We have had chicks in the basement in a box that fit them just fine when we first got them, but they’ve grown quite a bit in the last month. They’ve got plenty of feathers now, so it was time to put them outside (plus, our basement was starting to smell like a barn). In order to make the transition, I had to build a new house for them inside the coop. It could use a coat of paint, and come spring it will need a few nesting boxes, but it’s a big improvement over the last one.

After a day out in the new coop, I will say that the concept of ramps is a pretty complicated one for a chicken brain to wrap itself around. Or maybe they just like to stay close to the heat lamp. Hopefully, they’ll figure it out soon and learn how to scratch around for worms. Either way, Bob Dylan is happy for the company out there.

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A couple weeks ago, Hannah found an egg in the bag of cedar shavings that we keep on the back porch for the rabbit’s cage. We kind of laughed about it and thought it was a good thing she found it in a timely manner. Since then, we’ve found a couple more in there, and today we caught the chicken in the act. Apparently when I let them out to roam in the yard, she much prefers the bag of bedding to the normal nesting box for egg-laying. Maybe it’s a message that I should clean it out more often, or that she prefers the wood shavings to straw. (Though last summer we did find a couple eggs laid on the straw bale in the shed, so I think it might just be fun to have a change of scenery every once in awhile.)

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Alicia texted me this morning while I was out saying “2 eggs in the coop today”, which is exciting because they haven’t laid since October or so. Maybe it was that huge full moon last night. When I got home Robbie and I went out to collect the bounty and pose for this picture. By that time there was a third egg, so spring has officially arrived.

(Note: Right after snapping this photo, Robbie decided to drop the eggs on the ground, and one broke, so we’re back down to 2 eggs.)

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Dispatches from Paradise Volume 1

We’re spending a couple weeks in Hawaii doing a housing exchange (not to brag). Word is that it’s still pouring in Seattle, so we’re not missing much, and I’m not worried about the garden burning up. Naturally, my first question upon arriving here in Maui and seeing the red clay soil was, “I wonder how well you can compost here.” It seemed like the natural solution to the hard, arid soil, but that’s just me, I suppose.

We are staying in a house with a big lot (over an acre, I’d guess.) And a view of the ocean (not to brag.) There isn’t much in they way of gardens here (besides a pot of basil on the deck) but it has two things going for it in the farm department:

1. Fruit trees – Tangerine, banana and papaya trees on the premises. We’ve had a few tangerines so far, and there are some ripe papayas that apparently we can pick with a bamboo trimmer. (They’re pretty far up in the tree).

2. Livestock – There is a flock of 10 or 12 chickens, from a couple months old to laying hens. Plus, the big bonus, 2 sheep that look like goats. They are a little bit too friendly at times (see the photo below; they think they own the table on the deck.) Our morning routine consists of feeding the sheep (Robbie is kind of getting the hang of it), letting the chickens out to forage, and refreshing their water.

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Our chickens are back in production mode after a short period of setting (sitting on the eggs to incubate them).  Additionally our asparagus patch continues to emerge little by little.  This morning we had enough of both of these farm treasures to make a delicious breakfast.  When we get our pig we can add some bacon and make it a true farmer’s breakfast.

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The size of this egg that was laid today is ridiculous. It is at least twice as big as normal chicken eggs… there must be two or three yolks in there. The good news is, I think all of our chickens are laying again.

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This just posted on the Seattle Urban Farm Co-op listserv by Dave:

Here’s an interesting bit of chicken lore: Did you know that chickens can’t taste pepper heat? That’s right! You can feed a chicken a fresh habanero pepper, and it won’t even flinch. Lizards and chickens are alike in that manner.

Just in case you were wondering…

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We got a couple new chickens the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and I have to say it was a pretty ill-advised move considering the blood-thirsty raccoons that were still roaming the neighborhood. I spend nap-time the day before (if you don’t have small kids, that being my only free time of the day) completely securing the chicken coop. Or so I thought.

We bought the chickens at night — or something like night since it gets dark at 4 pm these days — and so we put them straight in their house and closed it all up. Much to my dismay, the next morning, there was evidence that a raccoon had indeed infiltrated the coop that night. Fortunately, the chickens were locked in their house and were safe, but it was a close call nonetheless. So I patched up the places where the defenses were breached and instituted a 4 pm “bed-time” for the hens.

The next day I had to teach all afternoon and evening, so Alicia was going to put the chickens to bed, as we call it. Her email to me explains it best:

“We need to do something about the chickens.  It took me almost 30 minutes to catch them and made Hannah cry (I made her help me and kept getting frustrated).  Our back neighbor came over and basically said the raccoons keep coming back and messing up his yard and they are coming because of our chickens.  We have to kill those raccoons.  What we have now is not a viable solution. I am sure the raccoons will be here in a matter of hours and will probably find a way in again.  Eventually they are going to get the latch open on the coop and kill these ones too.”

