Dumber than a Bag of Hammers

Ever since we got a pet that's actually quite clever, the chickens have seemed more stupid than ever.

That's why I really appreciate this New Yorker piece by Simon Rich, which features a conversation between two free-range chickens. I think all you chicken aficionados might enjoy it.

...

“Hey, someone refilled the grain bucket!”
“Is it the same stuff as yesterday?”
“I hope so.”
“Oh, man, it’s the same stuff, all right.”
“It’s so good.”
“I can’t stop eating it.”
“Hey, you know what would go perfectly with this grain? Water.”
“Dude. Look inside the other bucket.”
“This . . . is the greatest day of my life.”

...

Chickens make terrible gardeners

I know you all have plenty of volunteer tomatoes, squash, and other whatnot's growing in your compost bins and we are no different. However, this year we discovered a volunteer (we think) squash plant in the chicken's pen area. Unfortunately we will never know what variety it is because the girls just can't keep from gnawing at it. If they only knew how much food they could get I'm sure they would leave it alone.

Chicken Tractor, or, Meat Sounds

The chicken tractor is built. It only took a few hours to do, and now we can finally put the chickens to work on something other than breakfast. It would be nice to let them completely free range, but we have neighbors who would think that's a bad idea. What we plan to do is toss the ladies in the tractor every morning and park it on a bare garden bed or under some trees*. After years of neglect, there is a fair amount of bad shit crawling about this place and we, with the chickens' help, aim to improve the situation.

*Have you ever heard the sounds a chicken makes when it eats a really fat grub? Imagine someone eating a raw steak with their mouths open. It may not be as loud, but yeah, it's nasty. I just have to remember that the slurping makes the eggs taste better. Shit, that doesn't help at all.

Meet n Greet

Today, I took the kitten out to visit the chickens for the first time. I was hoping for some cute antics but, alas, the chickens were terrified and the kitten learned to hiss.

Feathered Chain Gang

When Meg and I are in the garden we bring the chickens along to do some weeding and bug hunting. They never work where we want them too, but they're always good for a few laughs.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Squawks and Freaks Out

Although our chickens usually keep themselves quite busy in the compost production department, this weekend we put them on weed-eating duty in the garden. The idea was that, since the chickens generally try to eat everything in sight, we'd let them loose in the garden where they could chomp on weeds and bugs until they put themselves into food comas.

That idea didn't really pan out. Even though the garden is about 1200 square feet, the ladies chose to hang out in the same 4x8 bed that Kelly and I were working on. Bertha, specifically, thought that she could provide the most help by tap dancing in the tray of compost we were using to fill in the holes of our transplanted seedlings. That was actually no help at all.

We decided to change our approach. It became obvious that we should have built a chicken tractor to keep the ladies on task. As a weak substitute, we dragged out a big cage that we built a few years ago to keep a groundhog from eating our cucumbers. The cage only had room for one chicken to comfortably move around inside and Stella, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, got volunteered for the position. She was really pissed and she strutted around the cage with her chest puffed out, making noises like she was going to attack someone. We ignored her and hoped that she would calm down and start eating bugs.

She didn't. Instead, she just stared forlornly at the other chickens, who were still running around like idiots.

Stella ate no bugs, and she became increasingly pathetic as she stood and watched the other chickens enjoying their freedom on the outside. I didn't know that chickens had enough emotional complexity to become despondent, but apparently they do. It was clear that Stella wasn't going to get any work done, so we let her out after a couple of minutes.

Interestingly, she seemed to be scared straight by her ten minutes in confinement because soon after her release she was leading the other chickens on a weed-eating expedition.

Chores and Chickens

Last year we extended the garden, tilled, and double dug all of our raised beds. Thankfully all of our hard work paid off, because the only planting prep work we've had to do is pull weeds. What's especially fantastic is that the number of beds that actually need to be weeded are few. Last year this was our potato bed and it is now lined up for green beans, which will be planted in about a month.


The chickens, the nosy ladies they are, sought a suitable spot for inspection.

No Varmints Allowed

Last year we learned that rabbits can squeeze through incredibly small spaces. Unfortunately our lesson had to be made at the sacrifice of our entire soy bean crop and a good amount of our fall peas. I can say with vexed determination that I hate those wabbits.

