Classes on poultry and canning

I've been invited to teach two classes, one on urban poultry and another on canning.  I'd love your input on the curriculum.

Each session is to be an hour.  Classes will have 20-30 people who are new to urban gardening.  Ages range from 20-somethings to octogenarians.  My goal is to point people to resources and to encourage them that these are things real people can do.

At the end of each class I want the participants to:

• be able to evaluate if owning chickens/canning is an activity that they can manage
• have access to reliable resources online for learning more independently after the class
• know what to do with their eggs/canned goods

URBAN CHICKENS: The Gateway Poultry

• City rules & regulations
• All about coops: basic elements of a coop, where to put it in your yard
• Healthy hens: predators, parasites, lifespan, dealing with problems
• Where to get chickens and resources for how to raise chicks
• Eggs: how many to expect, what to do with them, selling
• Potential visit from my hens, Animal and Curry

PUTTING UP: Intro to Canning

• Canning versus freezing
• Canning types: boiling water bath versus pressure canning
• Safe canning guidelines and where to find them
• Where to get produce for canning (if not growing your own)
• What to do with your canned goods

What do you think?  Having just an hour limits me from being able to actually do any sort of hands-on activity.

What do you wish you'd known about having urban chickens or canning before you started?

Update on molting hens

I posted earlier this month about our girls going through a hard molt.  Here are a couple of pics of them.

Front to back: Animal (standard blue cochin), Dozer (barred Plymouth Rock), and Nugget (Rhode Island Red).

The girls are so pretty, soft, and fluffy after a molt.  Animal's lacing (the appearance of an edge around her feathers) is quite striking.  We've noticed that the girls' colors change slightly with each molt.  Nugget's head and tail are considerably darker than they've ever been.

Curry's tail is still rather stubby but she's so soft right now.  Her head, too, is darker than ever.

Croquette, on the other hand, looks like dookie.  She holds up one leg to conserve heat.  She wouldn't let me near her to take any decent pics. 

Scooter, the top of whose crest you see below, was proud to show off her new white plumage.  Polish cresteds are the dorkiest birds, I swear.

The australorps are, hands-down, the softest things I've ever touched.  Once Croquette's new feathers are fully grown, she'll be black and green and gorgeous.  Until then, however... not so much.

Eggs in winter

I used up the last of our girls' eggs this morning.  We're officially relegated to store-bought eggs until the ladies kick into gear again. 

Last year we got no eggs from December until sometime in April.  This year some of the girls starting molting in August, which was very early for them.  I took it as a signal that our La Nina winter was to be very cold but thus far it's been fairly mild.  I suppose we still have several months to go.

The cochin & Polish cresteds molted first, followed in close succession by the production birds.  As was the case last year, the australorps (black hens) were the last to go.  Also like last year, they look miserable: they're ratty and have broad swathes of bare skin in 40-degree weather.  We've found, too, that our normally friendly birds shy away from being touched when they molt.  It's got to be an uncomfortable process for them.

This is a pic I took of Croquette about this time last year (click link for more pics).  She and Miss Piggy, our other australorp, look like this again now.  Croquette has taken to standing in the middle of the yard, one leg pulled up to conserve heat, looking cranky.  There's nothing we can do for her but offer our sympathy.

When Gene and I first got chickens a few years ago, we made the decision not to force them to lay during the winter.  I'm rethinking that choice now, especially since they eat 50 pounds of feed each month at a cost of about $17.  Freeloaders.  Frankly, it's annoying to buy eggs at the grocery store when you know there's a flock of hens in your own yard.

So how come hens don't lay in the winter?  If you think about it from a biological perspective, it makes perfect sense: it takes warmth and ample food to raise chicks.  Neither of these things is available during the winter months so when the hours of daylight dwindle to less than 12 hours, hens' laying tapers off until it stops completely.  As the hours increase in the spring, the production of eggs follows.

Modern chickens have been bred into two categories: ornamental and production.  Ornamental birds, like our cochin and two Polish, tend to lay less frequently, go broody (i.e. desire to hatch eggs), and "switch off" for a longer period during the winter.  Production birds, as the name implies, lay more eggs per week for more months of the year.  Our nine-hen flock has six production birds: buff orpington, black star, Rhode Island Red, barred Plymouth Rock, and two australorps.  They're the workhorses of the group.  Other common ornamentals include "silkies" and others.  Most of the birds you find in feed stores are production birds, though ornamentals are increasingly more common.

We've definitely seen the difference between our breeds.  Beaker, one of our Polish cresteds, spent much of the summer trying to hatch the other girls' eggs or even sitting in an empty nesting box.  When she finally quit being broody, she laid a half-dozen eggs, then molted.  We'd get another standard cochin in a heartbeat - they're sweet, gentle, curious birds who don't mind being handled by children - but probably won't get any more Polish.  The Polish are noisy, neurotic, and poor layers.  That said, they're easy to catch because they can't see anything!

As an aside, we used to have a bantam cochin, who was also gentle with kids.  Tribble's short legs, feathered feet, and our rainy climate meant that moisture wicked up onto her body all winter.  She hated the rain and we constantly struggled with mite infestations on her.