My response to her email was pretty classic:

“OK”

But then I decided to take her seriously (especially when she said the neighbor saw four raccoons on the coop the night before). So the next morning I called the fine folks over at Critter Control. Bob showed up with two traps, marshmallows and cherry puree for bait, and a plucky “Let the trapping begin.”

And let me tell you, leaving out marshmallows for raccoons seems to be like shooting at the side of a barn, because in the morning, both traps had captured their prey. Two down, who knows how many more to go. Bob said the record for a yard was 33 captures. (And all you left-of-left whiney Seattle liberals, present company included, don’t have to worry, because Critter Control brings the animals to a forest and does their best to reunite families once they’re captured.) While we were waiting for them to come pick up the two traps, the mother raccoon kept coming back to check on her trapped kids. This was kind of heart-breaking, but only a little. Hopefully she’ll get caught and be relocated to her kids’ new forest home.

And the upshot is, we still have two chickens that are alive.

Update: I just went outside to empty the kitchen scraps in the compost (10:14 pm) and there are two more raccoons trapped out there.

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It’s been a bad week for our chickens. A week or so ago, I walked outside to empty the coffee grounds into the compost and the chickens looked a little despondent and on-edge. I looked a little closer, and then my stomach tied in a knot — there was one of our chickens dead on the ground, with feathers scattered all over the pen. Closer inspection revealed another carcass back in the corner. It was frustrating because we had just moved the chicken coop, and I hadn’t had a chance to fully secure it with chicken wire across the top.

So that day I spent a couple hours in the rain getting everything secure, stapling chicken wire up to the fence and zip tying it together. I even buried a brick in a hole it looked like the raccoon had dug under the fence.

The next morning, there was another chicken missing. Chicken wire had been pried apart, and little openings where I wouldn’t think a raccoon could fit through proved to be ample room to invade through. There was even course grey fur on the chicken wire… evidence that the killer carelessly left behind. And the most unbelievable part was that the brick I had buried was pushed back out of the hole. Apparently those suckers are strong.

So we were down to one chicken (and it’s sad to admit this, but she was my least favorite of the original four). She took to hanging out on the porch and looking in the back door during the day when I would let her out in the yard.

Well, that daytime freedom soon became her demise a couple days later. I left to teach during the afternoon and didn’t think to close her in the coop — the raccoons had always come much later at night. Guess how that ended… Needless to say, I’m feeling pretty terrible about the whole thing. It sucks to have animals die because of my own carelessness. And I didn’t have to hear the chicken being eaten like Alicia did.

In the book “Farm City” I just read, the author catches a possum attacking her chickens and she kills it with a hoe. I can identify with that rage. I’ve been plotting borrowing the family .22 from my grandma’s house and sitting out on the back porch with a glass of whiskey and night-vision goggles; maybe some raw chicken in the coop as bait. But then I was talking to my friend Zack and he said that the legend back in Indiana is that large marshmallows will choke a raccoon. So maybe I’ll back off a little and just put some of those out in the empty coop and see if we can knock off one or two of them.

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Farm City by Novella Carpenter

Jared and Kris got me Farm City by Novella Carpenter for my birthday this year. It has a nice Bay Area connection for us, since the author is writing about her urban farm in the ghetto of Oakland, and we all met while we lived down there. It is fun to hear her talk about Berkeley and Oakland, BART and the bay, and be able to call it all to mind.

It was definitely an inspirational book; she starts off as kind of a hobby gardener taking over a vacant lot, and by the end she’s butchering pigs. The arc of ambition gains momentum, big time, and the farm seems to get away from her quite a bit (which I can identify with). Fortunately, winter comes, animals are butchered, projects completed, and things quiet down for awhile.

Reading this book makes me want to expand our farm into the livestock arena. I’ve been threatening to get some rabbits for awhile now, and Alicia doesn’t quite know what to make of it. Plus, it’s in my family heritage — my grandpa Vern raised rabbits for meat when my  mom was a kid. I love the description of butchering a rabbit in this book — you slit the throat, then pull of his pajamas. I can do that.

There are some real highlights in this book — reading about the author dumpster diving for 15 buckets of food every other day to feed her pigs, the description of pouring a box of bees into a beehive, and plenty of salivating descriptions of food (mostly meat) produced on the farm / vacant lot. Check out her blog… it’s a good read too: www.novellacarpenter.com

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Thanks to Brian for this link!

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It looks like the stars aligned and all four of our chickens are laying, because we got four eggs today! Pretty exciting news. The egg tally for all of February was a respectable 38, and by March 10th, we already had over 30 eggs for the month. Quiche, egg salad sandwiches, french toast, you name it, our menu is now leaning heavily toward it. Start sending those egg-heavy recipes!

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Does anyone notice anything funny in this picture of the chickens? On the ground? Yep, I did a double-take too when I got them their food this morning. Who lays an egg on the ground and then walks away? It’s been awhile since we got our chickens, and we are finally going to start getting some eggs from them. Needless to say, we are very excited.

