. . . and then there were seven.

We are now down from 10 to 7 chickens. Why we decided to start with 10 chickens is not clear to me.  One of those impulsive decisions.  Anyway, our original brood included two aggressive roosters which we relocated to Debi and Charles' farm just east of us.  One of them attacked Debi, so she made a delicious stew out of him.  Not too long after that Louie noticed that one of the remaining eight had a limp.  We isolated her in Lynn and Lisa's dog cage after deciding against shooting her with their pistol. Just couldn't do it.  Gimpilina (her nickname) lived happily there for a week, but her limp was not improving, so another neighbor, Todd, who I call the chicken whisperer, came and took her to his place to recuperate -- or to eat -- depending on how much time he had to process her.  Well, he brought her back about 7 days later as she had recovered from her limp.  She, however, was never accepted back into the flock.  The other seven would not let her out of the coop.  If she tried to get out, they would block the door, so after way too long, we finally decided to take our other chicken friend up on his offer to accept her into his chicken yard which he calls the United Nations of Chickens.  He has a gorgeous mix of many breeds who all get along.  So that's why we are now down from 10 to 7 chickens.

Sunrise.  December 1, 2012.  Red sky in the morning.  Josephina,
take warning.  

Josephina meeting her new chicken friends.
Ruffled feathers.  Hmm.  Maybe she is the
bully after all. 

Louie relocates Josephina number 8 to the
United Nations of Chickens in East Lawrence.

Chillie Willie Chicken House.  

cozy contemporary: this one time, at book club...

cozy contemporary: this one time, at book club...: The author came.  How cool is that?  The last book we read for book club was "The Chaperone" by Laura Moriarty.  She is a Lawrence...

The red chicken trivet from sister Lois in
Iowa looks great against the Jayhawk blue.

Well, here's some more news from the girls.  Louie collected NINE eggs today.  That's a record. Tomorrow night is the neighborhood potluck.  Guess what we're taking?
It's 7:00 pm.  Time to let the chickens out to scratch around the yard until dark. It has been interesting to track dusk with the girls.  Tonight they roosted at 7:40.  In the depth of summer we were out there with the girls until nearly 9:00 pm. I guess we'll start letting them out around 6:00 pm, so they have more time in the yard.

Another exciting view this evening:  Six geese flew right over me as I sat on the garden bench.  The sun glinted off their bellies and I could hear the flap of their wings.  It was another reminder of fleeting beauty, and I'm glad I was out there to see this one.

French toast:  Mix 4 eggs with cream or milk and a teaspoon of real vanilla (or rum).  Dip sour dough bread from Wheatfield's Bakery into the egg mixture.  Cook in butter in a cast iron skillet until golden brown.  Top with whatever you have on hand.  Today I topped with Louie's home made grape jelly and a dusting of powdered sugar.  Yum!

The Joesphinas just love Swiss Chard.  

The golden scratch is another favorite.  That's
corn.  

More eggs-citing news

Thanks to Cindy for my newest chicken
geegaw -- Farm Fresh Eggs.
 More to come.

 I have been a bad blogger.  I blame the heat and the drought. It has been a real challenge keeping the girls cooled and watered.  I fed them frozen grapes on the hottest days.  They loved them, and I do believe they added flavor to the eggs.  They eat mainly fresh produce from the garden.  They especially love Swiss Chard and tomatoes.

As the summer heat finally lets up, I am feeling such a relief for my girls. Just like a mother hen, I putter and worry about my flock. I knew I had this tendency when I first agreed to this venture of raising chickens and that's partly why I hesitated. But. Louie has taken such good care of them that my worries are subdued. And, now, the Josephinas have settled into a routine.  They begin bawking around 9:00 a.m.  By that I mean they start laying eggs.  We can hear their "bawk, bawk, BAWK," and we know egg production for the day has begun.  Laying between 6 to 8 eggs daily, those girls are more than earning their keep.  We have had no trouble consuming 42 eggs a week.  Well, not just us.  We share with our neighbors, and we are all aware of the cholesterol risks, so here's a link to what the Mayo Clinic has to say about that:  Eggs. Are they good or bad for my cholesterol?

