A bouquet for the ladies

There’s a bush that grows commonly around here; I don’t know what it is but I call it a Bee Bush because it attracts a lot of bees. And during monsoon it breaks out in stalks of yellow flowers, which the hens seem to find acceptable if not quite lettuce. (they pounce viciously on lettuce.) So I’ve been picking them a bouquet every so often, when I go in to check their water and collect eggs.

Hey, you takes your love where you finds it.

When it turned out the ladies were here to stay, I bought a book called The Small-Scale Poultry Flock by a guy named Harvey Ussery, who takes a practical approach to raising chickens (in Chapter 22, Helping the Flock Stay Healthy, the word “hatchet” appears frequently – he’s not a sentimental kinda guy) and as a means of dealing with chicken manure he recommends something called a Deep Compost method, which basically involves turning the chicken coop, or yard in my case since I don’t pasture them, into a sort of free-form compost heap. I keep the chicken house very clean but the yard is a foot deep in dirt, straw, and decomposed chicken shit and plant scraps. I’ve been doing this close to ten months now and it does seem to work. The chickens don’t mind, there’s no bad smell, and every now and then I rake out a wheelbarrow full of lovely compost and that’s only with three chickens.

Welcome to the Fortress of Attitude

But the reason I mention this is that the ladies seem to find quite a lot to eat in there. I still give them pellets and scratch, and veggies when I can get free scraps, but except for oyster shell their consumption of storebought food has fallen dramatically. They do love their lettuce and corn, but a scoop of pellets goes a long way. Ussery mentioned the same thing: The chickens find a lot to eat in the compost, but he also says it’s a mystery just what they’re eating.

The ladies are very active, productive and apparently healthy, though early on they developed a terrible habit of plucking one another bare that didn’t go away when I moved them into better accommodations – in fact they’ve gotten worse.

The Bald Ladies.
They’re embarrassing, but they’re mine.

Landlady’s chickens are also doing fine, in that there are still 21 of them and they’re getting quite large. By comparison with the Bald Ladies, the children are going through pellets at a ruinous rate. One of them somehow managed to break her leg, and although it truly doesn’t seem to bother her it’s not improving; she just walks around on the knee in a kind of waddle and her foot sticks out to the side. I’d be screaming in pain but she just waddles around with the rest of the flock – I’ve speculated that maybe it’s some sort of birth defect I never noticed, since I really don’t pay that much attention to individuals yet. But I don’t think so.

Also I find it strange that, as large as they’ve grown, I still can’t tell any difference between hens and cocks.

I’ve been going through the tile scraps I brought home from D&L’s place, and playing with possible floor patterns for the Lair. There are rectangles and strips, and the strips appear to outnumber the rectangles roughly two to one so I’m thinking about something like what’s in the picture. It’s going to be a lot more work than I hoped, though – none of the strips are exactly the same width, and when I work out their width including spacing it’s not going to equal the length. So I’ll need to cut them all to the narrowest common denominator, then work out how long they need to be and cut them to that length. Then I’ll need to file a radius on each cut surface. And THEN I can start thinking about moving the stove and all the furniture out of the lair. Ew.

But a tiled floor sure will be nice. My OSB has quite worn out its charm.