Thelma & Louise

Last Sunday, Matt and I made the 30 minute trip across the Columbia to Washougal, Washington, where we obtained the newest members of our backyard brigade.

Introducing Thelma:

...and Louise: 

These girls are year-old Ameracaunas, just slightly younger than the rest of our flock. This is our second attempt at some green eggs, although it might be a little while; Thelma is finishing moulting, and the trauma of being introduced to a new flock might put them off the lay for awhile anyway.

Matt had brought up the idea a few weeks ago of adding two more ladies to our flock, since our permit from the county allows us seven hens, and we have a growing market for eggs, with several of my coworkers wanting to buy them from us. So we scouted around and found a place in Washougal that was selling hens for $14 apiece. 

Picking them up was a bit of an adventure, mainly due to a bad move on my part. We bought the hens from an older man with a big property on the edge of town, and we took along a box to put them both in for the trip home. The man had caught the then-nameless Thelma with a long handled net and got her into the box, and I held the lid on while he went after Louise (Matt was moving the car at the time, so someone else could get out the driveway). Louise was netted and handed to me when the man's phone rang. So I had Louise under my arm and was holding the box shut with my other hand, and without thinking of the possible negative consequences, I tried to slip Louise into the box by myself. In hindsight, more than two hands were needed to keep one freaked-out chicken in the box while inserting the second. Thelma saw her opportunity, and made a break for it. As the man came back from his phone call, he found me looking incredibly sheepish, now with Louise safely in the box, and Thelma on the lam and out of the fenced chicken yard. He ran after her as she escaped the property completely and went into a massive and dense camellia hedge beside the road. It took another fifteen minutes of Matt crawling around inside the hedge trying to spot a perfectly camouflaged chicken, and flushing her out, while the man waited grumpily at the end of the hedge with his net, and finally sprinted madly after her when she did make her exit. I spent the whole time feeling like an idiot and simply holding the chicken box shut, since the bungee cord we had brought to keep it closed was in Matt's pocket, deep inside the hedge. As we left, I tried to apologize several times, and dearly wanted to explain to the man that I was a keeper of chickens and knew their ways and just hadn't thought, but I'm sure he believed I was just some greenhorn from the city who had no idea what she was doing. On the drive home, Matt suggested that any pair of chickens resulting in such a runaway should be dubbed Thelma and Louise. Since in the movie Thelma was generally more of a hell-raiser, that name went to the beautifully mottled brown lady that led Matt on a wild-hen chase in what was virtually a jungle.

Nearly a week later, they are somewhat integrated into the flock. Louise more so than Thelma. There has been some brawling in the chicken run, but it is decreasing every day. So far Louise is jumping in to fight over the kitchen scraps with the other hens, but Thelma is rather reluctant for fear she will get chased or pecked. Ironic since at first she raised Cain and went toe-to-toe with the other hens. She must have come off worse in the end to be at the bottom of the heap now. I managed to get photos of her showdown with Goldie:

Strangely, Mimi, who was once the new kid on the block, has become the boss of the flock and is most likely to dole out punishment on the new girls. She is also the biggest of the hens so is probably the most intimidating if you're at hen-eye-level.

Well, they're here, and they're figuring out the routine of where to roost and to come running if they hear me or Matt come outside. We clipped their wings and tails when they first arrived, to be on the safe side, but I don't think they're wanting to escape as much anymore. Another week and hopefully there will be peace in chickenland and they'll all be getting along well all the time, rather than only at select moments. Here's to green eggs soon!

Our flock of seven!

Our Flock

The chickens are one year old this week, which also means that we have lived in our house for exactly a year (we brought home our little chicks on our second day here)! With our hens thriving and at the peak of their lay, it seemed appropriate to devote a post to them. (And yes, I am aware that I am now that girl who writes personality profiles of her chickens...).

The hens live on the west side of our backyard. The henhouse and attached coop sits against the house, and attached to it is the long run where they can range about without destroying our yard. Three weeks ago, we (mostly Matt) doubled the height of the fence, due to a certain daily escapee who kept flying over it (more on that below). It looks nice and tidy, if a bit like a maximum-security poultry penitentiary. Matt refers to it as Chicken Fort Knox. There hasn't been a single successful bid for freedom since we increased the height.

