As I too often do, this post has been sitting in my drafts folder for much too long. So a Friday night with the kids in bed seems like a good night to finally finish this one. A while ago I realized that my my post categories were heavy on the recipes and light on the other three categories. So lately I've been trying to at least add to those other three categories. Finally it is time to talk about the feathered friends at our house--technically our backyard.
If you didn't already know, our family happily cares for a backyard flock of eight egg laying hens. We've been in the backyard chicken coop club for 18 months now and are entering our second winter with our feathered girls. When we started this adventure, I never thought we'd enjoy it as much as we do. And I never thought caring for chickens could be so easy until we started doing it ourselves. Raising our hens has been an endeavor our whole family has enjoyed. And yes, we have names for all 8 of them: Rosa, Elvira, Eleanor, Miss Scarlett, Irene, Pattie, Sam and Ella.
I took the picture above a few months ago, but it tells a couple of stories. For one, there's a chicken on our back step meaning our girls free range. They sort of demanded it this spring and summer. When the spring flowers started blooming and temperatures went up, we noticed the chickens were also "awakening" from their "winter survival mode". We have two sets of 4 chickens--the older/original 4 (about 3 years old) and the younger 4 (about 18 months old). So the younger 4 started laying eggs for the first time last fall. That made them full grown hens. During the winter, we figured they just all put up with each other and concentrated on the basics: eating, drinking, sleeping, laying eggs, and staying warm. But when spring rolled around the younger 4 tried to improve their pecking order status. Two of them were especially aggressive and were pecking one of the older girls (Eleanor) so much that they would sometimes draw blood. They basically harassed her and bullied her so much she wouldn't leave the nest unless a more dominant chicken came into lay. She was pretty miserable and it was dangerous for her to be with these aggressive ones. So we started letting them roam around in the backyard. That seemed to help them get along. Eleanor had more room to spread out and get away from the aggressive ones. And all the chickens have learned to stay fairly close to the house and seem to enjoy being out and about.
