This morning, Kevin opened the nest boxes and found a very mysterious object.  It was about the size of a small egg, pink and meaty, mottled with what looks like fat.
All the chickens seem normal and healthy.  They’re eating, and pecking, and dust bathing.  Nobody’s obviously at death’s door. 
But this clearly came out of a [...]

I’ve never been a reader of shelter magazines. I can certainly appreciate the lovely homes, the high-end kitchens, and the innovative décor, but stories of people who have more money and better taste than I do can only hold my attention for so long before I pick up my issue of Shack Quarterly or The [...]

This morning, Kevin scrambled some eggs for our breakfast. What with keeping chickens, we find that we eat a lot more eggs than we used to.
When our hens first started producing (September 22, 2009, that would be), we thought it was utterly miraculous. You’d think that two people who’d known all their lives that eggs [...]

After 2 ½ days in solitary confinement, our broody hen metamorphosed back into her normal self. When she first went in the broody-busting cage, she’d do her Henzilla act – fluffing her feathers, lifting up her wings, clucking – whenever we got near her. And then, yesterday morning, I went in to give her more [...]

The vast majority of the world’s chickens spend their entire lives in a cage. That’s what I told myself as we put Queenie in what is supposed to be the cure for her broodiness. The impossibility of nesting in a cage is supposed to break the hormonal cycle, and should turn Queenie back into an [...]

My husband embodies a panoply of old-fashioned virtues. Honor. Courage. Perseverance. Grace in the face of adversity. Although these virtues are to be valued in both genders, it seems to me they make a man manly. Kevin’s strong and daring and fearless. He’s not afraid of hard work or getting dirty. And he never complains. [...]