Adventures of an urban homesteader growing greens, preserving the harvest and tending a backyard barnyard
It’s been awhile since I’ve written about my flock of urban chickens, who have been quietly keeping toasty during this unusually cold winter. We had a spot of snow again last night, so I checked on the girls this morning. When the temperatures drop below freezing, we make sure they have thawed water and fluffy straw to keep them warm. There were icicles hanging from
Different people have different ways of dealing with cold weather and chickens. Some build coops better insulated than our old house. Others wire the coop with electricity so they can run heat lamps out there. My feeling is that their molting process in the Fall equips them well for colder temperatures, as they grow in new, dense feathers. They fluff them up to hold in
Florence has been laying eggs since August and I was beginning to wonder what the hold-up was with Maude. I raised them both from chicks, so they are the same age. Maude is a Brahma and Florence is a Rhode Island Red. Not sure if it’s a breed thing, but Maude waited until she was seven months old to start laying eggs. We got our
It’s about time for an update on my crowing hen, Pearl, after all that hoopla last week. Pearl’s crowing seemed to get more frequent each morning. The first morning I heard one crow. The next morning, five crows. Finally after five mornings of this, we heard eighteen crows. There is a Woodburn livestock auction every Tuesday morning, and I was planning to attend and buy
I woke up again this morning to crowing. This time a little more of it than the last two mornings. I didn’t think to use my digital camera to make a video until the crowing stopped. BUT, then she started again about 30 minutes later. So here is the video of Pearl crowing. She crows twice in the video: I talked to our house sitter
I found the culprit this morning: Pearl. I can’t really explain it except it appears Steve taught Pearl to crow before he headed out into the sunset. She crowed three times again this morning, but nothing since then. It’s so hard to explain rooster noises without sound… Maybe I can find some way to record her when she does it. My old flock (Pearl, Hazel,
You are not going to believe this, because I can’t believe it myself. Guess what woke me up this morning? Just guess. A wild, seemly impossible guess. Crowing. Just to give you a sense of my disbelief, here is what ran through my head as I heard those three little crows. And this absolutely, honestly what went through my head as plausible options: “Did one
This evening I had the delight of discovering a fresh new egg from one of the younger ladies. It’s hard to say without stalking the hen house whether it was Maude or Florence, but either way I am very excited. Unfortunately the little egg had a little hole on one end. I think this can happen during the first couple eggs, as their system gets
I am looking forward to a Sunday evening when I am not butchering livestock in my backyard. For the past week I have been trying to find Steve a new home. And to no avail. Sadly, you only need one male for every 20 something females in multiple species, and chickens are included in that formula. This evening we returned from a vacation to Bend,