Getting back to my point about laying cycles: it is possible to get the hens to lay during the winter.  We've decided that the girls will get a much-needed break through December.  They laid well last summer and we believe it's important to give their bodies a rest.  Come the New Year, we're going to put lights in their coop to encourage production.  Twelve to fourteen hours of light are needed to get them to lay.  The sun sets around 4:30 p.m. here in January, so we'll turn on the light in the coop from 3:30 until 7:00 a.m., then allow the natural daylight to take over for the rest of the day.  It's best to have the light in the morning to avoid the coop going dark before the girls have had a chance to get onto the roost.

Have you used supplemental lighting to encourage egg production in your backyard flock?  How were your results?

Signals of fall

I've started to notice something over the past few days.

First, I saw it in the coop.

I had my suspicions of what was happening but I was in denial.

Today I came home to this, and I must now face the facts.

Can you see what's weird?  Not quite?  Here's another angle.

How about now?

This morning there were no feathers on the ground. 

Every single feather has a yellowish tinge on the tip, meaning they all came from the same hen.  This hen.

Our Buff Orpington, Curry, is molting.  I think that Croquette may be molting as well.   She went through a really hard, ugly molt last winter.  That's her on the far right:

This means 3 things.

First, Curry and Croquette probably won't lay another egg until spring.  Hens need about 2 months to recover from a molt.  As a full, hard molt - as it appears Curry is experiencing - takes a month or more.  Three months from now it'll be December.  Our girls took the winter off last year (arg).  Therefore Curry & Croquette are out of operation until April or so.  Bummer.

Second, I'm going to stop selling eggs.  Our hens went through really hard molts last autumn and we had a long, cold winter.  We got exactly zero eggs from December until perhaps April. 

Third, and most importantly, falling feathers signal autumn's arrival. 

Fall is here.

Has My Pet Chicken gone mad?

The most recent newsletter from My Pet Chicken mentioned something about a neighbor of Oprah's getting eggs from her.  Strangely, I can't relocate the article on the MPC website, nor is there anything on the interwebz about it.

So Oprah has chickens.  That's nice.  Lots of people have chickens named Oprah.  That's nice, too, and ranks just as highly in my top 100 (that is, not at all) daily news bits.

What caught my attention, more than the Oprah mention, was the newest slate of MPC offerings.  Has the Oprah association gone to their heads??

Let me tell you how much I love MPC.  I ordered some chicks from them two years ago.  With just one exception the chicks arrived healthy, the customer service was top-notch, and the adult hens are healthy and beautiful.  All in all, I've had great experiences with them.  Even their goof of accidentally sending a box of 14 chicks to my office in Seattle was handled well on their side.  I did have to ride the bus home - an hour-long trip - with a box of peeping chicks on my lap that day, though.

OK, so back to Oprah and My Pet Chicken.  Are they crazy??  Their new product line has two things that seem completely beyond the reach of your normal, middle-income chicken owner.  Sure, a bajillionaire like Oprah can drop money on a hobby like it's nothing but what about the rest of us?  Will there actually be a market for these items?

First, they're offering an automatic chicken coop door.  Anyone who has trudged twice daily to a coop to open it in the morning and lock it at night knows how tedious this chore is.  And anyone who has lost birds to predation knows how critical it is.  I get all that.  But seriously... this product costs $215, or $350 if you want the solar-powered one.

As much as I get sick and tired of this twice-daily chicken chore, I'll keep my $350 thankyouveddymuch.

Their second new product is a solar-powered self-propelled chicken tractor.  For the uninitiated, a "chicken tractor" is essentially a portable chicken coop, which allows you to change the chickens' location on your property regularly while keeping them confined.

Just how much does it cost?  $2,000.  Seriously, two GRAND for a chicken coop that holds just 6 birds.  So much for chickens being an inexpensive hobby.  I couldn't find shipping costs but I imagine those are extra.  Your chickens are going to need to lay a ton of eggs to repay you for this extravagance.

Finally, there's this stuff.

$20 for "chicken caviar".  Maybe I'm going through a stingy, cheap-ass stage in my life (probably the case) but chickens don't need this stuff.  They might "go berserk" for the chicken caviar, but they'll also go berserk for moldy cheese, a beetle, or a snail.  If you want to spend $20 + S&H, go for it.  But not me. 

The way to a chicken's heart is through its stomach.  If you want a "friendlier flock" go to the pet store and buy a few dozen crickets.  Or chop up some cheese to dole out.  Give them lunchmeat, cheap cat food (it has more grains in it and is pretty good for them), cut up cooked beef kidney or crushed hard-boiled eggs, shells & all.  They'll go crazy for anything that's high fat and high protein.  They also love breads in any form, leftover pizza, cold onion rings, cereal, chips, berries, melons, and grapes.  Don't bother buying treats for chickens unless you have an extra $25 hanging around that you just have to spend.

Learn a second language

Any time Gene and I watch a movie and there are chickens in the background, we always chuckle about how noisy the movie chickens are.  It's such a cliche.  Watch any western or medieval movie/tv show and invariably there's a loud clucking flock of chickens somewhere, bawk bawking like the entire flock is laying eggs at the same time: buck buck baw-KAWK!

