We begin again

Another brilliantly sunny day, and with less wind than yesterday. We hope for warmed bones.

Today begins our fourth season as proud breeders of the lovely Bionda Piemontese (and our seventh keeping chickens). In the next few days I'll be depriving everyone of their breakfast eggs, their lunchtime omelettes and their suddenly-starving-snacks. Instead, the eggs will be set aside in a cat-free, dog-free, kid-free spot and I hope in ten days or less (the shelf-life of a fertilised egg) I'll have enough to make plugging in the incubator worthwhile. 

And maybe, just maybe, 21 days, two candling sessions, 63 rotations and hundreds of checks of thermometer and hygrometer later, we might hear the ghostly chirping of chicks inside their eggs and the tiny tapping of beaks on shells.