To avoid further fury, Meg and I added a section of two-foot high chicken wire around the entire perimeter or the garden. The space between the wires of the original fence is about two inches and the chicken wire is, well, chicken wire. To add some extra protection we left a few inches of the fence at the bottom to bend out and away from the garden. We're hoping that this will deter burrowing.


The project took us a couple hours. My hands got all nicked to hell, but I'll live. Tomorrow we plan to plant our brassicas and I am confident those bastard varmints will have to forage elsewhere.


The chicken pen shares a fence line with the garden so we had to barricade their little play area, too. They took an invested interest in everything we did. I'm sure they could give two shits about their increased safety; they were more intent on pecking at anything that moved.

Look at this mess.

This is the weird, rubbery ghost of an eggshell that was blowing around the floor of the chicken house this morning. At first I thought the ladies were pulling an April Fool's prank, but no. Someone just laid a stupid egg. The insides of it were glopped on the floor of the coop, and there was no yolk, so I just kind of covered it up with pine shavings so the birds didn't eat it. I've said it before and I'll say it again: damn chickens.

Meg & Kelly's Eggcellent Adventure

Since we were visiting people this past weekend and everyone had eggs all over the place for Easter, we decided to loot some refrigerators and do an experiement. Or, should I say, an eggsperiment.

I conducted the eggsperiment using the steps of the highly scientific Scientific Method, as listed by Wikipedia.


Define the question:
How much more kickass are our chickens' eggs than gross white store eggs or organic, free-range store eggs?

Gather information and resources (observe):

Resources: My mom stole the white egg, and we stole the organic, free-range egg from my mom. The huge egg came from our birds, obviously. Information gathered: Our chickens lay huge eggs.

Form hypothesis:
Our chicken's egg is gonna taste sooo gooood. Conversely, that white egg is gonna taste like crap.

Perform experiment and collect data:

L to R: store bought free-range organic egg, white egg, two of our chickens' eggs

Analyze data:
The free-range organic egg was alright. It looked basically like our eggs do, except that the yolk was pretty runny. It broke when I flipped it. The white egg was very watery and stringy. The yolk was runny, and the white part was so thin and watery that it started to smoke and get crispy as soon as I put it in the pan. It also smelled like hell. Seriously. If our chickens were to lay something that reeked like that when it was cracked open, we would have eaten the chickens by now. Ugh. Our chickens' eggs were big and bright and fluffy, as usual. They smelled fresh and nice. I didn't eat the white egg. I scrambled it up and put it on the porch for the outside cat. He didn't eat it either.

Interpret data and draw conclusions that serve as a starting point for new hypothesis:
Conclusion: Our eggs taste awesome. New hypothesis: No one should buy those crappy white eggs. Everyone should have a chicken.

Publish results:
Does this blog count?

Retest (frequently done by other scientists):
Kelly cooked himself two eggs for lunch. He said they were delicious. Original results confirmed.

Chicken Down!

We've got a gimpy chicken.


Apparently Steveo looked outside this afternoon and saw two chickens frolicking in the yard and the third laying under a bush. He went to investigate and found that the chicken in the bush was Stella, who proceeded to hop to him on one leg. When we went outside a bit later and found them all hanging out, Steveo caught us up on the situation. Chickens are not the most graceful animals, so Stella looked pretty pathetic hobbling around on her one good leg.

We couldn't see any visible injury—she didn't step on a nail or anything—so Kelly held her while Steveo felt around on her leg and her foot. She didn't seem like she felt pain in response to anything he did to her, and aside from general chicken resentment at being held and poked, she didn't react much at all.


So, we aren't really sure what happened to her, nor do we know how the chickens ended up outside of their pen. My theory is that they were feeling adventurous and Stella kung-fu kicked the door of the pen open, hurting her leg in the process. Or maybe not.

She's mobile and she can hop up into their house, so we think she'll be fine. She also puts her pain aside and breaks into a lopsided, limping sprint when you trick her into thinking you've got food. Damn birds.

Sorry 'bout the shaky camera work ... I was trying to outrun the chickens.
They move quick when there's food involved

42¢ a day

Two months ago we bought a 50 pound bag of chicken feed from Organics Unlimited. Their operation is big enough that they need a fork lift, but small enough that the plant manager helped us carry out one the bags from our recent order.