I'll be back soon with more geegaws and a few of my favorite recipes -- with eggs as the main ingredient.

It's like a miracle every time I go into the
chicken house and find eggs.  I'll never
tire of this free produce. 

Eggs-citing News

This beautiful sight greeted me as I opened the chicken coop
last night after we arrived home from 3 days in cool, wet
Colorado.  

Look what I found!  July 9, 2012.  The first egg from our Rhode Island Reds.  I will try to determine who is laying.  We bought the chickens as pullets when they were about 6 weeks old on March 16, so I figure our hens our a little over 5 months old.  Good girls.

Our chicken partner, Jim, gets high marks for taking good care of the Josephinas in triple digit weather. Louie and I spent 3 days in Colorado for our grandson, Campbell's, birthday.  He is 5 now and is curious about the chickens.  If he comes to visit at the end of July, we will pop some corn and feed it to the hens. They love corn in all its forms.

Those chickens are beginning to be like pets.  I didn't want to like them so much, but . . . .

From the inside out

Not much new to report this week.  The girls are happier and more content without the roosters bothering them.  We visited our roosters at their new home on Friday.  They are very happy there, but won't leave the chicken run even though the gate is left open during the day to encourage them to go outside and forage. Our pullets have taken to roosting in the window above their nesting boxes.  I heard a loud banging against the window while I was in the sauna garden the other evening.  I panicked because I thought they might be under attack.  When I went to investigate, I saw two of them in the window pecking at bugs flying around outside.  I had to laugh.  Louie has had to put up more screen to keep them from breaking the window and/or denting their beaks.  They are vicious when on the hunt for bugs.  Now we're just waiting for eggs.  It will probably be this fall before they start laying.

Happily eating bugs.  I've had to put up more chicken wire
to keep them from devouring my zinnia seedlings.  I'm sowing
more seed today.  They ate all but three of the emerging plants.
I'm learning.  We will live peacefully together -- as long as they
start producing eggs.  I'm waiting.   

Those chickens in the window are keeping their eyes on the
bug prize.   

Freedom!

O.K.  I just had to show off my lavender.  It has never been
happier.  Nor have the chickens. We have been letting the
chickens out in the yard around dusk to eat bugs. Notice the
chicken in flight.

Since the chicken coop's completion, we have been busy fine tuning their feeding and watering stations.  We did have two roosters after all.  They were relocated today.  Our good neighbors, Debi and Charles, came over this morning and took them away.  Debi was fearless and captured both roosters.  One of them put up a fight and attacked her wrist and hand.  She had what she called a surface scratch, but her wrist was bright red with blood and had to be cleansed immediately.  She was on her way home to apply comfrey to her wound and to enjoy a fine chicken dinner. 

The grass really is greener on the other side.

Week 8: Construction Complete

Jim sands the roost to protect the chicken feet.
Happy feet-ed chickens.

The chicken house construction is finished!  Thanks to Jim and Louie for their work.  I'd also like to give a shout out to Becky Eller, Dennis Domer, and David Frayer for letting us tour their chicken houses and for sharing their  stories and expertise.  As David told us, the other thing that comes with raising chickens beside eggs is stories.  Speaking of stories, here's one Louie wrote about his experience with chickens in the 1950s.

Trash Can Chickens

Louis Copt

Most of my early childhood was spent growing up in a dingy apartment above a hardware store sandwiched on either side by two taverns.  A long dark hallway stretched from one end of the building to the other.  The apartment was way in the back which overlooked an alley and the black tar roof of the “Town Royal Tavern.” A set of iron stairs led from a back room down and around and out into the brick-paved alley.

