We’ve had the chickens for exactly a fortnight. When they arrived, the pen looked like this, complete with a fair amount of the original grass:

But since that time they’ve systematically removed all the grass and turned the ground into an arid, dusty wasteland over which tumbleweeds might plausibly drift if they managed to  bounce over the fence first.  All of which was fine last week when we had near-continuous sunshine, but with the weather forecasting torrential downpours starting today, there was a real risk of the pen becoming a mudbath.  Which almost certainly wouldn’t have fazed the chickens one iota, but us humans have to enter the pen on a daily basis too.

So last night, to the accompaniment of Spain hammering Italy 4-0 in the Euro 2012 final and immediately after the chickens had been packed off to bed (or perch), I spread the contents of two large bags of soft bark over the whole of the interior, also covering the paving slabs.  Although in this photo the end result doesn’t look any different from the mudbath that we were trying to avoid, in actual fact the surface is much more absorbent, and springy rather than squelchy underfoot:

The chickens seemed utterly unfazed by it, and indeed spent much of the day digging up bits of bark and shifting them around, which is why an entire corner of the previous surface has been exposed (bottom left).  They also seemed completely unaffected by the weather – as you can see, all four are out in the pouring rain, and it wasn’t just to say hello.

So a new chore has been added to our lengthening list: every evening, after the chickens have been locked up in the house, we have to spread the bark around so that it covers the entire pen, and every so often we’ll have to replace it altogether.  But we’ll worry about that when we come to it.

As with any other pet, there are downsides to keeping chickens, and the main thing that I’d been putting off as long as possible was cleaning out their house.  In theory, this is supposed to be done weekly, but based on the surprisingly not-bad condition that they left it in this morning, we reckon we can probably get away with a fortnightly clean-out.

Anyway, this is what the chicken house looks like from behind.  Note the bolt on the left-hand side of the left-hand picture – we added that because we thought it would be too easy for a determined fox to flip up the rather crude wooden catches and get the entire back open.  There’s also some chicken wire draped over the roof – this is to discourage foxes from climbing up the house and using the roof as a launch pad to get into the pen.  (We’re working out a less ramshackle and more permanent solution.)

The interior is essentially divided into two, with the back half subdivided further into three nesting compartments and some roosting bars.  In theory, egg collection simply involves flipping down the back entrance and collecting them from the nesting compartment(s), though in practice the first egg was laid in the chicken pen so we have to keep an eye out there too.

Here’s a better-lit close-up of the interior:

This was taken after this morning’s cleaning-out, which involved scraping out as much of the existing sawdust as possible with a Dutch hoe (as in a gardening implement, not a denizen of Amsterdam’s famous red light district) and porting it over to our compost bin, and then replacing it with fresh sawdust – I erred on the side of generosity after I noticed that one of the chickens (presumably Pearl) had been augmenting her nesting compartment with torn-up newspaper.  I also changed the newspaper under the roosting bars, something I do separately every few days as it usually gets the worst of the various substances that chickens are wont to leave behind.

We’ll also be giving the house a more elaborate clean-out every so often, including spraying the interior to kill off any red mite or other pests – which we did just before the chickens arrived in the first place.