As well as renovating our own home in Somerset, we have also been extremely busy setting up a new home for our chickens.

We have recently demolished and removed most of the old buildings in our back garden using a mechanical digger for much of the work. Over the past few months parts of our garden have been transformed to become a brand new covered area for our beloved birds.

Although not yet finished it is going very well. It will be an "eco-friendly" fox-proof run to be proud of I think!

Some of the luxuries will be solar powered lights, an automatic door closure system for the birds, an automatic watering system which uses stored rainwater and a bulk feeding system.

Its gonna be good, not long to go now!

I thought it was about time that Ourchickens.com was back online - after a long time 'off air'

I had been thinking whether to revive the UK's original and premium Hen Cam, or just to let it sink without a trace.

As I am writing this we have no hens for the cam, so its not a great start!

Regulars may recall that this is due to what became regular attacks by a town fox, and we were unable to carry on because of this recurring problem.

We are now going to develop an entirely new part of our garden to keeping some more battery hens. This will take us a few months to build as can be seen by the photos, and to completely fox-proof everything.  read more »

Welcome to my first update of this website in 5 months, and my what a busy few months this has been for everybody!

In this time we have witnessed the collapse of many banks around the world, including the Icelandic banks which we had personal savings. We are extremely lucky that the UK Government are due to refund our money soon. We hope.

The Grand Pier at Weston-super-Mare spectacularly burnt down in July 2008 and a new design has been submitted already. We live not far from the seafront at Weston and this was a massive shock at the time. The whole bay still looks as though something is missing, but now we all have to look forward to the future with the new design.

We have a baby boy called Dylan. He is now almost 6 months old at the time of writing and he is the main reason this website has not been updated. He is certainly keeping us busy.

As for the chickens we have to decide whether to get some more in the future or not. We used to have some lovely friendly ex-battery hens that had been rescued from Battery Farms, and to lose these to a town fox again seems too horrible to contemplate.

On the other hand our garden is not the same without them and all seems far too quiet. Besides, the neighbours need to be able to complain about something don't they? Who am I to spoil their fun?

If anyone has any suggestions, or would like to help us build a totally fox proof run, please contact us directly, thank you.  read more »