We got our first batch of three chicks Memorial Day weekend in 2008.  Coincidentally, that's also when I met my good friend, Dena.  The law in our county states that you must buy a minimum of six chicks at once from feed stores.  It's meant to prevent people from buying cute baby animals they can't care for and will eventually kill due to neglect.  Dena was advertising on Craigslist to split a 6-pack of chicks.  I responded and we've been friends ever since, both of our flocks growing as well.  Though Tacoma has about 200,000 residents, Dena and I have found over the years that we know a number of people in common.  Small town, indeed.

I digress.

Of that starter flock, Gwen and Nugget are still with us.  We now have nine hens and I can tell you that hens are fairly low on the noise spectrum, making far less noise than the neighbor's dogs that never stop barking.  Ever.  The exception in our flock is the screechy Polish Crested named Beaker.  That neurotic bird can make a ton of noise when she's feeling insecure or the others are picking on her.

Last weekend I headed for the front yard to do some weeding and get my veggie garden started.  I took the dog - who at some point rolled in something horrific and later required a bath - and allowed the hens to come with us.  It takes them a while to build up enough confidence to stray very far from the bushes against the house but invariably a few always do.  This time I looked up and saw Gwen and Croquette scratching in the dirt where I'd just weeded.  Later in the day Miss Piggy, Curry, and even Dozer joined the dog and me on the parking strip.

I enjoyed the company of the animals while I weeded.  The dog kept watch (when she wasn't rolling in stinky compost somewhere) while the hens aerated the soil and did their best to reduce the various bug populations.  As I worked I listened to them and realized that I can recognize each individual just by her unique "voice".  It reminded me ot an article I'd read some time back that a researcher had discovered that chickens make about 24 different vocalizations. 

Without seeing the girls, I can tell you when Animal is getting picked on, when Croquette has found a black beetle (she's the only bird of the whole flock who makes that particular noise for that particular bug), when a broody Beaker has ventured out of the nest, when Dozer is watching the others, when Curry wants to be picked up, when Nugget is alarmed by the dog, and when Gwen is frustrated that I'm moving her away from where I'm swinging a hand tool.

From inside the house we know when an egg has been laid and when the girls are stressed or scared, such as when a falcon is parked on the telephone wire above the yard.  In the morning we can hear them in the coop, softly clucking their discontent at being locked up while daylight's burning.

Not only does each situation have a unique sound assigned to it, but each bird has a distinct voice.  When Curry wanders into the house we always know when it's her because of her deep "braaaaawkk".  Croquette is our little chatty Cathy, constantly cooing and blucking to us.  Dozer is also chatty but in slightly different situations.

If you have chickens, spend some time learning their language.  You'll come to understand them better and enjoy them that much more.  Besides, it's fun to listen to them and know what they're doing just by the sounds they make.  I'm not sure I could identify the 24 unique sounds, but I could probably come close.

As I was wrapping up my yardwork chores, my neighbor drove up, rolled down his window, and started to chuckle.  I looked up to see what was going on when he said, "you look like Doctor Doolittle with all those animals in the yard with you." 

I looked up to see Rosemary at the top of the little slope, surveying the domain.  Five hens were tilling the soil of the slope right beneath Rosemary, fluffy butts on full display.  And Mira, my 14-year-old black cat, was sitting primly on the stairs, eyeing the hens warily (she hates the chickens with a passion).

The sight warmed my heart and me chuckle, too.

Here are some sample chicken noises:
A broody hen
Hen showing her chicks where food is
The "egg song"
Content hens (eating)
Dust-bathing hens (and this, my friends, is what destroys your yard)

How to muck out a chicken coop

Hey there.  Yeah, I'm still around.  I've been taking a breather lately and deciding what - if anything - I wanted to do with this blog.  After a highly flattering kick in the butt from Karen over at The Art of Doing Stuff, I'm getting back on the horse again.

To be honest, I haven't felt like doing much of anything lately.  I've barely cooked, haven't knitted in weeks, and haven't worked in the garden beyond last month's work spree.  With the rain we've been having, that last one is kind of a given.  This is a busy season at work, with multiple evening events each week.  I've had nights where I've dashed home, let the dog out long enough to do her busines, then gone back to work.

(more after the jump)

Crying uncle

I spent much of the weekend doing much-needed gardening, even taking Friday afternoon off work because the rainy weather had given way to a day of relative sunniness. I put in 3 days of exhausting labor but am proud of the results.

Two of the three parking strip raised beds are prepped and ready for spring. The dirt in all three beds settled quite a bit in the past year so I sacrificed one bed to fill the others. I'm pleased to see how healthy the dirt has become: it's filled with wriggling earthworms.

In one of the beds I planted new asparagus roots, potatoes, and green onions. As soon as I get my hands on some strawberry starts, those will go in with the asparagus. Last year I planted asparagus on my front right slope in the hopes that it would be a good fit for that spot.

It wasn't.  In fact, not a single shoot has appeared this spring.  "Uncle!"

I'm going to just give up on that section of the yard.  It's never been a good spot for a garden and is subject to winter erosion.  It won't be hard to let it return to grass - it's nearly there.  (OK, truth be told I'm only going to give up on the left half of this slope; the right half will host my artichokes, more rhubarb, blueberries, and whatever else I feel like planting there.)


