Green Mountain Girls

The girls are not a militia.  Well, in some respects they are.  Earwigs, earthworms, cutworms, flies, spiders, little creepy critters of all kinds would definitely consider these chickens to be armed.  Sharp beaks and strong toe-nailed feet count as lethal weapons.

Mountain of gifted greens

When my hens bellied up to the mountain of grass clippings and clover dumped from the five-gallon bucket, they meant business, and they became the Green Mountain Girls, for just a minute or two.  Collecting the bucket of greens from my sister's place was one of the Things I get to do today.  Dumping it in the hen house where they could forage without concern for the rain was another.  Eating their way through the pile as tall as they were was their job which they dispatched with the precision of a platoon of soldiers.  What they didn't eat, they scratched.  Days later whatever is left will have dried and become the pickings for a boring day inside coop while a fall storm thrashes its way through.

Green Feeding Frenzy

The head of lettuce already torn apart for easier access

They take bigger bites than I do, I swear! Lena Horne Hen tore off a piece of lettuce two inches square and swallowed until it went down.

OK.  This one is a little too big to swallow.

The rest of the girls didn't take smaller bites because they were polite.  It was just the luck of the tear.  Grab what you can.

Getting down to the last leaf

When a whole head of bolted lettuce (all you garden folks know that's what it's called when it is starting to grow tall and make seeds) lands in your yard, in the hen world you have to get to busy or there'll be nothing left to cackle about (or eat).

Katy reigns over the core

Going down!

The first lettuce plantings have turned bitter, so chicken Things I get to do today are fling a head over the hen-pen fence and watch the gals gobble it down.  I'm expecting them to say "oink."

Chicken Christmas

Handsome cardoons are artichoke cousins.  Stalks are edible.

Cardoons are a favorite Christmas present--if you're a chicken.  We all live in our own little world.  From the human view point, we would say that we see the real world.  However, there is a dog world, a cat world, a worm world and a chicken world and a. . .    Every sentient being has its own world.  In my chickens' world, cardoons are Christmas.







What is Christmas to a chicken anyway?  Let's have a go into the chicken world:  Feet grip the perch all night.  Dark is turning to slate gray to light.  Hop down from safety and out into the open.  Flap, flap to the fluffy straw below.  Thirsty.  Shiver as the cold water goes down.  Fluff feathers to be warmer.  Tuck one foot up into warm belly feathers for a time. Warm foot down, cold foot up. Warm foot down, cold foot up.  Gobble some greens on the floor.  Swallow, swallow, swallow until the whole leave is down.  Eat pellets.  Oyster shells--peck them, eat them.  Scratch, peck and eat dirt on the floor.  Outside the coop, scratch, peck and eat bugs in the dirt.

Cardoons for Christmas Eve Dinner

All this is to say that a day in the life of a chicken is scratching, pecking, eating, preening from light in the morning until dark at night. Rather obviously they don't know Christmas from scratch.





One of the Things I get to do today, this Christmas Eve (their very first), is teach my chickens about Christmas.  From their point of view it looked like this: Dark things falling down on top of them. RUN!  Big greens on the ground.  ????  Quickly but cautiously inspecting the greens that fell out of the sky.  Food?  Peck, peck, peck.  Food!

So you might say that the hens don't and won't ever get it about Christmas.  But if it's about the spirit of giving, then maybe they know more than we think.  One of them left this for me yesterday.

Very first egg from any of these chickens--maybe from Latifah.

Crazy 'Bout Greens

Stubby, short grass with generous mud is not a chicken banquet.  My gals like their greens.  They like them lush and generous.  This time of year the lawn in the hen pen is sparse, not lush.

If all children loved green vegetables the way these hens do, there would be no McDonald's, and Burger King would not stand a chance.  Can you imagine:  Super Size it with another helping of broccoli and kale, please!  And what a difference that would make.  Take 30 seconds right now to "see" all the people (children and adults) who regularly eat fast food, and then imagine what would be different about their lives if they ate vegetables instead.  Kind of blows you away, doesn't it.

Well, not to get too hung up on the eating habits of others, my job is to eat my greens and make sure my sweeties get all they need.  Since "plarking with the hens" (I could spend all morning puttering in the coop and pen making it cleaner, cozier, cuter, more comfortable and more convenient) is on my Things I get to do today, it takes the form of finding an abundant wealth of salad for the chickens.

Clockwise from 12: Katy, Nina, Latifah, Lena, Nora--green-lovers,  all.

Turns out that "Early Mizuni", an Asian green, is one of the first things to come up in the garden.  It also, and more importantly here, keeps on growing no matter what the weather in the fall and winter.  Even with frost nearly every night now for weeks, "Early Mizuni" seems untouched.  So I supersized them with a huge clump of it--the perfect fast food for hungry hens.

Besides the Fence

When my Uncle Bill was still alive, Tuesday mornings at 10:30 was our prearranged time to chat on the phone.  He had a bit of an old Western funny bone and frequently would say hello with, “What have you been up to, besides the fence?”  He would chuckle.

I might reply, “Well, not much at all but standing here by it telling you stories.”  We’d both chuckle.  And today as I’m checking off farm chores on my urban plot of land, I’m working on the fence.  My girls have pecked their little green lawn nearly into the ground, giving it a haircut that would make the scalp raw. Just outside their space there’s an area of grass that is hard to mow and full of clover plus a scattering of lush dandelions.  Since that’s their favorite combination of greens, it’s only fair that I share.

I’m always “rotating crops” by moving the fence to allow or disallow chicken access to various parts of the yard.  Raw, scalped sod moves this to the top of Things I get to do today.  I think of most farmers/ranchers “making fence” miles from the barn with only the fence line connecting them.  Solitary work.  But I’m a city farmer, and besides, Gwyneth Poultry keeps me very good company.  She comes right up to peck my gloves (safety check, I think), scratches around in the loosened soil to round up all the bugs and then looks adoringly into my face as I kneel to untwist the prickly ends where one length of chicken wire meets another.  I imagine that she loves me dearly, but my rational mind tells me she’s probably just checking out my nose hairs to see if they are edible.  It is bliss plarking with her along side.  Her soft musings and chicken chatter pluck at the strings of my heart. The task goes quickly.

I gather up my work implements, nearly as pleased with the new space as the hens are. I can almost see Uncle Bill leaning against the wire mesh, with one elbow on the post, watching the hens.  Don’t really need anything besides the fence.