Abby Quillen

Freelance Content Marketing Writer and Editor

Gardening

Hen Diaries (Week 5)

By

I’m not sure I can really call them chicks anymore. They’re not full-sized, but they have all of their feathers, and they hardly resemble the sweet little balls of fluff they were a short five weeks ago. This week, the plumes around their legs flare out, making them look much more grown up.

The chickens explore every inch of the backyard this week and find ways to slip through the gate into the front yard several times. The second I hear them cheeping in the front yard, life seems to shift into a Three Stooges episode with me trying to wrangle four chickens into the back yard, while keeping three cats at bay and watching a baby. Hijinks tend to ensue. By midweek, we get all the gaps in the gate blocked, and the chickens roam the backyard for much of the day. Near the end of the week, we can even let the cats into the backyard at the same time- with supervision.

We’re feeling more confident that maybe, just maybe, we got four hens. Except – the black (and now white) one without the comb is still much bigger than the other. But it’s turning mostly black, and the other is turning mostly white… so we’re hoping maybe they’re different breeds. We’re waiting to name them until we’re sure we don’t have any roosters – hopefully within the next two weeks.

In the last few weeks, I’ve become increasingly aware of how many words and idioms come from raising chickens: the chickens have come home to roost, cocky, don’t count your chickens before they hatch, full-fledged, chicken-hearted, flew the coop, no spring chicken, rules the roost, and so many more. I can’t help but feel like I’ve joined a big club of English-speaking chicken-keepers.

New to the Hen Diaries? Read Weeks One, Two, Three, and Four.

Hen diaries (Week 4)

By

The chicks wander further from their coop this week. They stay together, pecking grass, eating weeds, and scratching dirt. They discover the shed, and spend hours in there eating spiders. One evening, we come outside, and they’re lined up on the pole to my husband’s old wash-tub bass. They’re sleeping. I rush in to get the camera, but of course, they’re awake by the time I return.

Another day the chicks’ peeps are louder than usual, and I glance outside to see a neighborhood cat streaking across the yard. At first I can’t find the chicks. Then I discover a black one separated from the group, hiding behind the begonias. The others run from beneath their coop, making a beeline for the stray one. They all seem relieved to be reunited and go about their pecking and scratching, seemingly unruffled by the episode.

In the evenings, we don’t have to pick the chicks up to put them in their coop anymore. We stand at the gate and call them, and they run across the yard and file inside single file.

I’m much more fond of these chickens than I imagined I would be. They’re a tight-knit group, but I’m starting to notice some individual personality traits. When I’m taking photos, one yellow chick always steps to the front. It’s almost like she’s posing.

New to the Hen Diaries? Read Weeks One, Two, and Three.

Hen Diaries (Week 3)

By

 

The chicks seem crowded in their cardboard box, so we move them out to their coop. They’ll still need a heat source until they get all of their feathers in three or four weeks, so we hang the brooder light from the eaves. It casts a red glow over the plywood floor. I check on the chicks right before bed, fearing they’ll be piled on top of each other shivering. But they’re lined up on the edge of their wooden nesting box. They’re roosting!

The next day we buy a chicken feeder and waterer, and some organic chicken feed. With the new containers, I only have to feed and water once a day, not three. I recommend buying these right from the start.

We let the chicks out to roam the yard a few times each day. But before we can let them out, we have to put our three cats inside. The cats line up at the screen door and watch the chicks’ every move, flicking their tails, drooling, and licking their lips. Midweek, one of the cats gets outside. He races across the yard and makes a beeline for the chicks. My husband intercepts him, but it’s a dramatic scene. Our neighbor assures us that once the chickens are cat-sized, they’ll all coexist peacefully in the backyard. For now, corralling the cats while the chicks roam is anything but easy, especially because I usually have an eleven-month-old baby in my arms.

The chicks get more feathers every day. The yellow chicks are turning brown and white. The black chick without the comb is significantly bigger than the other black chick. I’m not sure what to make of that. By the end of the week, the chicks are mostly feathered from the head down and look less like chicks and more like small chickens. They also now have very defined ears on the sides of their heads.

They love the empty raised bed near their coop. They run back and forth, pecking and scratching, throwing dried leaves in the air with their feet. It’s entertaining to watch them. Sometimes I lose track of time … until I hear a cat moan from the door.

New to the Hen Diaries? Read Weeks One and Two.

Save

Save

Save

Save

The Creative Life: Buy less, create more, and transform your life

By

When you type the phrase “American consumers” into Google, you get 976,000 results. That two-word phrase is mentioned 1,494 times in Google News stories just today. I don’t know about you, but I’m a little tired of hearing about American consumers. I’m all for supporting farmers, booksellers, manufacturers, craftsmen, bakers, and artisans with my dollars – especially those doing business in a fair, sustainable way. I’m just convinced that this meme that Americans are essentially consumers is destructive, not just to the environment, but to our psyches.

