What happens when a girl from Miami and a guy from Chicago move to a 118-year old house in small-town North Carolina and care for our rescued chickens.
Well, the pen is finally done, in spite of the off and on weather, and the girls are now in their new home. The stable looks great and I hope they love their new yard area.
Sadly today is a crummy rainy day so I'm sure they'll get used to their covered area, eat some grain and hay and keep warm!
Here are the first shots I took from inside while they were just getting used to their space. I love them already... they're so good. And Petal is still so tiny. She's just like a kitten! But she loves to frisk and gambol around and nibble on everything.
The stable space is pleny big enough for them. I hope the yard area will be too.
In the winter, the hens don't lay eggs every day. In fact, after their Fall moult which was a few months ago, they have not really laid at all. But just as the winter solstice passed, Meg started laying again. She hasn't been having an egg every day but so far we have 4. Gertie isn't laying again yet, as far as I can tell.
One of the questions we a lot, now that we are vegan/vegetarian, is what do we do with the eggs from our girls.
Well... the simple answer is, we eat them.
Or, mainly the hubby does. I don't eat eggs a lot ever anyways. I mainly used them in my baking. But since I made the switch to a fully vegan diet right around the time they paused in their laying, I've been looking at substitutions for when I'm baking. So it hasn't been a big deal.
There are many reasons why people choose to become vegetarian or vegan. One of my main reasons is to avoid participating and supporting an industry that subjects animals to cruelty and torture. I don't need eggs (or meat or dairy) and I don't want it enough to make the animals pay that kind of a price. I just can't justify it any longer and I can't continue with it now that I'm aware of it.
As I mentioned before, our 3 chickens were rescued. We keep them because we like them and we like taking care of them. We aren't going to eat them and we didn't get them for the eggs. We aren't going to kill them or get rid of them when they stop laying - which could be tomorrow or years from now. The girls are going to lay eggs as a part of their natural cycle. We are not raising them for breeding chicks either. So, because we know where the eggs came from, how the hens are treated and what their future is, we feel comfortable eating the eggs. Outside of know that about any food, I try not to risk it.
Of course, we are lucky in that we are able to do this. If we were living in Florida still, or even another location here, this would be difficult to impossible. If that were the case, I do not forsee us eating eggs at all.
But we don't.
We live here. We have the girls (and Napoleon, of course). We do our best to take care of them and to avoid causing harm.
Erik Knutzen and Kelly Coyne started keeping chickens in their Echo Park backyard a little more than a year ago. The two are co-authors of "The Urban Homestead," a handbook for city dwellers who want to live off the land as much as possible, and the couple were interested in taking their urban farming experiments a step beyond harvesting artichokes, blueberries and zucchinis. So last summer they purchased four chicks, and now they are obsessed."I used to think it would be so great to bring the laptop outside and just watch the chickens and work," Knutzen said. "But I can't get anything done when I'm out here because I can't take my eyes off the chickens. They are hypnotic."
Any urban dweller interested in living green has good reason to keep chickens. They reduce garbage by eating your leftovers mixed in with their feed, and they will pick off those irritating caterpillars destroying the vegetable garden. Their poop is an excellent composting aid, and they will even trim your grass and weed for you, if you let them. Added benefits: farm-fresh eggs right from the backyard and the amusement of impressing friends with an interesting new pet -- and for many it is a pet, not a future entree.
"Bottom line, chickens are a lot of fun," said Dave Belanger, publisher of Backyard Poultry magazine, who has seen subscriptions more than triple since he launched in 2006.
Because neither Knutzen nor Coyne had kept chickens before, their venture began with lots of research on message boards and websites. They learned it's best not to name the chickens and get emotionally attached (they did anyway), and that chickens are social animals, so it's better to have more than one (they have four). Then there was the whole question of constructing a coop to ensure maximum chicken comfort and safety.
"I was talking to a friend of mine who used to be an architect who keeps a lot of chickens, and we think that architecture students should have to design chicken coops," Knutzen said. "It's the perfect way to practice how to meet a client's specific needs."
An infinite number of chicken coop plans are available in books and online, but most share the same concept of four zones: a run for the chickens to scratch and peck in the dirt, a place to eat and drink, a covered and secure roost in which to sleep at night, and, of course, the nesting box to lay their eggs.
In Mount Washington, furniture designer and artist Dakota Witzenburg built a chicken coop for his wife, Audrey Diehl, for Christmas last year as part of their ongoing effort to live green. When designing his coop, his priorities were keeping it easy to clean and making sure his chickens were safe by sinking corrugated metal at least 6 inches below ground so that burrowing predators couldn't get in. But he also considered aesthetics.
His innovations included a green roof planted with succulents, and he's considering a pulley system to make raising the roof easier. He chose yellow cedar and redwood planks not just for their sturdiness, but for the patina. "I didn't want it to be something I had to maintain," he said. "This will gray out nicely."
Diehl has been keeping an elaborate blog on her chickens' development and socialization at greenfrieda.blogspot.com.
"I'm kind of obsessed with them," she said. "Chicken people always talk about how chickens are better than TV. You could watch them all day and never get tired of it."
Oriana Bielawsky had her boyfriend, carpenter and doghouse designer Billy Peshel, build a midcentury modern coop to match their midcentury modern house (and their midcentury modern doghouse) in Laurel Canyon in fall 2004. Bielawsky didn't even want a chicken, but Peshel found one wandering on Mulholland Drive one night as he was driving home, and nobody responded to their "Chicken Lost" signs, so they decided to keep her.