I seem to remember bricks everywhere.  Just across the narrow alley was a lumberyard.  Its brick wall contributed to the canyon-like feeling the alley had.  Once, when I was two, my mother took a photographs of me standing against the brick wall.  The sun was in my eyes and I looked like I was ready for the firing squad.  This brick-lined world was my playground.

One of my favorite activities there was digging through the trash.  A print shop in the basement of the apartment building supplied the raw material for endless afternoons of childhood bliss.  Often, their trash cans would be full of misprinted flyers and church bulletins.  There seemed to be no end to ribbons of brightly colored paper trimmings that I gleefully let fly up and down the alley decorating my drab, brown world.  The best part was I always had plenty of free paper to draw on.

But, the trash can which held most of my attention, especially in the spring, was the one behind the hardware store.  The name of the store was “Jones Hatchery".  Besides the usual assortment of hammers, ladders and barrels of nails, the back room came alive every spring with baby chicks hatched in large incubators.  Up in our apartment, the end of winter  was always announced with the cheeping of hundreds of chicks, the sound echoing off the brick walls of the alley.  Sometimes the cheeping was loud enough to drown out the juke box noise from the bars which often mixed with the drunken cussing and fighting by men just home from the war.

During hatching season, I would scour the trash cans behind the hardware store on a daily basis.  I would listen for peeping in the cans and begin my annual rescue of the little chicks still alive among the heaps of broken shells and their dead brothers and sisters.  These were the birds that were too weak, too small or had some flaw that would cause them to be passed over by those who could actually pay money for live chicks. Upstairs my mother would line the bathtub with newspaper, and I would start nursing my brood of refugees back to health.  We would rig up an old lamp with a bare bulb to provide a bit of warmth and with a saucer full of water the chicks were safe. I could usually beg enough “scratch” from the hardware store clerks, who would fill a small sack out of a big bin. I loved to feed the dozen or so chicks that would limp around, sometimes walking backwards on the newsprint oblivious to the headlines that screamed of car crashes and furniture on sale.  

Not all of the chicks would make it, but at least they had a better shot in the bathtub than slowly dying in a trash can.  The ones that did make it were eventually transferred to my grandma’s farm in Osage City.  There, they would join their brethren hatched in Osage and those that were still alive from the previous year having been rescued from the Jones Hatchery gulag.

What a weird assortment of poultry my grandma had.  Everything from the convalescent, to exotic show birds to common hens and roosters.  This was because we never knew what type of bird we would get when they were dug out of the trash.  When I would visit the farm, my job was to feed the chickens the table scraps my grandma saved in a coffee can housed under the sink.  The chickens would eat just about anything, but they especially liked coffee grounds.  I imagine the caffeine kept them wound up, and my grandma always claimed it made them lay more eggs.

It never bothered me that the rescued chickens eventually found their way to the Sunday dinner table.  In my mind, at least they had a chance to roam the farm, eat bugs and grasshoppers and peck all the Folger’s coffee they could handle. And, we were hungry. 

  

Nesting boxes installed.  One for every four layers is
recommended.  There's plenty of room for our ten.

Lou fits a cover on the boxes.  The girls like to deposit
their eggs in dark, protected places.  These nests are
properly designed for just such  places.  

Building the nesting boxes requires a
fowl vision. 

The final window is installed and sealed.  The
ceiling is covered with insulation.  

Week 7: Painting Chicken Town Red and Blue

Girls night in.  The storms

had all of us hovering for safe havens. 

The two chickens in the foreground look

speciously like roosters to me.  I've heard

of a rooster relocation program.  That's where

they're headed if they are indeed what they

appear to be.  

We shall see if those raccoons know how to
manipulate a carabiner.  

The color scheme is, of course,  Jayhawk red and blue.  Our
mistral-style wind is keeping me and the girls inside this
afternoon.

