Too Many Chickens!

(From the Friday, January 25th broadcast of Garden Guys Green Revolution Radio)

My mom used to constantly ask us about my son’s milestones. She’s a teacher, so she can’t help it. “Is he sitting up?” “Is he talking?” “Is he potty trained?” “Is he potty trained?” “Is he potty trained?” Potty training was the big one, and once that was out of the way, she seemed to turn her attention to the chickens.

“Any eggs yet?” became the question I knew was always coming. Early on I could explain that the chickens needed to reach a certain number of weeks of being alive before they could start laying eggs. This bought me a couple of weeks. Once we crossed that threshold, I had less to deflect with. I suppose I could have gone out and squeezed a chicken to see if an egg came out, but I had a good feeling it didn’t work like that. At the end of the day I’d still be eggless, and would have cranky chickens.

We got the chickens in June, when they were one week old. The general thought is that chickens start laying at around 19 weeks. Based on this, I was expecting eggs in October, but October came and went. No egg o’lanterns. Surely they were coming in November, right? Nope. No Thanksgiving omelettes.

Notice there are no eggs in the picture.

I knew there was a lesson here about letting things come when they were ready. This is nature, and it does things on its own schedule. There was probably also a lesson here to not let my mother’s constant questioning influence my feelings about letting things come when they were ready. But I was very excited for the eggs to come, and any questions about it added to my anxiety. And really, where were they? “They will lay when they are ready,” said the internet. “It’s going to be at least six months before you get an egg,” said my mother in law. Who was right?

With December came six months. I went out one night, and as is my silly ritual, after I shut the coop door, I looked in the window and said, “nighty-night, chickens.” Unlike every other night, there, in the back of the coop, sat a small brown egg. I’m a little embarrassed to say that I audibly gasped, but not so embarrassed to not tell you about it. Composing myself, I brought it inside and showed it to everyone in the house, triumphant. There was plenty of excitement in the room, since my family had also felt the pressure of The Egg Question. While admiring its eggy goodness, my son said, “I think maybe there’s a baby chicken in there.” So then it became time to explain what role roosters play in this whole endeavor. An anxiety door does not close without opening an anxiety window.

Oh, and that egg? I ate it, and it was good. Not just good, but goooooood. I had been hearing a lot about how much different backyard eggs were from the ones in the store, and this egg was everything they said it would be. The yolk had a brightness to its color like I had never seen. The texture when cooked was hearty and robust, and the shell even seemed tougher than store bought eggs. I later read that store bought eggs are generally about a month old, whereas this one was hot off the presses, so to speak. I might eat a store bought egg again, if I had to, but I hope I don’t have to.

You will never see a carton with just one egg on our counter these days.

Chickens generally lay one egg a day, but in the winter months, they tend to lay less, due to there being less sunlight. We have six chickens, so that’s a half dozen eggs a day at full capacity. That’s a lot of eggs. And the chickens didn’t seem to get the memo that they were supposed to tone it down in the winter. They were firing on all cylinders, and the eggs were piling up. Too many chickens = too many eggs. We knew this was going to happen, but thought we were going to ease into it. No one said we’d go from no eggs to piles of them so quickly. We ate what we could, and I started mentioning to people at work that I might be bringing eggs in. This was met with much more excitement than if I had said I was bringing in extra zucchini. That market is glutted. And you know what, the chickens love zucchini, so I can bring free work zucchini home and feed it to the chickens, who make more eggs, which I then bring into work. Circle of life! Or something.

Another magic quality of backyard eggs is that they supposedly have less cholesterol and more vitamins than store bought eggs, thanks to the varied diet backyard chickens tend to get. Ours get all sorts of vegetable scraps, all the bugs they can catch, and regular chicken food. I’m not sure how I can test the vitamin content, but after my next physical, I’ll let you know about the cholesterol. Even if it’s through the roof, it’s a delicious roof to go through.

Listen here!:

I have a tendency to not call things by their proper names. Or at least things that have proper names, such as pets and humans. I have been told that this is one way in which I am a weirdo, but I disagree. Sometimes you don’t know what something’s real name should be until you have known it for a little while. Hence my cat Hamish is referred to as “The Bone,” my wife is “The Dorf,” and my son is “Babydude” (at least until he gets old enough to really put up a fight about it). You give a name because you have to, but sometimes the “real” name emerges later.

