The chickening continues

But not without a few struggles.

After nearly 22 weeks of patient waiting, the flock has finally started to lay eggs. The first one arrived on Labor Day, after several anxious hours of ‘egg song.’ That’s a euphemistic phrase for the caterwauling a hen will get up to as she prepares to lay her first one.

Yeah, so listening to a hen labor to lay on Labor Day seemed apt, though an edible egg is unfertilized, containing as it does an egg for you to eat instead of a chicken embryo. Still, I’m sure my neighbors think the flock’s been visited by packs of wolves or something equally alarming, for all that egg song. I’ve been getting curious looks from the balconies on both sides. (If this is your first visit to Brunette Gardens, I’m not talking in metaphor: We’re on a quarter acre in the city, surrounded by apartments.)

The emphatic squawk-clucking only seems to happen the first time. But that’s for each chicken, and we have a flock all the same age, all morphing from pullets into hens, oh-fficially, for the first time, together.

Big Sister laid the inaugural egg, and I sweated that one out with her, making sure she had an ice block for the heat, fresh water, a clean nesting box… I would’ve massaged her little chicken feet if she’d let me.

Now I know the magic first hand. I got my initial egg, and after that, two more came, one each day in succession.

I ate number three atop homegrown, roasted pumpkin, one of my favorite breakfasts.

Savoring the superior flavor of that little egg, I closed my eyes and felt connected to these feathered friends, issuing a loving thanks for their gift. While they are not exactly pets, they certainly aren’t wild animals who need to be set “free” either, as they’ve evolved with and are dependent upon the farmer, and that shows in their behavior through and through. They follow me around, beg for treats, roost on my legs and arms, ask for pets, and cuddle up to me. One or two will wait around, guarding the coop, before Anthony or I show up to close the coop door, safely tucking them in for the night. They enjoy the bounty of their oversized run and its plethora of forage and insects, but they also flock to the feed tube, recognizing the bucket when I come a-swingin’ with it.

It’s a mutual arrangement stretching back thousands of years, and I’m glad to feel my place in it at last.

To what do I owe this egg-static bliss? All I had to do was painstakingly raise a flock of chicks from golfball-sized fluffs to gangly teens to grumpy, hormonal ladies over the course of a long spring and summer.

Earlier in these chicken chronicles, I waxed poetic about how I’d hit upon what I thought was an ingenious method for rotating the flock around our quarter acre using the combination of a mobile coop called the chickshaw and an electric fence.

Backyard homestead chickens

Heh, heh, well… best-laid plans and all that.

As I mentioned in this later flock update, the first problem with a solar electric fence is that it will short out in a thunderstorm, as ours did, leaving us with no choice but to let them free-range, as they all quickly figured out the barrier was down and leapt through it.

We got the energizer fixed—free of charge from the US manufacturer—and set everything up again, only to be met with a second problem.

It turns out the chickshaw is the perfect height for chickens to hop onto such that they can launch themselves right up over the top of our 48-inch tall electric fence, whether it’s wired up and active or not.

Wah-wah…

So there I was again, like Lucy trying to keep up with the chocolate conveyor belt of chickens flapping out each time I dropped them back into the run.

By chicken decree, we went back to the free-ranging trial. Or, as I explained it on Notes:

At first, free-ranging seemed like it might be OK.

But then.

We had these beautiful limestone walkways laid in June after seven years of carving out annual wood-chip paths for ourselves and feeling like we could not keep doing that as we age. (I’m now in my 50s, and the man hit 60 this year.) Well, chickens like to scratch huge, gaping dust bowls into the earth, and when they do that on the edge of a path, it’s kinda wrecked.

Plus poop. So. Much. Poop.

Fond of their human kitchen-scrap dispenser, the chickens wanted to follow me up to the two rock patios—where we have a table and chairs—and up onto the porch to the back door. Wherever chickens wander, poop accumulates. As we use the back door for everyday comings and goings and the table and chairs for occasional outdoor dining, this was less than ideal. Wherever chickens poop, flies flock.

Lastly, but most importantly, those sweet, little, innocent chickie-boos utterly destroyed the garden: Tomatoes tasted, okra devoured, carrots consumed. Pumpkin pecked to death in the prime of its youth. They didn’t even spare the zucchini.

The chickshaw-and-electric fence combo seemed to be an abject failure, and free-ranging wasn’t working.

This is where my well-developed inner critic breaks in, telling me I shouldn’t even try to raise chickens, let alone help other people raise them, as I’m obviously really, really bad at this. This critic only wants what’s best for me and is just trying to get me to work harder, but yeah, I’ve been talking her into cheerleading instead of cutting me down.

Also, in my defense, the guy who designed the chickshaw is literally the spokesperson for the company that made our electric fence. Yeah, have them send you their catalog, and there he is in the centerfold, smiling in his newsboy cap, standing next to… the chickshaw.

Ahem.

Don’t judge the man or his sponsor too harshly, though? I think he designed that mobile coop for sizable homestead businesses like his, where they use it to transport flocks out to further pastures. Still, I’m not sure that wide-open egg door in his original design (we patched it closed) wouldn’t still be a problem, unless you’re only using the chickshaw for day ranging.

My larger point is that no one tells you how to scale this homestead thing down to the size of an average backyard, or even a slightly-larger-than-average backyard, like ours. That’s basically why I’m here, busting my ass writing this Substack every week.

We’d been left with two choices.

1. Buy a second 50-foot fence (the smallest they make) and double the run size.

2. Free-range the chickens but use the electric fence on the food garden! That would also keep out the pesky rabbits, who demolished our spring carrot crop… but we’d still have an, um, poop problem.

Unfortunately, the electric fence doesn’t come in a 75-foot size, which would have been my choice from the jump. The problem with 100 feet is that, because our quarter acre is chopped into sections by a center sidewalk, rain garden, rocky strip (a former driveway given over to water-wise natives), and other features, there are really only two places we can set up a fenced area that size. Both require serious tree trimming and other amendments as well, and in both cases, they’re still fairly narrow strips of land, and the chickens might still be able to crest over the fence from the chickshaw.

This blows my plan to rotation-graze the chickens, giving them fresh forage nearly year-round and distributing their nitrogen-rich poop throughout the garden areas.

We went with option no. 1 above, both for their own better protection and because of the poop and destruction, as even if we electric-fence the food crop, the rest of the garden would suffer.

So far they are… somewhat deterred?

I trimmed our Amorpha fruticosa (indigo) bushes back even further, and I’m gifting our hens piles of fresh greens every morning, and that seems to be holding them in the run. For now, anyway... or maybe they’re just distracted by their own egg-laying.

For more adventures in backyard chicken-keeping, check out all our stories here.