Chick(en) Stuff

Ten new additions to this wanna-be microfarm!

I’ve wanted another flock of chickens for years. Ten years, to be exact, ever since we had to give away our last flock before moving (the first time) to Slovenia in 2015. I became a bona fide chicken lady way back then and haven’t felt complete since.

If you have the space and the right perspective, backyard chickens just make sense. Those little dinosaurs handle kitchen scraps with efficiency, produce nutritious eggs, provide rich nitrogen for the compost pile, and offer hours of entertainment watching them scratch around or run. Chickens running are genuinely funny.

I really enjoy keeping chickens, and I’ve been asking for another flock since we moved here four and a half years ago. For whatever reason, we hadn’t made the move to get another bunch of baby chicks, and I reluctantly decided perhaps now wasn’t the time to be adding to our responsibilities — so many things were up in the air, and I wasn’t in the mood to put more roots down until we made some serious decisions about our future. Then my husband’s uncle found himself with a bunch of baby chicks to rehome, and despite my protests, I came home to nine baby chicks in a box in my basement gym. I won’t describe my reaction here, but just know we got through it. :/

Ok, so chick meltdowns aside, we raised them in our basement (turned the big airplane dog crate into a makeshift brooder), found new homes for, and harvested the 4/9 roosters we ended up with (life is not fair for a rooster — we actually tried to keep one but he became so aggressive, especially toward my youngest and our dog that we decided it was too risky so he went to a neighbor), built a coop out of materials we already had (except for the wire mesh), ordered 5 more chickens from a Slovenian chicken farm, successfully introduced them, and now we’re finally collecting eggs daily, though not always (or ever) in their beautiful nesting boxes. In fact, the preferred nesting place, seems to be the basket we use to haul firewood, right by the front door. We’ve been catching two birds trying to lay their eggs at the same time in that basket, and it’s quite the soap opera.

For the coop, we found a simple design online and used it. Luckily, my husband is a builder of homes, so building a chicken home was in his wheelhouse. However, the run has been a different story, as 5 of our chickens happen to be excellent flyers, and we haven’t had the heart to clip their wings or a plan to net the top of their run. So we have chickens all over our tiny property, pecking, scratching, pooping, and generally being hilarious. Not so hilariously, they have decimated my unfenced garden. However, I’m not as panicked as I would have been last year or the year before, because most likely, there will be some big garden changes next year, and perhaps they’re just helping me to accept that. Plus, another result of those recently made big decisions is that their new coop will have to be moved (won’t be too hard, thanks to the way it was built) to another part of the property.

The eggs are beautiful, tiny (for now), and deep orange. We feed them a feed we buy from the farm store, and the forage around all day. In general, here in these parts, chicken keeping is much less precious than we like to make it back home (though I appreciate the romance of a beautiful coop, chicken swings, and special fermented feed). It’s easy and rewarding.

The best part, though (even better than the eggs) has been watching my girls, who live in a community of farmers, be so excited to have their very own livestock to care for. I’ll often catch a kid lying in the hammock with a chicken on her lap, both totally content with life. It reminds me of my first flock and how they’d jump on my lap as soon as I sat down on a chair in their run. They may be mini dinosaurs, but they’ve certainly got little personalities that make me smile. And after all of it, I’m grateful to have them.

Our tiny wannabe micro-farm will be growing soon, hopefully with the addition of a LOT of little creatures and an exciting new gardening setup, which I hope will seriously increase productivity and efficiency. We’ve got a big learning curve in front of us, but I’m looking forward to all of it.

Are you chicken people? What’s your favorite part of keeping backyard chickens?

P.S. I did order wooden eggs to encourage more nesting box laying, and they arrived today. Amazingly, one chicken laid a real egg in the nesting box just hours later. Success.