Front yard, right slope


Getting back to the raised veggie garden: the second bed contains over-wintered leeks and celery. To them I added some lettuce, spinach, and bush peas this weekend.  I'll do successive plantings in the coming weeks to stretch out the harvests of each.  After I get more dirt for the third bed I'll  plant tomatoes and tomatillos in it.  I'm hoping we'll put in 2 additional beds on the parking strip this spring as well.  Likely plantings include parsnips, basil, carrots, squash, eggplants, and other stuff yet-to-be-decided.


Veggie beds on the parking strip


The left slope in the front yard, which is a combo of herbs and flowers, is newly weeded and even got an infusion of plant starts from my grandma's yard. 


Front yard, left slope

The backyard, after a winter of being ravaged by chickens, got my full attention on Sunday.  Unfortunately my work made me feel like the movie "Groundhog's Day": didn't I just go through this?  A year ago I rototilled the large chicken run, planted grass, and put fences around the more vulnerable plants.  By fall the grass was gone and many of the plants were barely clinging to life.  The hens' larger run was a disgusting mud pit and we still haven't dealt with the drainage issue.

View from back porch


On Sunday I did what I could to make the yard better.  I again tilled the soil, this time by hand, raked, and replanted grass.  I transplanted the remaining plants to other parts of the yard and left only the shrubs and raspberry plants.  The rest will be grass.  It'll be good for Rosemary to have a little more room to crap and run.  The chickens are relegated henceforth to their smaller run, which is probably 7'x15'.  They've been bitching to be let out ever since.


View of backyard from garage toward coop (out of view)

I've officially given up on having a vegetable garden in the backyard.  Last summer did me in and I just can't handle the disappointment of it.  I tried for several years, years that included some very nice summers, to grow things like artichokes, peas, and green onions.  Every attempt was mostly a failure.  Last summer was unusually cool and yet the parking strip garden out-performed the backyard's best years.  "Uncle!"

View of new cut garden

My former veggie garden has yielded way to a cut flower garden containing mostly things from Grandma's yard.  I even got a start from her rhubarb, which I believe was itself a start from rhubarb on my great-grandparents' farm on Fox Island (my great-grandfather gave WA State the 40' of waterfront property where the bridge lands, and if you know Fox Island, the flag pole you can see from that spot was erected by my ancestors).  Keep your fingers crossed that it survives. It's always been a prolific plant and I'm hopeful it'll do well at my house.

Has this rhubarb lasted 4 generations?

The new cut flower garden is joined by a birdfeeder from Grandma's yard, and will be bordered by more grass.  I had gotten rid of over half of the grass since buying this house nearly 8 years ago, during which time my life has changed dramatically.  I hadn't even met Gene when I moved in, and hosted just 2 of the dozen animals that now live here with us.  Having a little more grass will make our itty bitty yard seem more open and make it more welcoming to our friends' young children.

I still feel kinda bad about planting grass, though.  But sometimes you've just gotta cry "uncle".

Poached eggs on toast

Poached eggs on toast have long been one of my favorite meals.  Our hens are laying again after a 6-week period of no eggs.  Some of our girls stopped laying in late October or November, meaning that they took over 3 months of vacation.  It's about time they started paying their rent again.  Not only are we eating our own eggs instead of storebought ones, I'm able to sell eggs again.

Hint... hint... if any of my Tacoma readers want naturally nested, cage-free, free-range, humanely raised eggs from hens with names, let me know.  At $4/dozen they're less than at the closed-for-the-season Broadlway farmers market.

And to you midwesterners selling your eggs for $2/dozen, shush. This is the city.

Anyway, poached eggs are simple and quick to make.  You can go from conceptualization to digestion in maybe 8 minutes.  With the egg already perched on top of the toast, there's no chance of that delicious, runny yolk going to waste.  Just a little salt and pepper makes this the perfect meal.

Poached eggs
Eggs
Toast

Bring water to a low boil (hot enough so that it bubbles but isn't violently boiling) in a saucepan.  Crack your eggs into a small bowl or cup.  Slowly tip your cup into the water and allow the egg to slide in.  Since the water is on a low boil, the egg shouldn't go far. 

Some people swear by the swirling water method, which I think is pretty silly.  Don't bother.

Cook your egg to the desired doneness.  For me this took maybe 3-4 minutes.  I've always loved runny, goopy egg yolks.

Scoop the egg out of the water with a slotted spoon and serve on hot toast with salt, pepper, and/or hot sauce.  Heck, go crazy and dump some hollandaise on there if you need the extra calories in your diet.

Bread: Poulsbo Bread
Eggs: from our yard, I think Beaker & Dozer laid these

UPDATED around 5:20 p.m. - Friends have been asking me on my personal Facebook page how I did this.  [shrug]  I've never had poached eggs go wrong so it never occurred to me that they could.  I think that the key lies in a low cooking temperature.  Don't let your water come to a full boil.  See this link for pictures of water at various cooking temps.

