I am a great fan of recycling – and if you can reuse something first – even better. This is an excellent example. Sweet tubs – the large ones everyone gets for Christmas containing a selection of chocolates – make great water bowls for my rabbits. They are reasonably easy to clean – and you can replace them with new ones every January!
Some of the hens are still laying eggs – but two of them have gone broody. Mrs Brown is really good-natured and lets me move her anywhere but Honey is very bad-tempered and pecks me when I go near her. I have moved them to a rabbit cage so the other hens don’t bother them. Once the chicks are all hatched and big enough to hop about I move them to a bigger pen but with a shallow water bowl. Baby ducklings can also drown if they can’t get out of a water bowl.
When there are young chicks about I always put a brick in the big water bowl so little ones can get out. Dane was helping me just after Christmas last year. We had a chick that hatched on Christmas Day so we called him Jesus (he later turned out to be a girl!). Dane asked me why there was a brick in the water bowl and I answered: “It’s so Jesus doesn’t drown.” Dane replied: “I thought Jesus could walk on water!”