This week Jim installed the window on the back of the coop and made the door for the girls' run.  The coop is now rain proof; we expected more than the .5 inch that fell last night. Fortunately, the storms that swept over the state last night, spared us, but we did spend the night in the basement.  The tornadoes this season have been so severe and long lasting that we weren't taking any chances above ground level.  The girls spent the night above ground in their house, and they were on their own.  They survived just fine as did we.

Week 6: Chickens moved into their house

The interior.  Nice and warm.  It turned cooler
just when we moved the girls outdoors.  Now
they spend most of their time in the new house.
Nesting boxes next.  

Coop and chicken run.  Coop is secure.  No predators
allowed.  Priming and painting begins this week.  

Coop door with the eggstravagant decor.

The girls flock together.  They are curious about
the outdoors, but they are still timid.  Honestly, they like
their new house.

Week 5: It's not a coop, baby. It's a house.

The girls, Josephines, are beginning to look like
awkward adolescents.  The one looking at the camera
has a distinct personality already.  We call her the
curious one.  That's what killed the cat, you know. 

As you can see, the siding is on the chicken house.
We laid prairie hay around the perimeter to soak
up the mud.  We have had some good rain.

This week we moved the chickens to the garage.  We did, after all, need a bigger box.  They now live in a washing machine box, and as they produce more and more fertilizer, our next project will be to figure out where to locate a compost pile. The chicken manual, Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens, instructs us to let the fertilizer cure for a year before adding it to the vegetable garden.  Our place is beginning to look more and more like a farm. Old Ms. Donald will be my new moniker.

We are recycling the steel-tube fencing from Jim and Cindy's.
We will cover it with more fencing and then chicken wire.
This is the chicken run area and it will have a top made from
chicken wire.  We have electric fencing, too.  Not sure we'll
use it.  We'll see.  

Week 5: Up and Onward

The tin roof is recycled from Jim and Cindy's.

  Jim and Louie work "where the air is fresh and sweet . . . upon the roof." (The Drifters: Up on the Roof, 1962) No more drifting for us.  Chickens need us every day.  We had to move them to the garage this week.  They are losing their baby feathers, and the studio was looking like a chicken-down factory.  I am imagining how all that waste will fertilize my gardens. Yeeew.

The first chicken box goes up in flames.

Week 4: They're Here

Although they are camera shy, the chicks are quite happy
in their new home.  They are friendly, quiet, and are known
as good layers.  

Ten Rhode Island Red hens are now living in the studio.  We found a picture frame box that is just right for them now.  I need to find out how much longer they have to stay indoors. They already have feathers and when we picked them up, one of them flew into Sharon's hair.  I think "we're gonna need a bigger box."

Livin' in a box.  Interestingly, this breed was first bred in
America in Little Compton, Rhode Island. We live in
Lecompton, Kansas.  For more fascinating reading check
out this link:  Rhode Island Red.

Week 3: Anxieties Fading

Just when my anxieties about raising chickens were beginning to fade, my friend, Katie, came out to return a house key.  She told me about the black snakes (yes, that's plural) she saw near the garden and on the driveway last fall.  Now, I can just visualize a big black snake with a chicken egg (or, worse, a chicken) in its middle.  I immediately thought of the Little Prince's first masterpiece.  It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. The adults didn't get it. They thought it was a hat and advised him to put away his drawing.  He said that, "Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is exhausting for children to have to provide explanations over and over again."  But, unlike the Little Prince, who "abandoned, at the age of six, a magnificent career as an artist," I shall not abandon, at the age of sixty-something, a magnificent opportunity to launch a career as a chicken farmer.

On the Ides of March the walls go up.
Jim and his wife, Cindy, restored two barns on
their property using only recycled materials. The
left-over materials from those barns will now become
a perfectly secure chicken coop. The floor is tongue
and groove maple.  This flooring came from an athletic
center in Topeka that failed.  New owners didn't want the
flooring, so Jim and Cindy bought it -- for a song.  

Jim is building the coop in pieces on his farm.
Here, he and Louie set the wall frames on the base
to check measurements and level.
 And talk about cost-egg-fective.