The Dorf and Babydude (and a chicken)

So, you can see that I take naming things very seriously. By the time I have come up with a nickname for something it is safe to say I am pretty attached to whatever is being named. When I first got the chickens, I had decided that maybe I should not name them, precisely because of this attachment issue. From the beginning of this project, I have been haunted by the spectre of imaginary chicken death. It didn’t help that shortly after getting the chickens I read an article by someone who was dead set against the idea of chickens as pets, and railed about people being upset when a chicken dies, because chickens drop dead all the time for no reason. This article put me in a very weird place in terms of chicken emotions, and I was determined to not get too attached, in the event that no reason came along and dropped one of my chickens dead.

The thing about chickens though, is that they are very easy to get attached to. It starts with just liking them. Coming home picking up these tiny little creatures that scurry around in the brooder was one of the most peaceful parts of my day. I could come home from a bad commute and feel much better after a couple of minutes of chicken time. That’s how they get you. How could I not begin to grow fond of things that make me happy?

Then they had to go and have funny little personalities. We initially had kept them in a cardboard box for a brooder. Not very long into it, I went in to check on them in the morning, and one of the Barred Rocks was sitting on the edge of the box, looking at me. I did what anyone might do in this situation, and yelled, “Hey, chicken!” The chicken held her ground. I put her back in, and put a piece of cardboard over the side she had gotten up on. That night I came home, and she had gotten up on another side. I then moved them into a space surrounded by a baby gate, which was much taller. She got out again. One night, when my wife got home, she asked if all the chickens had been there when I got in. I asked why, and she said, “Because when we left this morning one of them had gotten out, AND I THINK YOU KNOW WHICH ONE IT WAS.” We were only a couple of weeks into this, and we were beginning to be able to tell them apart.

I finally covered the brooder with a screen, and this kept them in. But this little one was not going to go unnoticed. With her escape plans foiled, she took to chasing the other chicks around. If I put in treats, she would rush over and push her way in first. If the other chicks were in a group, she would rush over and fight her way to the center. She would also chase them all around and just make a general nuisance of herself. And slowly something started to build, until one day in my head I referred to her as Boss Chicken.  Then it was too late. What has been thought cannot be unthought. Her name was now Boss Chicken. “Well, I just won’t name the other ones,” I said. And then one of the other Barred Rocks would go and flip out any time I came near the brooder, or picked her up, or basically existed. “That one freaks out so much, she’s just like Henny Penny,” I thought. And now two had names.

Baby Boss Chicken

At this point it was inevitable that the third Barred Rock was going to get a name, but I really fought it. She wasn’t doing anything much to stand out, so that seemed like it would help keep her nameless. Until something went wrong in my head and I decided she seemed like a Suzy Creamcheese. So now half the chickens had names.

Naming the Barred Rocks was a little easy, since the three of them had variations in color. Boss Chicken is the darkest, and even her light spots are fairly dark. Suzy Creamcheese is the lightest. Where some Barred Rocks seem like black chickens with white spots, Suzy Creamcheese seems like a white chicken with black spots. Henny Penny is right in the middle. She seems to have a fine balance of light and dark. At least when compared to the other two.

The unbearable lightness of Suzy Creamcheese

The Buff Orpingtons have no such variations. They’re a one-color breed, so there are no spots to be different. And that color seemed really consistent across all three of them. So on the one hand, that seemed like a great way to not have to name them. On the other hand, I was feeling really bad that the more visually exciting chickens had names, and the plainer ones did not. I’m color blind, so I may be missing subtle variations in color, but I may also be some sort of chicken racist by not being able to tell them apart. This idea was too much, and since there were three of them, I decided to give them a name that was applied to a famous threesome of the past, and so we now had chickens that are collectively referred to as The Mandrell Sisters.

The whole gang (except Henny Penny, who was likely hiding).

So yes, I am now attached to them. As of this writing, they have not dropped dead for any reason, much less no reason, so I’ve got that going for me. One day when we were pulling out of the driveway and the chickens were looking at us, I asked The Dorf, “Is it weird that I love my chickens?”
“A little,” she said. But I am o.k. with that.

The Bone disapproves of this post.

Here’s this week’s segment, with some pictures. Added value!

So you’ve got your chickens, now what do you do with them? Put them in the coop, right? You have a coop, right? I did not have a coop. Everyone says, “Don’t get chickens until you have a coop,” but then you read a little more, and it seems like lots of people still get the chickens first. I was not alone, in concept. I was very alone in practice.

You actually don’t just throw them in the coop right off the bat. Baby chicks need a lot of care and warmth until they “feather out,” (or lose the fuzziness that makes them so cute). But that’s good, because it buys you time to build the coop you have to have. They sit in a “brooder” under a heat lamp for a while, unaware of just how much stress the new home they don’t even know about is causing.

