Category: About My Chickens

I’ve seen bamboo my whole life, but this is the first time I’ve seen a grove bloom. The grove of bamboo next to the cabin is blooming. The leaves are drying and falling. Bamboo can go decades before blooming, but once it blooms, the whole grove dies. A bamboo grove really is just one plant, each year sending new shoots up new roots.

The flowers are small and plain, like most grass flowers. I’m curious what the seeds will look like. Will they be grain like? Something I could turn into flour and bake into bread?

Summer has finally arrived. Each morning blue skies await when I wake up. The long rains of June and early July ruined the cherries this year. They were small and many split. But the plum trees are full of fruit. So are the apple trees.

Every year an ice shelf forms on one bank of the pond, an ice shelf of cherry blossoms. Wind blows the cherry blossom petals onto the pond and pushes them against one bank. It looks like an ice shelf to me.

This last weekend we had a taste of summer in May. The temperature soared into the upper 70s here. Two days of mid July lost their way and showed up early, a reminder that more days like these are not far away.

The white lilacs are perfuming the backyard. The slow growing madrona tree is putting out new leaves. The pace of growth among trees is so varied. Some aren’t content without growing many feet in a year. Others, like the madrona, are happy with adding just an inch or two.

What would people be like if we never stopped growing? Nursing homes would be enormous with thirty foot ceilings, twenty foot long beds. Imagine five and six feet tall people herding twenty foot tall giants with dementia into a dining room. The toilets would be so large you’d need a stepladder to clean them.

The Komatsuna 小松菜 survived the winter rather well. So well they are on the verge of blooming. With no other brassicas in bloom, I can let these bloom and go to seed.

The nettles are up, a sure sign that spring is well on its way.

The weather is warm enough to start planting. And this year I am saying good bye to straight rows. Instead of potatoes rows, I’ll have potato bends, cabbage circles, and corn waves. And no more stretches of the same thing over and over again, starting with this bend of German Butterball potatoes. I mixed in garlic and leeks among the potatoes.

I was gathering eggs at the right time this morning to discover who is laying the rose colored egg. And here she is below. She came squawking out of a nest just as I was about to reach inside, and there was a very warm rose egg next to a cool egg.

She’s very distinctive with her orange feathers around her neck, a blunt beak, and five pointy crests for a comb. I’ll call her Rose.

The new year starts with a mystery. One of the hens is laying a rose colored egg, but which one? This is when it would come in handy to be able to talk with them and ask, “Which one of you is doing this?”

There is sunshine filling the horizon, pouring through an opening in the distant clouds. It’s not raining and for a mid December day in the Pacific Northwest, this counts as a sunny winter day.

Mynah, like many of the other hens, has soul-piercing eyes, especially when she is on a nest. You can almost see her thinking, “How close do I let him get before I poke his eyes out?”

One of the Welsummer hens decided to make a nest in the straw on the ground. And below is the egg she laid. Welsummer’s lay dark eggs with black speckles. They are beautiful eggs and beautiful hens too. I’m rather enamored with them.

Buttercup is free of her chicks. They are all on their own and she is back to laying eggs in style.

Not the clearest of pictures, but you get the idea how Buttercup and her brood bed down for the night, in a tight spot between a screen and the wall. Her chicks are two months old now and she still beds down in a corner of the coop with them. She’s got three chicks on her back with the rest of them packed in around her.

I’ve never had a hen take this long before taking her chicks up to roost. Many of the hens coax their little ones to fly up to roost when they are a month old, sometimes before the little ones can even fly up so high. It’s a traumatic event for the chicks, looking up at their mother high up on the roost. They peep loudly, and try to figure out how to get up there to join her.

Many hens have a “sink or swim” attitude when it comes to rearing their chicks. “You wanna sleep with your momma? Then get your butt up here,” is their attitude. Tough love and all that.

It will be interesting to see when Buttercup decides it is time for her brood to roost. At this age, they won’t have any difficulty following her to the highest of roosts.