Week 2: Anticipation

Note the heat lamps and the laser thermometer.  The temperature
starts at 95 degrees and decreases 5 degrees every week.  You'll
know where to find us for the next year.

Well, here's the brooder box that those cute little chicks will live in.  This old frame box will do just fine -- for 6 weeks!  We will purchase our chicks next week.  My manual tells me that chicks require additional care at the outset but give me a chance to get acquainted with my birds as they grow.  Really?  I just knew it.  I will love these chicks.  Oh, what have I gotten myself into?  More about "straight run" or "as hatched" chicks next week when we choose our chicks.  Oh, me.

Week 2: There's no turning back now

Nancy and Wyatt at the Orscheln Chicken workshop
Saturday morning.  Thanks to our friend, Jonathan,
for waking up early and attending with us.  You'll
never know how much your presence calms me, Jon.
I guess it's your lively cynicism that spurs me on.

The Orscheln chicken workshop on Saturday morning actually proved to be somewhat encouraging.  Our instructor, Sharon, was well-informed, easy going and unflappable.  She answered all my questions in a dignified manner, and she didn't condescend. I was especially surprised at the encouraging advice from her eager, seven-year old student, Wyatt. Wyatt is experienced with raising chickens, and he was so confident that I felt a little jealous of his youthful innocence. You just wait, Wyatt.  Sharon knows about those crafty coyotes who lurk in Douglas County.

I confess I carry no sentimental fragments from my childhood about raising chickens.  I only remember being terrified as the headless things ran around with blood spurting from their necks, and the smell of scalding feathers still makes me gag.  Now can you understand part of my hesitation in this adventure?  Oh, and then there's always the coyotes, the dogs, the raccoons, the . . . .

O.K.  So. Who can deny the absolute cuteness of baby
chickens?  Not me.  But thanks to Jon's attentiveness to
the other attendees, these babies will be named extra crispy
and original recipe. 

Week 1: Chicken Tales Begin

This chicken clay sculpture from Mexico will serve
as a totem to encourage me.  The two story tellers
wait for chicken stories which you will read about
here.  No doubt there will be many.  Josephine
Aguilar is the sculptor.  Maybe I'll name all my
chickens Josephine.  Thanks to Tresa Nasi for
taking me to that awesome Mexican import store in
Austin.  

Well, here I go. As promised, I will track progress about the newest project on our ten acres outside Lawrence, Kansas.  My husband, Louie, has been going on and on about raising chickens for the past 3 years. Being the pragmatic one, I have tried to point out to him why this is not a good idea.

First, our valley is full of coyotes, raccoons, opossums, hawks, and snakes.  All these critters just love chickens and/or their eggs.  If not for eating, just for sport.  Raccoon stories frighten me.  They just love to kill chickens for sport according to my sources.  Our valley is also full of domesticated dogs.  I'll bet they will keep the chickens stressed, and stressed chickens don't lay eggs.  Second, we live in a community that is full of folks who already raise chickens and sell them at our local Community Mercantile and other grocery stores.  Third, we like to travel. We haven't adopted a pet since moving out to the country because, as you know, pets tie you down.   Talk about being tied down!  Chickens need daily attention more than any dog or cat.

But, my logic has not detoured Louie's obsession to own chickens.  He has finally worn me down, and I have agreed to try this insane adventure with him.  I have nightmares about those poor chickens getting attacked by all those predators.  I'm thinking that this adventure won't last long.

Louie's real partner in this scheme is our wonderfully talented and smart neighbor, Jim.  I just don't know what has gotten into these two, otherwise rational, men.  Jim is building the chicken coop at his farm and will deliver it in stages to our property.  Believe me, you will want to see this coop.  Anything Jim does is over-the-top quality work.

So. Here's the sketch that started in our kitchen.

Louie's sketches.  Wait 'til you see Jim's
construction.