Even though Cecilia passed away this summer, her coop still stands, an olive green structure built on stilts to blend with the slope of the backyard. Bielawsky, who works in film production and considers herself more of an animal lover than a backyard farmer, said Cecilia became part of an extended family that included dogs, doves and cats. Plus, there were the eggs.
"Everyone loved them," Bielawsky said, "and they were the most gorgeous sunset orange color."
Today is absolutely gorgeous out, here in North Carolina. My favorite weather of all - cool, clear and sunny. It was so nice that I couldn't resist staying out with the chickens this morning and letting them run around the yard a bit before I went in to make breakfast.
This is the life that chickens deserve. Being able to spread their wings, scratch on the ground, interact with one another, eat some fresh greens and hunt for bugs and worms.
I have extremely crappy video capabilities on my little digital camera. This was low-res on the original video and even worse now that it is uploaded to YouTube. So, I know, you can't really get a good view of them.
What you can hear (and sort of make out) is Napoleon and the girls walking around and Napoleon finding stuff then making his little coo-ing sound to call the girls over, letting them know he found something good for them to eat.
It also shows him running over to me as soon as I got closer to the ground because he wants to jump up on my lap. He loves me.
I haven't really discussed this much on any of the blogs but we have changed to being vegetarians. I have actually wanted this for a very long time but it can be hard when you live with someone who is not totally ready for the change, especially if they do most of the cooking.
But Napoleon's attack really brought the issue and the disconnect home and we were both ready for this. And I have to say, no diet change has ever been easier. Or made more sense.
We are not completely vegan. We still each cheeses and butter and, rarely, milk, as well as the eggs we get from our girls. The hubby still eats fish. I'm a bit of a seafood snob in general so I didn't eat much in the past unless I was within an hour of the ocean. In terms of the cheeses, most of what we get comes from a local goat dairy, so we are very familiar with how the animals are treated.
With all of the great produce out there as well as the huge surge in recipes, menu choices and prepared foods, eating vegetarian is amazingly easy. And once you get past the mindset that a meal needs to include meat it's been simple.
One of my biggest hurdles was the milk issue. I love cereal and eat it a lot, generally. I always have - ask my parents. If I wanted a simple dinner, that was what I ate. So I was I bit leery of the Soy/Rice milk products. But when we decided to make the change we thought we would give them a try. How bad could they be, right? And if we hated them, we'd just dump them down the drain.
Well, we tried the Silk Soy Milk and LOVED IT. Seriously, I couldn't get enough. We have now tried the chai and chocolate flavors too. I like to have a glass of the chocolate when I get home from work for a quick "snack". The hubby uses it in his hot tea in the morning and to make scrambled eggs. If you haven't tried it, you really should. It's a little sweet but yummy.
The two of us have slightly different reasons for doing this but, hey, as long as we're together on the end choices, I'm fine with that. We're just at the beginning (just 3 months or so in) but I've never felt better physically or emotionally. It's kind of exciting.
I'm trying to convince the hubby to do his own blog talking about the recipes he's making and the products we find and try. I hope I can get him to do it because I think it would help to have someone share this change from a very early step. A lot of the vegetarian blogs and writers and podcasters have been on this for a long time, which can be intimidating. We're still learning ourselves but we're enthusiastic. What do you think?
We've been talking it up and, of course there are always questions. Our culture is so ingrained with how meals "should be" but once you get past that, you'd be surprised to realize that it's so easy.
And as I'm saying to everyone who is considering it or who we talk about it to:
You don't have to do everything; just do something.
That means, you don't have to make a 100% vegan lifestyle switch overnight. Ease into it. Give up chicken. Have 3 nights a week be vegetarian meals. Anything is better than nothing. I think you'd be surprised how much you already do and how much you like it.
Plus, if you want to chat or ask question (or follow my daily yummy meals on Twitter) I welcome it!
On a warm sunny day one of the favorite activities of the girls is a nice dust bath. The girls find patch of fine loose dirt and kick it up to their hearts content. Luckily there are a few nice patches in our yard that are ideal for a relaxing "bath". Their favorite spot is at the base of one of the juniper trees which gives them shade and keeps them from having to worry about hawks.
Once they get started rolling around and kick the dirt up and all around, it's pretty hard to get them moving until they are finished. Yesterday I wanted to move Meg into the coop with the other two, who were in their feasting on bird seed, but she was not at all interested.
Typically I let them hang out until they are done. Sometimes Napoleon will get in on the action but most of the time he just stands guard. The best part is when they get tired of kicking the dirt up and they get drowsy and start to purr.
Chickens definitely have a level of communication and there is no mistaking the fact that they are happy and content.
An unintentional side benefit of having the chickens is that we are also supporting, to some degree, the local songbird population.
The way the roof of the coop yard is designed, the local small birds can fly in and out. I have seen lots of these smaller birds come into the chickens' space to drink from their water bowl or snap up a bit of seed or bird feed.
One of our favorites is the cardinal. We love their color and their personalities - both the males and females. We often use cardinals to represent our home.
We're fond of all of the local birds and make sure to keep shrubs for them to hide and nest in, as well as keeping the bird feeders filled all winter long. Because of this we get all kinds of blue jays, robins, doves, chickadees, finches and woodpeckers. Many of them have become used to us and don't fly off when I am sitting outside letting the chickens free range.
Some things you can do to support local birds are to provide cover (shrubs and trees), water and keep your cats indoors. Not only is this better and safer for your kitty, but it will prevent many of these birds from getting killed.
