'Hey, you, what have you done with my garden?'

Poor old Blossom. She does hate the snow. All her favourite scratching spots have disappeared, and dust baths are out of the question. Little wriggly insects are tucked away out of reach and she can’t even peck at the grass as we haven’t seen that since before Christmas.

Blossom is the last of a long line of chickens, and has outlived all her peers (variously eaten by the fox-next-door or overtaken by old age – the last one passed away quietly in her sleep last October. RIP Primrose.). She is also a curmudgeonly bully – chickens are breathtakingly selfish and not nearly as nice and clucky as they look – so I’m not inflicting her on any new chickens just yet as she has a habit of pecking out feathers, chasing off rivals and generally being bitchy. In fact she’s the ultimate nasty neighbour – if she was a person she’d have multiple ASBOs by now.

Actually it’s quite nice having her on her own as she’s become more of a pet than a productive extension to the veg patch. I can also let her have the run of my garden as a single chicken doesn’t do that much damage in comparison to half-a-dozen scratching up plants, pecking away leaves and having dustbaths in the middle of your thyme bed. However she will have to be confined to quarters in a few weeks’ time as I wouldn’t trust her an inch after the first bulbs poke their noses above ground. There are also a paltry amount of eggs from one chicken and we’re having to buy them from the shops, much to my disgust, so I’ll have to solve the problem of how to  integrate my white-feathered hooligan with a new flock before long.

One of our regulars: Mrs Blackbird enjoying the chicken's scraps in the snow

In the mornings Blossom’s first port of call is the sliding doors which lead out onto the patio from our dining room. That’s because I’ve taken to tearing up all our scraps – everything from last night’s peas to the crust from our breakfast toast – and throwing them outside. This saves me carrying them down to the chicken run (I’m getting very hermit-like as this endless winter goes on) and also means I can feed all the poor little birds scraping by in my garden without fear of the cat (who is pathologically afraid of chickens) going anywhere near them.

So far we’ve got a thrush, a pair of blackbirds, a pied wagtail and a robin dropping by as regular visitors, all looking like puffballs with their feathers fluffed out against the cold. Feeding birds so close to the house also seems to put off big bully birds like magpies, crows and pigeons, as well as squirrels, so the littlies have the run of the place, much to our delight.

I’m hoping they’ll remember this as a cool place to hang out once summer’s come, as I need them to keep my gooseberries free of sawfly and my beans clear of blackfly, as well as clearing all the caterpillars off my blackcurrants. They can have a look at the apple trees while they’re at it and see if they can do something about the woolly aphid I found this winter. Birds in the veg garden are a mixed blessing – I seem to spend half my time keeping them off (brussels sprouts, cabbages and calabrese mainly) and the other half encouraging them in – but I wouldn’t be without them.