Every aspect of the operation is done on site, which is tucked into a Chester County farm area about 20 miles from our house. I'm not sure where they get all of the ingredients, but there was a very intense smell of roasted sunflower seeds when we pulled up to the plant. Sunflowers aren't local around here, so I'm guessing that not all of the ingredients can be supplied from the neighborhood farmers.



Each 50 pound bag costs about $25.00 and it can feed our three ladies for two winter months. That averages out to about 42¢ a day. The amount of feed we have to give them goes down considerably in the summer when they are on a much preferred grass and bug diet.

They don't lay as many eggs...

...but they are easier to keep in line.

Anatomy of a Chicken Photo

In the comments of this post, Danni (farmgirl_dk) asked if the chicken on top of the compost heap is our dominant chicken, asserting her place in the pecking order. She's not. In fact, the opposite is true. The chicken in that picture is Bertha, the most easily bullied and generally compliant chicken. We initially tried to take the photo with Stella, the dominant chicken. It didn't go well.


It was a pretty typical chicken photo shoot, actually. For every funny chicken photo we post, there are approximately 137 awful and blurry chicken photos languishing in my iPhoto files. Essentially, the chickens can stand only a few minutes of interaction before they spaz out. Here's a sample of what you've been missing:

Adventures in Composting

Today was the day for rotating the leaves in our chicken composter. With the aid of our feathered friends we were able to collect all of the scratched and shat upon leaves into an impressive mountain of rich compost. As we said in the last update, we're guessing that the first string of warm weather to roll through will roast this stuff into black gold.

We thought that we may have lost a lot of mass from the months the leaves spent in the pen, but the material we gathered today was able to heap over four yard cart loads. Once it was all out, the pen looked a bit barren. I can't wait until we plant rye in there; it should grow like crazy. In the mean time, we have about twenty bags of salvaged leaves to fill the pen at least two more times. We'll probably post on the refill tomorrow. With the weather warming, we shouldn't have to keep them in the pen as long as the first go around.

I must say that the cache of compost from this first haul was impressive. We have five compost bins and all of them were filled to where it was running out the front. I'm sure we'll use it all once the garden gets going this spring. The compost we get from rounds two and three will serve as a refresher for the garden in the summer and fall.

Chicken Composter Update

The leaves in our chicken powered composter are beyond ready to go into a more traditional compost bin. Using the chickens to compost our leaves has been a huge success. I suspect that as soon as the temperatures rises above 60° Fahrenheit , the final break down will be quick. The only snag to the experiment has been that the ground, and the leaves along with it, have kept us from being able to gather them up with any hopes of reasonable success. As I may have said in a previous post, at least one more round of leaves will go into rotation before spring. Afterwards we're thinking of planting rye in the pen. While the rye sets, the chickens will earn their keep in the garden scratching through the beds before we start planting.

Lazy Post

It's way too late for a thoughtful post. Instead, enjoy this old photo of the chickens in a tree.

Achoo

Don't you just hate it when you're eating breakfast and you get some chicken food up your nose


and then you sneeze in a really undignified way with your tongue hanging out and everything


and your friends just keep porking out like nothing even happened?



I hate that.

Al Fresco

Just as I was headed out to feed the chickens on Friday morning, our light rain turned into a torrential downpour. I grabbed the camera so I could get a couple photos of the chickens looking like drowned rats. Unsurprisingly, when I got down to the coop Bertha and Peggy-O were standing knee-deep (do chickens have knees?) in muddy leaves, and Stella was standing on the roof. I put one bowl of food in their house and another on their porch, though since the rain was coming in sideways it didn't offer its usual protection from the elements. Still, Bertha and Stella took it as an improvement and started eating.


But this was the surprise of the day: in an unprecedented display of intelligence, Peggy-O actually got out of the rain and ate inside.

Fruit Salad

Before we left Pittsburgh last week, Judi and Dan re-gifted us with a fruit basket they'd gotten. They were already working through a giant crate of apples, so I guess they were at their fruit threshold for a while. Though the basket itself was a keeper and will be doing harvest duty in the garden this summer, the fruit was unfortunately kind of crummy and quickly turned soft and gross.

So we chopped it up and fed it to the chickens.


The talking in the background is Kelly saying, "Fruit salad!" and then, "They laid three eggs."