Hermit on the Homestead

Dad finished building transitional home number 3 for the not-so-baby chickens. It's a make-shift cage inside of the chicken coup. I reached inside the box to grab the chickens in order to move them and they run so fast. I had a hard time grabbing them even when they were confined in the box. Finally I grabbed one, they feel weird, like bones wearing fluff. I put them in an empty diaper box and then carried the box to the coup and put them inside the new cage. They immediately started kicking and shaping the hay into a little nest. It was kind of cute. Meanwhile, I had to fix the screen on our sliding door in our bedroom, it had an enormous hole ripped into it, and we just happened to have some leftovers of a roll of screen material, so I got on it. First you take out the gasket and throw away the old screen. While I was doing this I broke the gasket, so I had the main piece and another piece about a foot long. I figured it didn't matter I'll just use the pieces. It was extr...

Chickens are a serious pain in the butt. I neglected to mention that one of the jobs involved in raising the chickens is to wipe their butts. They get something called Pasty Butt and they die if you don’t wipe their butt. You must do this until they get adult feathers which is at about 5 weeks old. Just sayin’. They constantly kick hay into their water and it gets stinky, they eat a lot and need to be fed all the time. It’s just no fun. Meanwhile, the bigger the baby chickens get, the more interested our dog Cheezit gets. Which is not a good thing. One night we heard all kinds of commotion at about 1:30 in the morning. We were shocked to see Chicken Number 2 running around the hallway, with Chicken Number 1 and 3 huddled in fear in the box. What in tarnation is going on here?! Shreds of cardboard were everywhere, hay and mess everywhere. Cheezit had destroyed their brooder box and the chickens were so scared. We had to jury-rig something to plug the enormous hole in the box and throw t...

The previous owners left two hens here, and we watched in the chicken coup for a few weeks and no eggs happened. Aji said that if you feed them they will lay more eggs which makes sense so we started giving them our table scraps of rice and the throw-away parts of the veggies from the chopping and all that and, what do you know, they started laying eggs. We thought it would be a waste to just throw the eggs away, and when I read about the huge difference in nutritional value that farm fresh eggs provide over commercial eggs, I thought, hey, a few eggs might be a nice treat. But we all started enjoying it so much that the eggs from just two chickens started to feel a little insufficient. And eggs at the store have more than doubled in price so that's not worth it.  So we thought, what if we get more chickens? So easy, right? I was headed to the ranch store to getting some tools and buckets, and Ganesh told me to buy two chicks if I happened to see them. Sure enough the ranch store h...