When we showed it to Hannah, she insisted that eggs didn’t come from chickens, they came from the store. So her first chore is going to be Egg-Hunting, so she can get that straightened out in her head right away.

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Frozen Chicken

We got snow in Seattle last night, in the usual on-again off-again, is-it-going-to-stick-or-is-it-just-going-to-tease-us fashion. It was looking pretty slushy when we went to bed, but I woke up early in the morning and peeked out the window, just like I used to do when I was a kid, to discover a decent snowfall had stuck around, and even covered the road. But this post isn’t just about the snow, it is about chickens in the snow.

I was really curious how they would do in freezing cold weather. When I was researching heat lamps for them online, I read about people in Indiana and other ridiculously cold winter climates who didn’t feel the need to heat their coops, so I backed off my initial plans of supplying the ladies with a warm red light on all night for them. Anyway, they all snuggle together to sleep, and they can also puff up their feathers to make a nice downy layer of insulation.

This morning when I let them out of their coop they ran right through the snow to their bowl of food, but that didn’t last long. A half an hour later I looked out and they were nowhere in sight — they were back in the chicken house where it was, if not warm, at least not freezing cold on their toes (feet? talons? claws?) I didn’t see them outside all day, even after the snow melted back a little bit. So today the chickens and the humans ended up sticking to the same plan — hang out in the house and wait for things to get back to normal outside.

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We are leaving town for a few days over Thanksgiving, and, assuming it would be tricky to line up a chicken-sitter who would come over at 7 am and let them out, and then back at 5 to close the coop door, I am working on some improvements to the chicken coop. As you may remember, we got a little lax on security and it didn’t end well for our last pair of hens. So now we’ve been diligently locking them in the coop every night, but it kind of seems mean to leave them in there for 4 days. It’s a pretty small coop (the size of a big dog house, maybe), and it doesn’t get much light.

So I’m trying to make an enclosed area that gives them outdoor access but also keeps them safe from cougars and racoons.

I also installed a motion-sensing light outside, so hopefully anything sneaking around there at night will get a blast of light in their eyes and get scared off. (I have cooled off from my original “racoon poison” Google searches.)

I also installed a heat lamp in their coop. I have heard different opinions on lamps — they keep them warm (even though they all snuggle together when they sleep), the light encourages them to lay eggs in the winter… I don’t know if it’s necessary or not. Tonight was going to be the first night with it on, but after some online reading, I went out and turned it off. I think I need to switch to a red bulb if nothing else; who can sleep with a big bright light shining in your face? Or maybe I’ll try just setting the timer to run from 4 – 7 at night, or maybe 5 – 7 am? Anybody have any ideas?

It looks tight, but it keeps them safe.

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Clipping the chicken's wings

The second night we had our new chickens, Alicia went out to close the coop door and keep them safe from predators. They still hadn’t quite figured out their new home, so two of them were sitting on the floor, rather than the nice nesting boxes I had built for them. The other two were nowhere to be seen, but the peeping of young chickens was coming from somewhere. Following her ears, Alicia found two of them roosting on top of the 6-foot fence.

When there’s dirty work to be done — in this case wing-clipping — it is passed on to me. The next day around lunchtime, I rounded up the chickens one by one and clipped off the big feathers from one of their wings. I was able to walk up and just grab the first one, but by the time I got to chicken #4, she gave me a real run for my money. They get really smart about using the chicken coop to hide under, around, and through. Plus they’re pretty quick when they want to be.

The theory is that clipping only one wing throws off their balance so they can’t fly straight, and thus, can’t “fly the coop.” When the first chicken hopped off my lap after her wing-clipping, she gave a couple big flaps and landed with a thud on her side on the ground, so I think it worked.

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I was expecting to get to write a bunch of light-hearted posts about canning and our cider pressing party and making sauerkraut and all the other things we’re up to, since, as Alicia says so well, we like to pretend we’re farmers. The parts of farming that we don’t really do are all the hard parts. We don’t rely on any of this stuff, it’s more like a hobby or entertainment.

But, this morning I looked outside and wondered if the chickens were cold; I certainly was inside the house. I didn’t see anything so I went out to look. It’s hard to describe the feeling: the chickens were gone and there were grey feathers all over the place. It was like I got punched in the stomach. Was it a racoon? I’ve heard they would do something like this.

After looking around the yard and walking around the block, I don’t know much. I am almost positive that Gray Chicken is gone, but I don’t see many brown feathers, so Brown Chicken might have escaped and found a place to hide. Holding out hope that she’s around somewhere, but for now I just feel pretty bummed.

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Grey Chicken after she came home.

When your chicken goes missing in Seattle, you put up signs. Turns out she had only made it as far as the neighbor’s yard, but it took us half a day to figure that out.

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