This week's Living on the Earth was recorded in the chicken yard at the Old Solar Farm. It is an update on the hens featured in the following essay from 1994. They're still laying.
Things have settled down in the chicken yard now and the pullets are beginning to lay eggs. Our small flock of chickens, which has varied between two and several dozen birds over the years, is an important source of high quality protein in our diets.
The eight pullets, with their rooster, are part of a batch of 25 chicks we bought freshly hatched last July. We got them for the students at the Common Ground Summer Program in New Haven to care for during their five week science and English course on a small farm. They wrote about, fed and graphed the growth of those chicks. It's wonderful to see tough streetwise teenagers transformed into gentle caring people when they tend animals.
We bought a dual-purpose heavy breed; they lay brown eggs and are also large enough to be used for meat. They were about the only chickens available in such small quantities in the summer. We got straight run chicks, about half were male, and the other half female. Two of the hens, which are discernable to a knowing eye early on because of their darker color, went to friends in New Haven, and we sold two of them to Patty across the valley to round out her small flock. We raised the rest until last week when the inevitable happened-at least to the males, anyway. The young hens mind their own business and are so dainty and nimble that as they approached maturity in the late fall, they figured out how to get out of their pen and forage for insects and other morsels in the mostly put-to-bed garden. Hopefully, they will have eaten some of the pest insects too. Their male counterparts, however, deserve no such praise. They mostly couldn't or didn't get out of the pen and just hung around and made threatening motions to each other, reminding me of cocky, contentious teenagers without enough to do. They hasseled the hens and attacked me when I fed them.
So New Year's weekend, two young couples from New Haven came out to help prepare these bad boys for the freezers, theirs and ours. It was a good day, sharing skills and good work outdoors, and afterwards a delicious home-grown meal together.
I selected the gentlest rooster to keep with the hens, the one that accompanied them on their forrays into the garden and the woods. A ratio of one rooster to eight to ten hens works very well. The rooster protects the hens, warns of predators and herds them into their house at night, where they are locked up safely from racoons and other nightstalkers.
Last summer we figured that it would be good to have some fresh egg layers this winter to supplement the declining production of our seven older hens. Comercially, chickens are used for less than a year before they become canned soup. Our hens, their egg laying declining both because of their age and the short days and cold temperatures laid eggs fairly regularly into November. The oldest hens, two barred rocks at least three years old, and a sex linked probably four years old, are dignified and beautiful. These old breeds seem much sturdier and more productive than the newer varieties we have.
Before last week we hadn't gotten any eggs for almost a month. This situation changed our eating habits. Suzanne will use the freshest storebought eggs we can find in cooking or baking but she'll make her delicious omlets and scrambled eggs with greens or eat sliced egg sandwiches only if we have our fresh eggs. And without our own eggs in abundance, there's no question of making the wonderful custards and quiches which plentiful fresh eggs inspire. We did use store eggs for one batch of homemade pasta, but it just wasn't the same. Homegrown eggs are special because they are very fresh and the hens get plenty of outdoor exercise and sunshine as well as a varied diet including greens and insects.
When it warms a bit, we'll clean out the houses of their accumulated manure and the leaves we've used as litter. Composted it will fertilize the garlic in our garden this summer.
For more information about a small home flock, write to Cock-a-doodle-do, WHSU, 5151 Park Avenue, Fairfield, CT 06432.
This is Bill Duesing, Living on the Earth
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