At last week’s backyard chicken basics class, I admitted that our coop is a jumble of reclaimed parts and pieces, including two wooden boxes ‘saved’ from alley trash. Lil contributed a little whimsy with some Angry Birds pig faces painted on old rubber stepping stones. Our coop will not win any design awards but...
Read more →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...
Read more →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...
Read more →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...
Read more →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...
Read more →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...
Read more →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...
Read more →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...
Read more →Two birdwatchers building a birdhouse… …and two orpington chickens happy to be free from theirs. Added to Five Minutes for Mom Wordless Wednesday and Dagmar’s Momsense WW .
Read more →I like a good cooking challenge. When I heard about Saucy Mama’s Fabulous with Five contest for food bloggers, I had to give it a shot. The competition required creating a recipe with a Saucy Mama condiment and only five additional ingredients. Having an abundance of backyard chicken eggs, I devised a simple and...
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