Consumption is passive, bland, and boring. Consumption requires little of us. We humans are creative and innovative creatures. Our minds churn with thoughts, impressions, and opinions. We erupt with ideas. We produce symphonies, skyscrapers, bridges, frescoes, novels, poems, quilts, ocean liners, and airplanes. We’re not mindless buyers, purchasers, or consumers. We are producers, inventors … creators.

How can we buck this oppressive notion that our most important role in life is consuming? Easy. We can buy less and get creative. I’m all for art. Draw, paint, sew, knit, crochet, sing, and dance! But what I’m talking about is more accessible. It doesn’t require a paint brush, knitting needles, a sewing machine … or talent. All you have to do is bring imagination to the day-to-day.

Look at your shopping list; think outside the box, bottle, or container; and ask yourself, Can I make this? Sometimes the answer will be no … or the learning curve, labor, or time you’d spend make it a bad candidate for your efforts. But often you can make things.

It may be hard to shift your consciousness from buying to creating at first. Most of us have watched and listened to literally years of commercials selling everything from boxed rice, to jarred baby food, to taco seasoning, to deodorant. Corporations have convinced us we need loads of products. And the government and media have even conflated consuming with civic responsibility. So it may seem strange that a lot of the products and packaged food we buy are unnecessary. Some don’t even save us time; many are inferior to what we can make ourselves; and worse, many (and their packages) are destructive to our health and to the planet.

When you start thinking about what you can make and start practicing that first (and most ignored) part of the recycling mantra – reduce, reuse, recycle, your grocery bills will inevitably shrink. You’ll probably experience an incomparable glow of satisfaction when your creations taste fabulous or nail the job they’re intended for. You might also notice positive changes in your health. But the best part is you’ll begin to see yourself as the imaginative, resourceful, amazing creator that you are.

Four easy ways to start buying less and getting creative:

1. Grow food
Turn your lawn into an edible landscape, put a few containers of tomatoes on your balcony, plant a fruit tree, or just grow some herbs in your kitchen window. When you garden, you and nature become co-creators in a grand project. And fruit, veggies, and herbs are never again something you mindlessly buy at the supermarket year-round.

2. Cook from scratch
You can easily afford some good cookbooks with all the money you’ll save by ditching expensive, nutritionally-deficient, processed food. Cooking is easy. If you’re a newby, just follow the recipes closely. Of course, cooking with whole foods takes more time than heating up processed food or spinning through the drive through. But you’ll save buckets of cash, eat healthier, and the taste difference is nothing short of astounding. Some of my favorite cookbooks: Cooking for the Whole Family by Cynthia Lair, Laurel’s Kitchen by Laurel Robertson, and America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook.

3. Make bread

The authors of Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book insist there are “subtle, far-reaching, and distinctly positive changes that can take place when you begin to bake (bread) regularly.” They claim the process is therapeutic, creative, calming, and can transform a house into a home. I agree. I’ve been making my family’s bread for much of the past year, and I’m amazed by how much I look forward to bread-making day, not just because the house smells delectable and I get to eat slices of steaming hot bread fresh from the oven. There’s also something about the process. It leaves a lot of room for learning and growing. Bread-making undeniably takes time, but you can use a bread machine, stand-up mixer, or food processor to help with the kneading, and for most of the rest of the process, the dough simply rests and rises on the counter, leaving you free to kick back or attend to some other chore. Start with a basic loaf, and you might find yourself moving onto more complicated recipes, like desem or sourdough, before you know it.

4. Mix up green cleaners
Years ago my friend Beth told me she started looking forward to cleaning when she started making her own cleaners, but it took me years to heed her advice. It seemed complicated. It’s not. Trust me, you do not need to be a chemist for this. All you need is distilled white vinegar, baking soda, and liquid castile soap (Think: Dr. Bronner’s). And Beth’s right – homemade cleaners make housework more fun. You can mix up an all-purpose bathroom cleaner with 50/50 vinegar and water. Find more recipes for everything from furniture polish to mildew remover in The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen or Organic Housekeeping by Ellen Sandbeck.

You don’t have to stop there. You can make herbal teas, tonics, tinctures, cosmetics, lotions, salves, yogurt, butter, ice cream, beer, wine, kimchi, sauerkraut, kombucha, pickles, jams, and so much more. And for the more crafty – of course, you can sew clothes; crochet blankets; knit sweaters; create art for your walls; or build furniture. You may find that the more you create, the more creative you become.

Are you already buying less and getting creative? I’d love to hear what you’re doing!