Something my dad always does, which I never do anymore, is to submerge the entire egg (in shell) into a pot of boiling water for roughly 30 seconds.  His eggs always turned out well.  In retrospect I think it may function to coagulate the egg white a bit, helping it stay together in the water while being poached.

Bringing home babies

This, my friends, is the time of year when many people start thinking about bringing home a box of peeping babies.  In fact, one friend (hi, Steph!) is getting chicks THIS WEEK and another is considering it (Arin - do it!).  The local feed stores are starting to advertise chick availability.  I love going to the feed stores and watching the massive bins of feisty chicks.

Photo from http://reneefinberg.blogspot.com/

Because we've already done this several times, G-man and I have agreed that we won't get any more chickens until our flock of nine has diminished somewhat.  Combine the facts that we we don't plan on killing our hens as their productivity declines and that we carefully protect the girls from predators, and it's going to be a while before we have any babies running around on the kitchen floor.

I miss having baby chicks.  We had three batches of them over two summers and they're so much fun.  The're sweet and inquisitive, fearless and easily exhausted.  They run around chasing each other and then fall asleep standing up only to tip over or splay out.  They are, in a word, adorable.

To be fully prepared for having chicks, you'll need a few things:
1. chick feeder and chick feed
2. chick waterer
3. heat lamp with red bulb (Why red?  First, the red light is less glaring and since it'll be on 24/7, this is a good thing for the babies.  Secondly it helps prevent the chicks from picking at each other because they will pick at blood and feathers, potentially harming weaker chicks.)
4. pine (never ever use cedar with birds) shavings
5. A large box.  If you can get a watermelon box from the grocery store, use that.  It'll seem too big at first but we found that our chicks could fly up over a foot after a week, and to nearly 2.5' just a week later.  We used a massive plastic tote with a screen over the top.
6. Paper towels.  Those little buggers crap everywhere.  The poops are small but powerfully stinky.
7. a perch of some sort, even if it's just a block of wood
8. a pie tin and parakeet grit - introduce this around a week and the babies will gobble it like mad

My Pet Chicken has an excellent resource for how to take care of your chicks.  Read it!

After having raised three batches of chicks here's some of my advice:

Frequent handling of babies will ensure friendlier adults.  One of our favorite things was to allow the chicks to fall asleep in our hands and then just hold them.  If you're up for it, wrap a towel around your neck and let the babies burrow into it.  Keep paper towels close!

Monitor household animals closely.  Our geriatric cats liked watching the chicks but weren't interested in hunting them.  The same can't be said for younger cats or dogs.  A friend's dog killed her chicks in just moments.

If there are chicks running around on the floor, shuffle your feet or don't walk around at all.  Curry ran and slid under my foot when she was maybe two weeks old.  I was wearing slippers but still injured her foot.  The sound she made when it happened was horrifying.  Luckily I only lifted a couple of scales and didn't break the bone, but it bled quite a bit and swelled up enormously.  She favored her foot for a few days and I felt like a giant lumbering asshole.

Before you give the chicks any non-feed food, present them grit for a day or two.  After that, introduce them to grass, lettuce, fruits, berries, tomatoes, scraps of cheese or meat, and anything else you can imagine.  If you want to laugh your head off, get a few crickets at the pet store and watch the babies play chicken rugby once they realize it's food.  The downside of this is that my chickens now see any plastic bag as a potential source of crickets.

The cute phase lasts only about three weeks.  Then one day you'll come home from work and find that your fast-growing baby chickens have turned into Skeksis.

Image from http://www.onlyforever.com/d_KiraPics.html

They grow so quickly that you can literally see differences over the course of just a few hours.  Leave in the morning for work and they have just two feathers.  In the evening they'll have four.  It's weird.

Having chickens can be very rewarding but they are a large responsibility.  They're highly amusing and will eventually present you with a regular supply of eggs.

Do you plan on getting chicks this spring?

A drawback of urban farming

Yesterday evening I was sitting in my warm, cozy home.  It was peaceful and the resident quadripeds were all snoozing.  I was working intently on my newest knitting project, Fiddlehead Mittens.  I've never done colorwork before and there's a fairly steep learning curve.  Hubbie wasn't home from work yet.

The weather forecast was dreary: high winds, heavy rain, and chilly temps.  But I was snug as a bug in a rug!  The storm hadn't hit the area yet but wasn't far.

All of a sudden the storm arrived with much fury.  I could hear the wind howling and could see the boughs of the giant fir tree across the street whip around.

I called G-man to warn him of the weather because he was driving home.  He told me later that the car doors felt like they were going to get ripped open as he drove across the Narrows Bridge. 

Tangent... maybe you've heard of this bridge?  It fell down quite famously in 1940, just four months after its completion.  The video is chilling.  Check out 1:31... can you imagine the noise that must have made?

According to family lore, my grandfather drove across it that morning.  At the time he was a brand new father of a 2-week-old son and weeks shy of his 23rd birthday.  After the bridge fell he was stuck on the Key Peninsula and had to drive back to Tacoma via Olympia - a long way. 

I digress.  After calling the hubster, it dawned on me: I hadn't closed up the chicken coop yet for the night.  Our neighbors lost 8 hens to noctural critters this fall and we've been doubly careful about the safety of our girls.

