to bugger off.

£200 of farm fencing supplies later we planned to rebuild the whole run, from this point on the be referred to (as all the neighbours are doing) as the Lion Cage, because what else do you call an enclosure made up for nine 8ft poles!

I feel my lovely curvy blue and white coop is some what lost in all this but hey ho. At least I can now go to work safe in the knowledge that are not pecking another man brassicas to death.

Look at those steely eye little bastards, already plotting their Steve McQueen 'Great Escape' style moment.

On the plus side no foxes are jumping this fence and as we had to make the run slightly larger I am already harbouring plans to get a couple of ducks come the spring, we'll see how it goes.

A few weeks ago Rich and I managed to get tickets via the excellent Bath Film Festival to see this amazing film. I really cant praise it enough, if you get the chance to see it do! The film looks at our rather checkered history with the land and the seeds we use to grow our food, in the 20th century we have lost a staggering 94% of the seed varieties, we now only commercial use a handful. This is worrying in that we don't even really understand what is it we are losing, verities which have existed for thousands of years have been allowed to become extinct taking with them who knows what benifical properties for both us and our eco system.

Then along comes a company like Monsanto (insert Dearth Vader music here), I started reading about this company 12 years ago when we started to build our first veg garden, the shear lack of humility in the face of nature displayed by the one company astounded me and in the last 12 years they only seem to have gotten worse. The blatant distribution of chemicals in weed killers which are carcinogenic, arbitrarily advocated that people should wholesale exterminate all insect life, the good and bad for larger crop production and worse of all the patenting of seeds meaning that farmers can not collect seeds from one years crops to grow next years, something we as a species have been doing for thousands of years. It makes your bloody boil! I have always been an organic gardener, I have never liked the idea of using chemicals on something I planned to put on my plate and Im bloody glad this is a path I never ventured down.

I would highly recommend everyone see this little film, weather you grown your own or not, we should all be aware of what we put into our environment and our bodies.

I would like to thank the Bath Film Festival for showing such a great film and also to thank local organic tea company Pukka for sponsoring this film (and for the lovely goodie bag we all got on arrival!).

Ok rant ok, I'll go back to posting chicken pics in the next post!