I could have just bought a coop, I suppose. That might have been the easy thing to do. Easy isn’t always cheap, though. Especially when you have crossed some sort of imaginary line about how many chickens is a lot. When I got the chickens, six seemed ok. When I actually looked into getting them a coop (which I did also do before I got them, I just wasn’t paying close enough attention, I guess) I would have noticed that most small coops hold up to five. After that, you’re in a different class of coops. A ridiculously expensive class of coops. Not that the small ones are cheap either, but room for one more chicken seemed to double the expense. That is an expensive chicken.

Given that the right size coop cost more than my car (I have a very old car, but still) I decided I would have to do this on my own. Did I know what I was doing? No. Has this stopped me before? No. Should it have? Probably. But I did it anyway. I spent most of my summer weekends and a few vacation days working on this. And I never remembered to put on sunscreen until at least an hour into it each time.

I originally had planned on using pallets as the framework. You can get those for free, which seems like a good deal to the budget coop builder. However, they’re also very heavy, and for some reason I couldn’t find many that were the same size. Some sort of modernist coop with odd sized walls and a severe tilt was certainly appealing, but I knew the limits of my skills. Chances were that even with matching pallets this thing would come out all cock-eyed, so I reconsidered my plan.

We have a room in our house that used to be a day care. The bathroom in that room has two toilets, each in their own wooden stall. I hated these. They were stained very dark, and it was depressing. One day I started to rip them out, and it dawned on me that here was a bunch of perfectly good wood that was already matched in size. The coop project started to look up. The stall walls became the sides of the coop, and the stall doors became the front and back. They already had hinges, so now I could use them as doors to get in and out of the coop, as needed. And a bonus was that with the stalls gone, we now had two toilets right next to each other, which I like to call “Lover’s Toilets.” You and a loved one can sit together and hold hands while you do your business, if you so choose. My loved ones have not taken me up on this offer.

So I had a wooden box, now what? The chickens need to have a run. I intended to let them out in the yard to lay waste to the local tick population, but during the day when I’m not around, they needed a safe place to roam. We’ve got pretty much every predator New England has to offer around here, so I wasn’t about to open a chicken buffet, if I could help it. The run is basically another wooden box, but with some sort of wire netting for walls. This keeps your chickens in, and more importantly, it keeps everything else out. Oddly enough, “chicken wire” is not the best thing for this task. It keeps the chickens in, but it doesn’t necessarily keep other things out. It’s easy to chew through, and the go-to horror story involves a raccoon that pulls chickens through the holes in the wire, one handful at a time. To avoid this, you need hardware cloth, which is made up of tiny metal squares. Hardware cloth is a great thing. Unfortunately, it is also an expensive thing. This is where about 80% of the coop expenses came from. But it’s also a thing you just can’t skimp on.

Things began to come together, if slowly. The fact that we had live chickens in our storage room getting bigger by the minute is the only thing that kept me going sometimes.There was no shortage of dark moments. When I write, I experience something I have come to call “mid-project depression.” I reach a point where the initial excitement of working on something new is gone, but the end, and the satisfaction that comes with it, is still far off. When I’m in this place, anything I write seems like the worst thing I have ever written. I have come to recognize that I do this, and so I am able to push myself through once I notice it’s happening. But this is with writing, something I know I am competent at. I worked on the coop most of the summer, and I experienced mid-project depression every time I picked up a hammer. I was getting mid-project depression when the project was just to paint the window frame. There were too many small pictures for me to see the big picture, and if I had seen the big picture, I might have passed out in the face of its bigness. Because building isn’t a mode that I was used to working in, it took me a long time to notice that mid-project depression was happening. Luckily, I could go back inside and pick up some tiny chickens, which always managed to perk me up a little. But I still had a lot of work to do. And as the chickens got bigger, and they get bigger fast, it became less relaxing. I knew I had to get them out into the coop soon, and it seemed like they got a little bigger each time I went in.

I finally reached a point where everything was together enough that the chickens could go out to their new home. There were some finishing touches that needed to be taken care of, but these weren’t anything that would affect the safety of the chickens so out they went. Of course, a few days before I was finished, my mother called to tell me that my uncle’s flock had just been wiped out by a raccoon and that he felt electric fences were the only way to go. I located a small, battery powered one just in time, and Chicken Fort Knox was all set. We put them out, and for days I could hear them pecking the inside of the coop, which is how they feel for their surroundings. That, to me, was the sound of success. To everyone else it was probably just annoying.