I pulled on a pair of boots, slogged out to the coop, counted heads, filled the feeder, collected the eggs (yay: 3!!) and locked them up tight for the night.  The whole time I was thinking: my friends without chickens are at home, warm and cozy in their houses but silly me, I'm out in this awful storm locking up the stupid birds, all for the sake of fresh eggs.

We love having chickens, we really do.  And I've talked about the downsides before.  But... bluuuurgggg... fresh eggs don't make it suck any less when you're tramping through mud and the rain to shut a chicken coop.

There's a naked chick in my back yard

Can you pick out the molting hen?

People always are interested - or at least politely feign interest - when I talk about the quirks of having chickens.  For example, many are suprised by the following factoids:

1. Some types of hens don't lay eggs in the winter while others do. 
2. Chickens will eat nearly anything, including meat.
3. Chickens molt (shed all their feathers) and get new ones in the late fall or early winter.
4. A molting hen doesn't lay eggs.

Croquette (center) is supposed to look like Miss Piggy (left)

About 2 months ago I opened the coop one day to find a "puddle" of feathers under one of the girls.  She trailed feathers after her like Pig Pen from Peanuts trails dust.  It was weird.  One after one, each of the girls molted.  Egg production tanked and at one point we were getting just 3-4 eggs per week.  Mind you, we have 9 hens.  After Gwen, one of our favs, molted, I thought they were done.

 The silvery things are called "pin feathers".  As they grow, feathers emerge from the skin in a sheath, which eventually falls off to expose the new feather.

I was wrong.  Croquette started to molt in earnest. 

What's funny is that her feathers are coming in the same way they did when she was a chick: in 2 vertical lines that look like suspenders.

Croquette, who'd had a light molt earlier in the fall, must have decided that her plumage need a total revamp after seeing how great the other girls looked.  As an australorp, she's got the softest feathers I've ever felt.  They're not coarse, as are Curry's feathers (our buff orpington).  They're even softer than Animal's, our blue cochin.  But now they're all over the yard... and very very few are on her.

The brown areas are the old feathers & the black areas on her wing are the new ones.  Her neck is covered in pin feathers.

Of the 9 molts we saw this fall, Croquette's has been the worst by far.  She actually has exposed skin, which none of the others had.  The poor thing, I picked her up the other day and she was shivering.  I've been thinking of going to Goodwill to grab a cheap stocking hat, cut holes in it for her head & wings, and put it on her.  If it weren't raining so much I would.

The poor girl.  If she didn't crap everywhere, I'd let her stay in the laundry room to be warm & dry.

I'm eager for her feathers to grow because I cringe every time I look at her.  If you looked like this, you wouldn't want to lay eggs, either.

Pot braise

A friend of mine at work and I were talking a while back about grass-fed beef.  She told me that friends of hers had raised a head of cattle in their pasture and that she and her husband had bought some of the meat.  It turned out that the friends hadn't really known how to raise cattle and the resulting meat was way too lean for my friend's tastes.  So she offered it to me for the chickens.

Why not?  Free meat for the girls.

After watching my girls go hog wild for the first piece I figured that I could cook up the second roast for us.  If we didn't like it, the hens would not object to a bovine feast.

Unfortunately for them, the pot braise was simply too good to share.  Sorry, ladies.  No more cast-off meat for you!

If you find yourself with a tough or super-lean cut of beef, braising it will bring out its best qualities.  Why?  Cooking lesser or tough cuts of meat in a long, low heat allows the connective tissues to break down into yumminess.  Here's a simple way to cook up that piece of tough, organic, grass-fed beef.  Your house will smell divine and the leftovers will be even better.

Ingredients
A hunk of beef large enough to feed your crowd
Olive oil
1 onion, chopped
4 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 cup flour
1/2 bottle red wine
Twig of fresh rosemary, diced to yield ~3 tbsp, or 1 tbsp dried rosemary
1 quart beef broth
As many carrots as you feel like eating
Salt and pepper
Tomatoes: either get 1 can of plum tomatoes (with liquid) or rough-chop 2-3 fresh ones

Method
1. In an oven-proof pot, sear the beef over medium-high in some olive oil.  You'll know the beef is ready to flip when it releases easily from the pan bottom.  Remove from pan and set aside.

2. Add more olive oil, maybe 2 tbsp or so, and decrease the heat to medium-low.  Add onions and cook until brown and translucent.  Then add the garlic.

3. Throw in the flour.  Stir it around until it coats the onions and starts to turn brown, too.  It'll happen fairly quickly.

4. Now you get to deglaze the pan!  See all the brown gunk on the bottom of the pan?  When you add the wine - roughly a half bottle - you're going to lift up all those brown bits and they'll add flavor to the sauce.  Because of the flour, the sauce will thicken as well.

Be generous with the wine.  It adds flavor.

5. Stir well.  But not too well.  I got overzealous.  Thank goodness this is not a good shirt.  Once of these days I'll be better about wearing an apron.  I'm so bad about that.

6. Once the wine is incorporated, add the broth.  Then throw in the carrots, rosemary, tomatoes, salt and pepper, and put the beef back in.