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The hens roost in the henhouse at night (occasionally one ends up on the roof of the henhouse and we have to pick her up and stuff her inside) and the door to the coop (made of welded wire) is barred shut from the time it gets dark till they wake us up in the morning. We haven't had any problems with raccoons yet, but we have seen them in the neighborhood, and we don't want to take any chances (they are almost always nocturnal, so not a concern during daylight hours). Despite our best efforts, none of our flock ever learned to lay in the nest boxes. Instead, they lay their eggs in the straw on the floor of the henhouse, usually in the back corner, which requires us to reach in through the nest boxes at an extremely awkward angle to retrieve the eggs.

Penny, our Barred Plymouth Rock, would probably be rated the "best" of our chickens by any county fair judge. She is big, gorgeous, quiet, and an excellent layer. She was the first of the bunch to start laying and is just a very good backyard chicken!

 "What are YOU looking at?"

Lady Macbeth, our black Australorp, has consistently been the loudest and most obstreperous chicken I have ever experienced (given, my experience is limited). She has been incessantly vocal since she was a small pullet, whining these horrible loud and drawn-out guttural growls from first light every day, when the other hens just cluck mildly to be let out of the coop, please. She squawks all the time, scolds us if we don't bring her food every single time we go into the backyard, and escaped the run every day for two weeks until we constructed Fort Knox. If she weren't such a reliable layer, she would be soup by now.

Esther is probably my favorite of the hens. She's a Rhode Island Red, and she follows me around whenever I go into the run.

She is also desperate to invade the garage every time one of us opens the door (there is a big pile of straw in there that I am sure looks like paradise to a chicken). She is petite and quiet, and lays really beautiful speckled eggs.

Mimi  was not one of our original chicks, although she is the same age. She is a Blue-Laced Red Wyandotte, and came to us in October. She got beat up by the rest of the chickens for a few weeks, but now is fully part of the flock. She is terribly pretty, I think, and also the biggest and fluffiest of all the hens- the sight of her wide, upturned white bum when she is pecking at something cracks me up. Mimi has gone broody on us twice now (none of the other chickens have).

After trying several techniques of getting her un-broody, to no avail, I came across a website that recommended dunking a broody hen in cold water in order to lower her body temperature (a hen's body temperature goes up when she is broody, in order to incubate the eggs). We decided to try it, more because it was funny than because we actually thought it would work- but it worked a treat the first time. She has now been broody again for a week, and we have started finding some broken eggs in the henhouse, so we may need a new technique. Matt is the brave soul who regularly extricates her from the nest (she growls loudly) and gets soaked when she tries to flap herself dry.

Goldie is our Gold-Laced Wyandotte. She holds the position of second-most-annoying-hen--she seems to choose one day every week on which to be very loud and screechy from dawn till dusk. We think she is Lady Macbeth's protege, and that they conspire together to irritate us with their noise. Despite my paranoia about the neighbors reporting us for the noise (we have a permit for a large flock, so the number is perfectly legal, but noise complaints are legit), that hasn't happened yet, so we're probably in the clear. Goldie hasn't gotten as big as many GLWs I've seen, but the iridescent green in her feathers is magnificent.

We have decided that our old Ameracauna, Vivian, is going to be "retired" soon- whenever Matt gets an afternoon free to butcher her. It's sad, but we try to be practical, and has laid us a grand total of two eggs (one of which was yolkless) in nine months, and the reason we keep chickens is for eggs. We've put it off a long time, but she will go, and provide us sustenance in the form of chicken stew. We are deliberating about getting two pullets to replace her, increasing our flock to seven (the maximum we can have under our permit) and thereby expanding our (very small) egg business.

Despite whatever gripes I might have about noise, keeping hens is a real joy, and I love watching them hunt around in the run, come racing down the fence whenever one of us goes into the backyard, and collecting eggs. We have learned so much in this year, and next time we build a coop and a run we will know what to do differently. Since having our hens, we have zero food waste in our house. It is nice to know that even if we let the end of a loaf of bread go stale, the chickens will love it, and we will still get food from it, in the form of eggs. They give us endless fuel for the compost pile, they love when I give them big piles of weeds from the garden, and they are our slug and caterpillar disposal system. Now that I've gone down the road of chickenkeeping, I don't think I can go back to a life without chickens in the backyard.

