A clean chicken coop is a glorious thing. I feel almost as good standing in my clean chicken coop as I do standing in my clean house. It smells good. The cobwebs are down. The dust is wiped away. The nesting boxes are lined with fresh hay. Everything has a place and is set to [...]
It rained and rained and rained and rained. For almost three days. Some say we got six inches. The Green River is fat. My pond is a quarter of the way full. The ruminants aren’t drinking out of the water troughs because there is so much water on their food, and the chickens are tripping [...]
I did an experiment with my chickens this year. I ordered ten cockerels (male chicks) of the largest chicken breed: Jersey Giants. According to the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, Jersey Giants were bred in the late 1800′s by two men in New Jersey who wanted a large chicken that could compete with turkey for its [...]
The past couple mornings I have opened my eyes feeling a heaviness that would hold me in my bed if it weren’t for the sound of the chickens on the porch, the roosters crowing, and the cows coughing at the water trough. I worry about the coughing and remember what’s it like to have too [...]
When we started farming, one of the things Chet and I realized was how repetitious our life had become. We always wrote notes to ourselves. But on the farm, we found ourselves writing the same notes over and over again. So eventually we wrote permanent notes and kept them handy in the kitchen where they [...]
Trim the goat’s hooves, brush-hog the pastures, take out the compost, clean the barn, muck the holding pen, clean the nesting boxes, muck the chicken coop, get the broken hay ring out of the pasture, put the new hay ring together in the pasture, fix the fence in the south pasture, weed the vegetable garden, [...]
In the morning after chores I feed Moon, and while he is digesting his food, I meditate for twenty minutes. This morning as my brain was twinkling, the chickens screamed in panic, Moon barked and ran to the door, and I very reflexively jumped out of my meditation and ran to open the door for [...]
I am trying to teach Moon to speak chicken. My previous dog, a 150-pound bullmastiff named Henry, spoke perfect chicken and he taught me how to hear it, too. There is a difference between the cackling of hens laying eggs, the decoy screeches as they run across an open space without air cover, the social [...]
Farming is entirely weather dependent, so days when the weather is absolutely perfect tend to be good days on the farm. The weather in the Berkshires has been in the 80′s with clear skies and low humidity for a few days, and looks like it may stick around for a few more. In some places [...]
Each year I hope for one of my hens to go broody, an expression that means she wants to sit on a nest of eggs and hatch them into a brood of chicks. Typically, a broody hen will sit for a few days in the same place, on an egg or three, to demonstrate her [...]