7. Plop on the lid and put the whole thing into a 275-degree oven for the rest of the day.  If you check the meat in 2-3 hours, you'll find that it's rock hard.  Leave it for another 2-3 hours and those connective tissues will dissolve, leaving you a hunk of meat that falls off the bone and smells amazing.

Serve with mashed potatoes or a crusty bread.

Optional serving method: cook with potatoes, mushrooms, and any other root vegetable you like.  Parsnips would be divine.

This could also be transferred into a slow cooker at step 6.  Cook it on low for a mid-week meal that's waiting for you when you return from a long day at work.

The girls next door

The other day I was putting away my recent batch of tomatillo salsa in the canning room. 

(OK, "canning room" is a misnomer.  It's a wall of shelves in what will be, eventually, a 1/4 bath.  The teensy room also serves as the kitty litter box and animal food storehouse.  I just realized we should call it "The Can" when it's all done... someday.)

Anyway, this room has a small window that looks out over the chicken run and into the neighbors' back yard.  Right now the grape leaves are very lush, giving us some privacy from each other.

It was a sunny day when I was putting away my jars and so the window was open.  The chickens were cooing and making soft noises when suddenly I heard a man's voice:

"Bock bock bockbockbockbock BOCK!"

Croquette, our resident chatty Cathy, replied with her own version of whatever the guy had said.

They went back and forth for about a minute while I stood in The Can, chuckling to myself.  I looked outside and could see a man in the neighbor's yard, his body obscured from the waist up by the grape arbor.  He couldn't see me inside my house for the same reason.  I didn't recognize his voice and am guessing he was a friend of the neighbor's 19-year-old son.

All 9 of our hens were standing at the fence, staring up at him.  He probably thought it was because he was talking to them but in reality, they know that talking humans generally mean food.

I listened to him chat to them for a moment more, then I said loudly and clearly out the window, "I think it's really cute that you're talking to my chickens."

There was an awkward moment of pause while he digested the fact that I'd been eavesdropping on his "conversation" with my girls.  He muttered something about the diversity of the hens as I retreated back into my house to finish up some chores.  Even now, a few days later, I'm still laughing every time I think of this guy hitting on the girls next door.

Poor guy.  I'm sure he was mortified. 

But dang, that was funny.

Egg production down the tubes

Our hens are exploding.

One morning I went to the coop to let them out and there was a puddle of yellow feathers beneath Curry.  She's in a hard molt, which means that her body is replacing all of her feathers.  It's weird how her feathers seem to all fall out at once.

This pic was taken a few days into her molt.  You can see how scruffy she looks.  Since the pic below was taken she has lost all of her tail feathers. 

The normally friendly bird doesn't want to be touched or picked up.  A friend of mine suggested that maybe their skin feels like our fingers do when we've cut a nail too close to the quick.

A few days later, I opened the coop to find a puddle of grey feathers: Animal now looks like a wrung-out grey rag.  She's lost quite a bit of her roundness and seems unhappy, too.  Poor thing.

Just this morning there was a new feather puddle in the coop, this time a black one.  Scooter, our silly little Polish, is molting.  And her Polish sister, Beaker, is broody again. 

Molting and broody hens don't lay eggs.  Gwen, the head hen who suffered a broken, then infected, toe last spring doesn't lay anymore either.  Well, that's not quite true.  Her "eggs" lack shells.  I keep hoping that she'll molt because I've read that a molt will reset the egg shell production in a bird with this problem.  But if it doesn't, Gwen will continue to have a home with us as a pet.  We won't kill or eat her.

That effectively takes 5 of our 9 hens out of the laying rotation.  We're getting just 1 or 2 eggs/day, though I've had an occasional 3-egg day.

Miss Piggy looks terrible and I haven't seen one of her eggs in a while.  I've noticed that the molting hens stop laying about a week before starting to lose feathers so it's pretty likely that her glossy coat of feathers will start falling off pretty soon, too.

Laying:

• Nugget
• Croquette
• Dozer
• Miss Piggy...?

Not laying:

• Scooter
• Beaker
• Curry
• Animal
• Gwen

For now I'm hoarding eggs.  We've got about 5 dozen in the fridge but I'm not selling any more until I'm confident we'll have a regular supply again.  We've only have 1 other bird go through a hard molt and we didn't get eggs from her for about 3 months.

Weather forecasters are predicting a La Niña winter for the Pacific Northwest, which means cold and wet.  "In the rainy Pacific Northwest, La Niña winters seem to bring even more rain and snow than usual."  If the girls' hard molts are any indication of the winter we're going to have, I'm awfully glad for the food I've been preserving and for my 3-mile commute!

Tastes like chicken

We've been buying all of our food at the farmers markets.  My favorite vendor is Lisa from Lucky Pig Farm and her adorable 7-year-old son named Calvin.  Lisa is so friendly and talks lovingly of her animals and farm.

G-man and I rode our bikes to the market and I decided to get some chicken from Lisa.  Unfortunately I got a flat tire on my bike.  Luckily there's a bike store right near the market, so I left my paid-for chicken with Lisa while my tube was replaced. 

When I returned to get my chicken Lisa was busy.  I enlisted Calvin to retrieve my chicken, then G-man and I rode home.