Do you like green eggs and ham?

It would appear that Vivian, our Ameracauna, overheard our plans to butcher her next week and decided to buy herself some time! After not laying a single egg in the almost six months we've had her (she is almost three years old now), she produced this monster double-yolker yesterday morning! We're stoked- green eggs are such fun to find, and a nice thing to add to the batches of eggs that go to our friends. Now if she can just keep them coming!

Keep in mind, my hand is quite big to begin with! This egg is fairly massive.

In other chicken-related news, our chicken-triggered door ceased to be effective about three days in, when the hens apparently devolved and forgot how to work it. They did it fine the first few days, and after that we would once again be awoken by loud squawking when they found themselves trapped in the henhouse. Instead of going to the door to get out, they now jump up onto their roosts, where they can see outside, which negates the possibility of them stepping on the pedal. We've tried several remedies, with no success. So we're back to square one, letting them out at the crack of dawn when they wake us up with their noise. Sigh. I've been dreaming a lot lately about living in the country, with the chicken run on the opposite side of a multi-acre property, far from where we (and our neighbors) sleep. 

P.S. I just went to check for eggs, and found both Goldie and Esther sitting on the nest. Yes, two hens on the same nest! Whatever annoyance they may be, chickens are also an endless source of entertainment!

This Week...

...lots of homework was done. And a lot still remains to be done this weekend.

...I managed to get my hands back into knitting, even if it was just a few rows on a dishcloth I started two months ago. It felt good.

...we took down the light on the chicken coop. It's light till almost 6 pm now, and the change doesn't seem to have affected the hens at all. We still get 5 eggs most days!

...I got my hair trimmed up again. Still loving this hairstyle.

...our little kales, arugulas and other cold-hardy greens are hardening off on the front stoop during the day. My plan is to have them in the ground on Monday or Tuesday.

...my mama has a big birthday- today! Happy Birthday, Mom! You make 60 look great!

In the next week, we'll celebrate Jessa's birthday on the 14th, and then my brother Tighe turns 29 on the 19th! Lots of birthdays to go around at this time of year when spring is just starting to show itself.

Enjoy your weekend, everyone!

Signs of Life in the Garden

I think it might be possible that we have crested the mountain of winter and are now heading downhill to spring- our garden thinks so, anyway, and I really hope it's right! . On a rare sunny day yesterday, I took a wander through the garden, and found that little growing things are popping up all over the place!

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Garlic sprouts! All that rabbit manure and straw kept them nice and warm until they were brave enough to show their heads. 

I had given up on the miner's lettuce I planted three weeks ago, after its tent was collapsed by wind, rain, and three inches of snow. We took the reemay off last week, and then yesterday I found these lovely little sprouts amid a thick layer of frost!

The rhubarb is putting up new little crumpled leaves. They look amazing up close in the sunlight.

Upstairs under the lights, my little micro greens are coming along very nicely. The potting mix I made using our homemade compost appears to be working wonders!

 

And finally, with the days getting longer, Mimi has started to lay! She's not very regular about it yet, but we get five eggs at least three days a week. Vivian still hasn't given us any green eggs, and Matt began to lobby again for turning her into soup. I struck a deal with him that we can't butcher her until we butcher our first rabbit (a fairly safe bet, it turns out, as mama rabbit offed her first litter of kits, but that's another story entirely), but now I am wondering if I might go back on that- yesterday Vivian not only broke into the garden twice, but sat on another hen's egg and broke it. She won't be around much longer if she keeps that up. 

Mimi in the sun. 

We've enjoyed two sunny (but cold) days after a week of endless heavy rain and lots of flooding south of here, but tomorrow it's back to the rain. We're going to escape it, though, if only for a day- we're headed up to Mt. Hood tomorrow with a group of friends for a snowshoeing/cross-country ski expedition!

