Chicks have hatched

On my sister's birthday, 9th August, one of our broody chickens hatched some Maran eggs. It's now 14th August and I still don't know how many chicks she's hatched because she's so protective of them. Soon now, she won't be able to contain them and I'll be able to count them. They'll start to bounce about, standing on top of her or peeping out from under her wings. They are sweet as chicks – dark brown with a little blob of yellow on their heads as if they've had an encounter with some splattered yellow paint. Meanwhile our other broody hen is due to hatch her eggs any day now. She's sitting on some Lavender Araucana eggs and the chicks should be yellow, if I remember rightly, although as adults they are a blue-grey like our fine cockerel and the two hens we hatched out on a previous occasion. We are both hoping for more girls than boys because we can't have fighting cockerels and we don't like 'dealing' with them if we have too many. In accordance with the colour of the plumage, the Marans will lay dark brown eggs and the Araucanas will lay blue ones. This doesn't always happen – our much loved Wyandotte, Whinnie, layed a creamy egg, and she was a pheasant colour.

Meanwhile my glorious wildflowers, which were all poppies in June, have moved into the cornflowers and are heading into a mix of red and yellow flowers now. They were an experiment for the position beside the steps down to the lawn, which we shall be repeating next year. Julien has plans for a desert-style area above them, so it will be an unusual but interesting mix that should work year round.