For dinner we'd decided to cook the chicken and accompany it with roasted corn and potatoes from our yard. 

G-man roasted the chicken and I never saw it until it hit the plate.  When he served it I asked where the drumsticks were. 

"There weren't any," he told me.  "It was just the breast meat."  I scratched me head. confused: the chicken I'd bought had had legs and wings.  "It wasn't 2 pounds, either."  I'd bought a 2-pound chicken.  2+2 wasn't equalling 4.

Oh well, the meat was hot and on our plates, so we dug in.  It was good and tasted like chicken.

The next day Lisa called me: Calvin had given us another customer's rabbit loin.  Lisa had frozen it for us and would bring it to the next week's market.  She told me that Calvin was horrified and had cried because he didn't want me to be mad at him.  I'm sure that he has seen some people's faces when they walk by the stand and cringe at the "fresh rabbit" sign.

Calvin and I hugged and made up the next time I saw him.  I assured him I wasn't mad at all.  Hey, I've lived in France, home to equal-opportunity meat eaters!

Tonight we're going to eat that chicken I bought.  I've seen it: it has 2 legs and 2 wings and it's definitely a chicken.

Recent egg recall

The recall of millions upon millions of eggs got me thinking: are the eggs from my flock safe?  I believe they are.  I tell people they are.  But to be sure, I contacted MyPetChicken, which is where I got my chicks, to ask if they certify that their hens are salmonella-free.

Here's their response (emphasis mine):

Thanks for contacting My Pet Chicken. We test Salmonella-pullorum-typhoid clean, and are H5/H7 AI monitored.  Salmonella is more of an issue with factory farmed birds, because the conditions they are kept in are simply terrible.  In fact, this isn't an illness that passes hen to hen at all, but is usually passed when hens eat rat droppings.  Yuck.

Presuming you are keeping your hens in clean conditions with fresh food and water, it is doubtful they would contract salmonella.  A hen sick with salmonella would be immediately obvious to you: weak, purple-combed, diarrhea, reduced egg production. The illness was probably obvious to those at the factory farm, too--even if they didn't notice one more symptom of the many in their abused hens, surely they would have noticed the drop in production--so it's sort of terrifying to think they just kept selling their eggs.  Worse, the supplier of the two factory farms on which the recent outbreaks occurred apparently has a long history of violations:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/22/egg-recall-supplier-violations_n_690400.html
If you are worried that your hens somehow have contracted this illness, you can always have them tested, but my guess is that eating your hens' eggs is probably the safest thing you or your friends could do.  Actually, this salmonella outbreak on a commercial factory farm is another good reason to keep your own hens, because you can monitor their health personally, and you can control what feed they eat and the conditions they live in.  You can see when they may need medical attention.  If you know anything about factory farms, the surprising thing here is not that there was an outbreak, but that there aren't many, many more.  Those poor chickens.

Best,
Lissa
http://www.mypetchicken.com/

I can confidently say that my hens are all healthy, as evidenced by perky appearances and alert behavior. 

And so, yes: my hens are salmonella-free.

Dog + Chickens

While we haven't yet committed money nor signed a contract with her breeder, it's pretty certain that we're keeping Rosemary.

How do you deny a face like this?

Or resist this stubby little body?

Rosemary is fantastic with the chickens, all things considered.  She's a very sensitive dog and has been very well trained.  It takes very little correction to stop her from chasing or even really looking at the chickens.  I take her with me every time I go into the run to let the girls out of the coop or lock them up for the night.  She's on a short leash, of course, but it's going well. 

The chickens are starting to trust that she's not going to eviscerate them, though the Polish are still easily spooked due to their limited vision.  Overall the girls have really relaxed when she's nearby.

Here are a few of them watching Rosemary last weekend.  They're alert - you can see that several of them have their necks are slightly extended - but not freaked out.  Some of them pretty much ignore her, which is what we want.

Here's Dozer, our barred Plymouth Rock, watching Rosemary explore the yard. 

They definitely give Rosemary lots of space.  If she moves too fast or in an unpredictable manner they're pretty quick to get away.  In this pic she was more interested in eating the grass than getting after the chickens.

Last weekend she pushed the gate (pictured above) open while I was cleaning the chickens' waterer.  Granted, Beaker was able to push the gate open when she was broody, hence the bungee in all the pics.  I turned around to see her in with the girls, just hanging out.  Gah!  I shooed her out as fast as I could without scaring the girls and any potential crisis was averted.
We'll continue to monitor the chicken-dog interactions very closely so that we don't get complacent.  As good as she is with the chickens so far, she has still shown interest a number of times in chasing them when they spook.  That could simply be her herding instinct - corgis are herding dogs, believe it or not - but she hasn't earned our trust with the girls yet. 

In time we'd like Rosemary to help guard the hens and keep them in their area of the yard.  But for now the interactions are strictly monitored.  Chickens, who don't tend to flock in the same way that waterfowl do, might drive a herding dog bonkers.

For now I'll be happy if I can get her to stop eating the chickens' crap!  I've never had a dog who is so interested in other animals' fecal matter. She's either eating it or rolling in it.  Bleh!

But she's still pretty darn cute and she's a pretty darn good dog.