Hen diaries (Week 2)

By

The first week of May is cool and rainy. The chicks spend most of the week in their box under the brooder light. It feels like I am changing their water and refilling their food bowl constantly. On Friday, the sun finally makes an appearance, and I tote the chicks’ box out to the yard. They have grown considerably. They’re scruffier, with balding spots on the backs of their necks where feathers are sprouting. Their wings are almost entirely feathered. They look even more reptilian – like baby dinosaurs huddling together on the grass. One of them pecks the ground and eats a grass stalk. The others follow suit.

In the gleaming morning light, I notice something strange. Three of the four chicks have combs. Yes, there are definite yellow ridges sprouting from their foreheads. I have a sinking feeling. I’ve heard that you usually end up with at least one rooster when you buy sexed pullets, but did we get seventy-five percent males? That seems like bad luck. But wait a minute, maybe hens have combs too?

But wait a minute, maybe hens have combs too? After I return the chicks to the guest room, I do a little research. In the pictures, hens do have combs, albeit smaller than roosters’. This would settle my mind, except that one of our black chicks does not have a comb. I click through an online forum hoping to get a definitive answer as to what we have. The more I read, the more I realize that sexing chicks is anything but straightforward. It might help if I knew the breeds, of course.

Later in the day, I ask my hen-keeping neighbor what she thinks, and she assures me that you just can’t tell for eight weeks – “until they start to crow.” She laughs. “Oh and sometimes hens crow a little too.” Hmmn. Well, I guess we’ll wait and see. But, just in case, does anyone want a pet rooster?

New to the Hen Diaries? Read Week One.

Hen diaries

By

It seems like everyone’s brooding chicks these days. Three of my friends are building coops, and I hear hens clucking and squawking all over the neighborhood. We inherited a stately hen chateau when we bought our house last February … and we couldn’t think of a reason not to take the plunge this spring and adopt some chicks.

Warning: we are not the people to instruct others on the care and upbringing of hens. (Translation: we have no idea what we’re doing!) However, maybe our clueless bumbling will inspire you to jump in and adopt some feathered egg-laying friends of your own.

Chickens in the city?

Backyard hens are gaining popularity for a reason. If you feed them well, they’ll produce eggs so delectable you’ll never want to order an omelet in a restaurant again. My neighbor’s hens lay eggs with bright yellow yolks that taste infinitely better than the $5.00-a-carton organic ones we splurge on. Hens dine on weeds and bugs, so they’ll help you in the garden. And their plentiful droppings are a boon to the compost pile. Chickens are also relatively easy to care for. I’ve been assured that they require much less babying than our three spoiled cats. Of course, you’ll need a coop and a very-secure pen to keep predators out.

The adoption

On Thursday, my husband goes to buy the chicks at our local feed store, while I stay home with our napping baby. We have decided four chicks will be a good number, in case one doesn’t make it, or one turns out to be a rooster. My husband says he will ask the salesperson what kind of hens will be the best egg-layers for our backyard habitat.

He comes home with two black chicks and two yellow chicks in a paper bag, a bag of medicated chick starter food, and a brooder light. The chicks are balls of fluff with reptilian eyes and giant feet. I love them immediately. “What kind are they?” I ask, gazing at them.

My husband looks perplexed. He shrugs. Then he assures me he knows he got egg-laying pullets (girl chicks). He thinks the breed of the yellow one might start with a “B”. Yes, I’m just a tad concerned that we have just purchased four roosters. But I try to tell myself that our chicken adventure has just gotten a bit more adventurous.

Home sweet home

We move the chicks into the home they will live in for the first few weeks – a box in the guest room. We line the box with a towel and use shredded newspaper for litter. But it seems to get dirty instantly (Chicks poop a lot!), and I am changing the litter at least twice a day. We buy some more absorbent “pet litter”, which works much better. Now I only have to change it every other day. Although I’ve read we might want to buy special water and food containers, we use regular bowls instead. They work, but I have to change their water and scrub their food bowl often. (Chicks poop a lot!)

Over the week, I watch them and talk to them. They’re entertaining, as they wander around their box, peeping and scratching at their litter. At first they seem scared when I pick them up, but soon they relax. I rub their backs and they sing.

They grow fast. By the end of the week, they are more feathers and less fluff, and they’re much bigger. I hit myself for not taking a photo of them the day we brought them home.

Bonded

On the first sunny day of the week, we take them outside. I’m sure they’ll try to run away, so we sit with our feet together and our legs extended to form a diamond. I lift them out of the box one-by-one, ready to block their escapes. (Most people use chicken wire for this purpose.) But they don’t run away at all. They move closer to me. One of them climbs onto my arm. The others follow. They love me!

I’m completely sold on backyard hens.