Can you spy the oddity in this picture? How about the chicken egg behind the bush?Which, upon looking closer, turned out to be a whole nest of eggs. It seems our chicken Austra has been laying for quite some time. We had our suspicions when her feathers grew back in completely and comb turned characteristically bright red, a sign of egg production. Then last week, we came home from a short walk and the dogs [...]

Who says a late autumn garden is dull and brown? Ours is hanging on to some color with rainbow swiss chard and greens, some of which self seeded when I neglected to pull the flowering mustard green plants. Austra the Australorp chicken regrew her jet-black feathers after molting and her comb is starting to redden up. On yesterday’s unseasonably warm evening, the sunset was full of bright hues too. Surely the color will fade or [...]

This is the face of our molting Australorp hen, Austra. Her pin-like feathers look prickly and uncomfortable. Austra is a generally affable character but molting makes her seem frenzied. I say comforting things to her and only joke about the awkwardness of her feather loss behind closed doors like every good chicken mom. Her roost in the morning appears as though a pillow exploded overnight. The nest box hasn’t held an egg for over a [...]

This week, we lost our speckled sussex hen, Sussie. Suss had not been active, or laying eggs, for a few weeks. We tried several recommended treatments but she continued to lose weight and strength. On Thursday, Alex found her dead in the coop. In life, Sussie was the most skittish and shy of our hens. She had a funky gait and I wonder if she battled a weak heart or other congenital defect. Lil loved [...]

Last month I devoured three accounts from fellow female real-food lovers. I read Kristin Kimball’s The Dirty Life, The Chicken Chronicles by Alice Walker and How to Eat a Small Country by Amy Finley. Each was part inspiration, part ‘what not to do’ and thoroughly enjoyable. Finley’s How to Eat a Small Country is the tale of a family reconvening in a foreign land from the verge of dissolution. Amy, her husband, and two young [...]

The chickens eye the tomatoes, the dogs walk all over the bean bed, and the squirrels want into everything. What’s a space intensive gardener to do? Fence around the beds. Yet every spring I resist. Fencing is ugly and expensive. It is a pain (literally, I have a hole healing in my finger from a wire poke) to install and remove. Grass is hard to cut around the edges. This year I was intentional about [...]

This is the foot of Speckles after Alex cured it for months in salt. He and Lil arranged a rock in the claw and set it aside to air dry into a Halloween decoration. In other words, ours is a very strange family. And, if you ever questioned whether dinosaurs came from birds, I submit this reptilian-like claw as evidence.