Small Victories

Sometimes, I get weighed down by worry about little things happening here on our little homestead, and then miraculous-feeling things happen that boost my spirits in a matter of seconds.  Recently, we've been worried and very annoyed because Lady Macbeth, our Australorp pullet, has become increasingly vocal, to the point of waking us all up with her loud and incessant squawking starting as soon as the coop light turns on at 6:30 AM. Not only are we losing sleep simply due to how loud she is, but the chicken coop is about ten feet from the neighbors' house, and if we're being woken up, I can only imagine what it sounds like to them. We have threatened Lady M with the soup pot, to no avail, and are planning to take a dozen eggs to the neighbors as a peace offering (they haven't complained at all, but it would be nice to be pro-active), but the situation remains a little worrisome. She is a great layer (all four of our original chickens are laying daily- no such luck with Vivian and Mimi yet) so we don't want to get rid of her, but loud chickens in the city just don't last. If worse comes to worse, we'll probably sell her to someone who doesn't mind the noise and doesn't have neighbors close by.

However, two seemingly small things occurred tonight that make everything seem better. First, we have determined beyond a doubt that we have a second generation of rabbits on the way! The first time breeding the rabbits, back in November, didn't take, but this time it is very clear that Duchess is "in kit," so we will have new bunnies around the 15th of this month! We're finally on our way producing our own meat.

The second small victory is that we managed to trap the rat that recently decided to take up residence in the garage. Rats are the last thing we want around (besides raccoons), and after the first couple attempts at trapping it with various baits failed, we discovered today that Tillamook Extra Sharp Cheddar cheese is, in fact, the way to a rat's heart (and death). Not an entirely pleasant experience, but a very satisfying result!

Now if we can just get that chicken to shut up...

A Few Photos From This Week

I'm headed into finals week, so until it's over I'm just going to leave you with a few photos from this week. I'll be back with you sometime after Thursday evening, when I'll be giving my last presentation and turning in my final assignment for the quarter.

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Frost on the garden beds on Tuesday morning.

A collection of eggs from Penny, including the massive on on the far right, which turned out to contain two and a half yolks!

First backyard egg breakfast. So delicious. 

We put up our Christmas tree yesterday! Most of the ornaments are ones I grew up with, but my new favorites are the sailboats from Matt's parents and grandparents.

Eggs!!

I'm completely giddy right now, because I just got home earlier than usual this afternoon (i.e., before dark) so I let the chickens out and decided to take a peek in the henhouse. Guess what I found?

Three very small but perfect eggs!

Just when we were wondering if our hens weren't going to lay until spring (having your chickens reach laying age during the shortest and darkest days of the year is maybe not the best plan ever), they have given us our first completely homegrown eggs! I'm ridiculously excited at the moment- opening up the door to the henhouse and finding these little treasures waiting there for me just sent me over the moon! I'm so proud of our girls, even if they haven't figured out the nest boxes yet --all of these were in a little nest made on the floor of the main henhouse. Our original four pullets just turned five months old on on Thursday, so at least one of them is laying right away after hitting the five month mark. We hadn't checked the henhouse in a couple of days, but I'm pretty sure that these eggs are from more than one hen- I don't think it's been so long that a single chicken could have laid three times, but I could be wrong. 

I'm almost entirely confident that one of the ladies who laid these is Penny, our Barred Plymouth Rock pullet. She's been far more docile than usual lately, and a couple days ago I noticed her hanging out in the area of the henhouse where I found the eggs, well after all the other chickens had headed out into the run. I knew she was up to something! Also, today I tried the old timers' trick of getting behind a hen and putting your hand out over them- if they stop and squat, that means they're ready to lay. Penny did exactly that, as did Vivian, the two-year-old Ameracauna. Maybe now that one of the younger ones is laying, Viv will go back to laying. I couldn't get behind any of the other hens, they're all too skittish still. Luckily I don't have to go anywhere straightaway tomorrow, so I'm going to do a stakeout of the henhouse early in the morning and see if I can figure out who is laying us eggs. I brought two of the eggs inside but put one in a nestbox, and ruffled up the original nest, to see if I can't convince our mystery chicken to lay in the box.

