Our Hen Crows

She is Woman, hear her Cock-a-Doodle-Do.

Her name is Mabel (the buff on the right) and lately she’s been quite the little diva. Last week when we were going though that crazy heat spell, we opened our bedroom windows at the crack of dawn to feel the cool morning air. We laid in bed listening to the surrounding roosters and our happy clucking hens. All of a sudden we heard this ‘bawk-bawk-bawk-a-doodle-do’ coming from one of our girls. Just the most dreadful, meager little crow sounding much like when our late rooster Lincoln was learning how to crow. It seems that Mabel has decided to become the resident rooster. We had read about this when we were learning about chickens, that if left to rule the roost for too long that a hen could start to act like a rooster and begin to crow. It’s a soft crow, no need to go rushing around apologizing to the neighbors like before.

Mabel, luckily acts just as much of a lady as she did before. We think actually that she might have a crush on the wild rooster down the street. Last summer a rooster got loose and made it’s home in the new subdivision a few blocks away. We had three knocks on our door of neighbors and police officers asking if it was ours. They’ve done all they can to catch it, but with no luck. It’s the closest rooster around, so maybe Mabel is ‘flirting’. Who knows.

Have you ever heard your hens ever started crowing?

Our Speciality Chard

Oh, I suppose you grow swiss chard for the leaves, don’t you? Maybe you roast them, maybe you braise them, maybe you even saute them. But not us, oh no. We grow them exclusively for the stalks, that’s where the good stuff is. So while you enjoy your dinner of supple chard leaves, we’ll be chewing and chewing and chewing on our nice fiberous chard stems…because we like it that way.

Gosh darn chickens!

Keeping Chickens from Seedlings

Last year we learned our lesson early, the chickens ate all of our spinach starts. All of them. In a matter of moments. It was a complete masacre. So the poor chickens were relegated to this smaller picket fenced yard within our yard. However they can easily jump over that, so we built up this really attractive layer of wire fencing over the pickets to make the fence higher. But still they were able to get through the fence somehow. Which means that while already watching a three year old and a one year old, I often had to go flying outside to shoo chickens out of the garden. A lot of days I’d just give up an leave them in their coop, and while that it’s a very nice coop, it just felt like animal abuse that they could run around like ’spring chickens’.

This year, I got creative. Over our new pea, spinach, lettuce, and daikon radish seedlings I put mounds of wire. First a layer of old flat wire fencing, then on top of that our big round metal tomato cages. It looks like these poor seedlings are doing time behind a prision fence, but at least it keep them safe. And the chickens can roam free and we can keep their egg yolks that insane orange color with all the bug and weed eating. We need their bug eating ability now to get the first harmful bugs out of yard too.

I don’t know if we are going to have enough intimidating wire to cover our entire backyard this growing season, but at least during this early spring start, I can rest a little easier.

Have you found any tricks to keep your chickens away from your seedlings?

We Lost a Chicken

Last Monday we lost Pearl. We noticed Sunday afternoon that there was a bunch of mud on her backside and by Monday morning when we went to go clean her off, she was walking slow and obviously bothered by something. When we inspected closer what we found was so horrific in our non-farmer eyes that we knew we would have to put her down. We think what happened is that she wasn’t somehow able to form a full egg (we had found a very gelatinous shelled egg in the coop the previous week) and that she wasn’t able to lay it, so it collapsed inside of her and well….. are you ready for this? Click away if you are eating or plan to eat anytime in the future. Anyway, her vent was teaming with maggots. It was disgusting. We did our best to clean her off without vomiting, but we realized that her problem was beyond our help.

Luckily the vet right down the road treats chickens so we took her to him and he told us what we had suspected, that we would have to put her down. Now a real farmer wouldn’t have been nearly as grossed out as we were and would have taken care of business right then and there, but we aren’t true farmers. Pearl had become a pet to us, so we took her to the vet and had him put her down. We were both sad. Sadder than we thought we would be about a silly old chicken dying.

That’s the thing about chickens, they are pea brained, they might be loud, they might bring unwanted flies into our house, they might eat all of our seedlings, but they are darling little pets and they grow on you. We’ve never laughed so much over any pet. So thanks Pearl for all of your eggs and for your antics!