For those of you who’ve followed my blog from the beginning, you know we got four fluffy backyard chicks in May of 2009. I chronicled our early days with them in The Hen Diaries. Raccoons, lost hens, a ransacked garden, that beautiful first egg … so much drama! You can follow our adventures as fledgling…
Maybe you’re wondering why you haven’t heard about our hens for awhile? Well, they peck and scratch, lay eggs, file into their house at night … it’s not the makings of breaking journalism. But these girls will be in for a big surprise soon. They’re going to get a chicken run of their very own!…
Shareable.net published my article about the Eastside Egg Cooperative in Portland, Oregon. It begins: Foster Road in Southeast Portland, Oregon is lined with wrecking yards, auto body shops, gas stations, cheap appliance stores, and vacant lots. It’s not the place you’d expect to find a six-acre working farm or a ten-acre wetland preserve. But that’s…
It’s the first week of October and something is up with Emily. The hens usually wander around the yard together, pecking and scratching, but Emily is hanging out by herself. And she spends a lot of time sitting on the back step, staring into the sliding-glass patio door, crooning. When we’re outside, she follows us…
If you’ve been following the Hen Diaries, you’ve watched our four sweet little chicks turn into garden-devouring hens. Well, today was a big day for our little flock. Emily laid our first egg! I’ll tell you all the details in the next installment of the Hen Diaries, but for now, look how much these girls…
Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief, is a backyard chicken enthusiast. Her article about her poultry-keeping passion, “The It Bird”, appears in this week’s New Yorker. “Chickens seem to be a perfect convergence of the economic, environmental, gastronomic, and emotional matters of the moment,” Orlean writes, “plus, in the past few years, they have…