I'm so pleased that our days of buying eggs are over. We've put in five months of work raising our ladies from wee chicks, feeding them and building them a coop, adopting two more chickens and making sure they all stay well fed and watered and enjoy ranging around the backyard. I love having them around regardless of whether they are laying, but receiving eggs just feels like such a gift right now. 

And just an update for those of you who were concerned about Mimi, the younger chicken we adopted a couple months ago, she is fully integrated into the flock and is no longer being bullied. She gets pecked and chased occasionally, but most of the time all six chooks go around happily as a flock. Our remaining mystery is to figure out how old Mimi is- she's about the same size as the other four young ones, so we think she's pretty close in age, but it's hard to tell! We did have to clip everyone's wings last week, because we kept finding them all flying up to the sit on top of the coop, which is a dangerously short flight from the neighbors' fence and a yard with several dogs.

Good job chickens, and thanks for the eggs!

A Day on the Farm

Yesterday (Saturday) we took a field trip, as it were, to Full of Life Farm, the farm that we buy most of our meat from. Jessa (Matt’s sis) came along, and we took the hour long road trip to St. Paul, Oregon, in the beautiful Willamette Valley, where Full of Life is situated. The farm is very new (about three years old), run by Bernard Smith, whose family homesteaded the property several generations ago. Bernard made the move from fast paced city life to farming after deciding to revolutionize the way his family ate, and bases his farming practices on Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farms. Matt and I try to eat only pastured, grass-fed meat and eggs from pastured chickens, and Bernard is an excellent source of both. He now partners with a neighboring farm and sells pastured beef, pork, chicken and goat in addition to eggs. We believe that the health benefits of eating this meat vs. commercially raised meat far outweigh any extra expense in it, and would far rather eat meat from animals raised on their natural diets on open pasture in the air and sunshine than from those raised in confinement, eating grain and other things their bodies aren’t built to process. Since transitioning to pastured meat, we eat meat less often (once or twice a week) and make the most of our purchases, making stock from leftovers and bones and eating small portions of a cut over multiple meals. We have also noticed that we get sick far less often and have a lot more energy since cutting processed meat out of our diet.

We first got to know Bernard and his farm about a year and a half ago when Full of Life Farm started selling at a farmer’s market in Portland. Matt and I visited the farm once before but didn’t do an in-depth tour. This time, we attended Bernard’s Family and Friends Day, and got a walking tour of the farm, met all the animals, and learned all kinds of things (and were pleased to find out we already knew the answers to a lot of the questions Bernard was asked!), then enjoyed a picnic on the lawn by the farmhouse and a performance by a bluegrass band, with Bernard’s teenage daughter on fiddle. It was an absolutely gorgeous day, sunny and about 80 degrees, and we felt right at home, tramping across farm fields, smelling the sweetness of fresh grass and clover and seeing our food roaming and grazing happily in the sun. 

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Bernard explaining the brooding houses for the chicks.

 Red Broilers free ranging.

 The eggmobile, which follows the cattle through the paddocks so the hens can till the cow droppings into the ground to fertilize and encourage the grass growth. 

 300 red broiler chicks!

 Full of Life Farm uses guard dogs that are trained to protect livestock. Two Bernese mountain dogs guard the chickens.

 Layers free ranging. The breeds here are Australorp, Buff Orpington, Silver-Laced Wyandotte, and Ameracauna.

 Matt and Jessa crossing one of the cattle paddocks. 

 A beautiful Fjord Horse at the barn.

 One of the hogs chilling out in the barn. 

 Isn't Oregon a beautiful place?

 Turkey poults (Broad-breasted Bronze)

 The goats are guarded by an Anatolian Shepherd and a guard alpaca.

 Goatlets!

We ended the day by stopping into the farm store and buying a 10-lb box of beef cuts (which we split with Jessa) as well as some pork chops and a dozen eggs. We spent $71 and have enough beef and pork to last us at least six months, not to mention some delicious fresh eggs. I am loving the look of our freezer now:

We had a wonderful time, and I feel incredibly lucky to be able to know exactly where my meat comes from and how it is produced. There is such value in farmers and grocers who provide complete transparency about their practices, especially in this culture where so much of how our food is made is purposely hidden from us; because if we did know, we wouldn't eat it.