Our 5 girls were admirable producers. I fed them regular laying pellets, obtained at great cost from the only feed store in our suburban town. They also got every imaginable table scrap, except chicken. (That just grosses me out.)
We got 3-5 eggs daily for the first year, didn't even lose time for molting. Oprah, Uma, Ruby, Diamond and Yetta were friendly enough, but the two RIR were somewhat aggressive to our toddler. Oprah, a barred rock, was the lap chicken of the group. We were lucky, and we were giving away 1-2 dozen eggs a week.
One afternoon I found Yetta, one of the RIR, dead. She was wedged between the fence and a rose bush. No sign of trauma, no obvious sign of disease, she was simply an ex-hen. We buried her beneath the apricot tree.
I expanded my knowledge of chickens by buying a bunch of chicken books and joining a bunch of Yahoo chicken groups. As the hens hit their second year, I knew their egg production would drop, so I posted them on Craiglist and promptly sold them for $20 each.
Our local feed store (highway robbery) had buff Orpington chicks for sale. I wanted 5, so of course I bought 12. We constructed a ridiculous brooder consisting of a red wagon with shavings in it and a dome of chicken wire over it. A clamp lamp with a 60-watt buld provided heat, and with a plastic quart feeder and waterer we were in business.
We weren't worried about drafts, for in our advanced wisdom we decided to raise the little darlings in the family room. What naive city-slickers we were. A dozen golden balls of fluff in a red wagon next to the couch. How much trouble could they be?
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
When our adventure began...
The pond's ripples reflect against the trunk of the fig tree, and it's hard to stay on task as I gaze out the window behind my workstation. My reverie is disrupted by a loud cackling; Buttercup has just presented the world with another egg.
I wasn't always like this. I grew up in Piedmont, an East Bay suburb surrounded by Oakland. No poultry there. No family history of poultry, at least, not on this continent nor in the past century. We did have a flock of ducks for a time, when we lived along a creek in the Oakland hills. But the interest in barnyard fowl didn't blossom until we bought a house in San Leandro.
Our property backed up to open space, a former orchard. We had the use of the space behind our property line, as did all on our side of the street. There were fruit trees there: cherry, apricot, orange, apples and peaches. A mini-farm of our own. Now we just needed some livestock.
We got our first hens from Craigslist, free. A family was giving away a coop and when we crossed the bay to pick it up, there were 3 chickens still in residence. They were pullets, young hens who hadn't yet started laying -- two Rhode Island reds (RIRs) and a barred rock. The man was heartbroken; he'd made the coop with love and nursed his chicks from day-old fuzzballs. But his wife was sick of the chicken poop on the lawn where their toddlers played, so the chickens had to go. He threw them in for free. When he opened the coop to show me the interior, a solitary egg sat inside on the shavings. His bird's first egg, laid the very day he had to give them up. I thought he was going to cry.
We added to the trio with two more birds gleaned from Craigslist: a silver-laced Wyandotte and a white leghorn. The leghorn is a small white bird that lays extra-large white eggs. It is the breed used in commercial egg production, a skittish bird not well suited to backyard living. I didn't know anything about the Wyandotte, and thought her terribly exotic.
So we had our coop and our birds and the following morning, 3 fresh eggs.
That was 5 years ago.
I wasn't always like this. I grew up in Piedmont, an East Bay suburb surrounded by Oakland. No poultry there. No family history of poultry, at least, not on this continent nor in the past century. We did have a flock of ducks for a time, when we lived along a creek in the Oakland hills. But the interest in barnyard fowl didn't blossom until we bought a house in San Leandro.
Our property backed up to open space, a former orchard. We had the use of the space behind our property line, as did all on our side of the street. There were fruit trees there: cherry, apricot, orange, apples and peaches. A mini-farm of our own. Now we just needed some livestock.
We got our first hens from Craigslist, free. A family was giving away a coop and when we crossed the bay to pick it up, there were 3 chickens still in residence. They were pullets, young hens who hadn't yet started laying -- two Rhode Island reds (RIRs) and a barred rock. The man was heartbroken; he'd made the coop with love and nursed his chicks from day-old fuzzballs. But his wife was sick of the chicken poop on the lawn where their toddlers played, so the chickens had to go. He threw them in for free. When he opened the coop to show me the interior, a solitary egg sat inside on the shavings. His bird's first egg, laid the very day he had to give them up. I thought he was going to cry.
We added to the trio with two more birds gleaned from Craigslist: a silver-laced Wyandotte and a white leghorn. The leghorn is a small white bird that lays extra-large white eggs. It is the breed used in commercial egg production, a skittish bird not well suited to backyard living. I didn't know anything about the Wyandotte, and thought her terribly exotic.
So we had our coop and our birds and the following morning, 3 fresh eggs.
That was 5 years ago.
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