Listen up, wanna-be chicken owners: RAISING CHICKENS IS HARD.
I am here to testify that running fresh water and feed down to the chicken coop, located a 250 yards from our house, in ankle deep snow is back breaking labor.
This morning, despite 20 degree temperatures, I was sweating my Carharrt overhauls off, trying to carry a feed bucket AND a water bucket AND a shovel down to the coop (and I’m 4 months pregnant). And then I had to clean the chicken coop, a twice-weekly necessity since the birds can’t frolic and play in the yard like they usually do because of the snow so they hang out in their coop all day, shatting their brains out, and I’m sure my baby is going to get lysteria from me inhaling all those scat fumes, but I can’t have the chickens mucking around in that stinking filth all day. But I couldn’t scoop the scat into our compost bucket because it was already half full of frozen kitchen scraps. So I had to hoof the bucket deep into the woods and up a hill, to try to dump its frozen contents into our big compost bins, which turned out to be a laughable attempt at efficiency because there was no way this frozen block of kitchen scraps would dislodge from the bucket. (What was I thinking?) So I trudged with the bucket all the way back to the coop — now feeling very much like the dying kid in the last scenes of Into the Wild — and tried to scoop chicken poop into the unfilled half of the compost bucket. I then made 5 trips back and forth to the house to dump the poop on various garden beds that needed it. Except those were already covered in 6 inches of snow, so really…..what was the point of this ridiculous exercise? What was I thinking?
And then I realized something: This type of work is WHAT HUSBANDS ARE FOR.
Tags: farm chores
Every time I’m tempted to get a couple of city chickens to keep out in my garden-enhanced-but-distinctly-urban yard, I think about the work. And I wonder if I’d be up to the challenge.
BTW, am loving your blog (which I just found, thanks to the shout-out on InnBrooklyn)… definitely good reading here, and it’s looking like I’ll be back again, probably soon!
I have been keeping chickens for 8 years now, and I clean the chicken house once a year. I use the “deep litter” method–put a foot or so of straw on the floor of the house. As it compacts and gets wet/dirty, spread some more straw, and sprinkle the floor with “scratch” , a mix of seeds and corn. The girls will dig in the straw, mix it all up and the wet stuff will dry out. No odor, eggs are clean, because the girls keep the feet clean by scratching in the straw. I think shavings would work too, but I have only used straw.
In the spring, I haul out wonderful compost that I can put directly on the garden because the girls have mixed the straw and the manure, and it doesn’t burn the plants. I have an 8 x 10 house for about 25 hens. It is about 50 feet from my living room, and I never smell chickens. (Well, very ocasionally, if we have a very long spell of wet weather.)
More to add–I also give all kitchen scraps to the chickens, and let them compost them. The only things I hold back are bones–I have dogs, and I don’t want them digging into the chicken yard for things the birds can’t eat.
In the fall, I collect leaves from anyone who will bag them for me, and dump them right into the chicken yard. The girls love them, they scratch and dig and poop and make the most wonderful soil you have ever seen. The leaves also cut down on the amount of mud on the girls’ feet, making for cleaner eggs. In the spring, I scoop up big shovelsful of compost, for very little effort.
you’re damn right that’s what husbands are for!!! I know Jake works hard, and all that but he doesn’t have jerky in the food dehydrator as it were!! if there weren’t 6ft drifts of snow across this truck stop town i’d come down there and give him what for!! tell him to stop tack welding horseshoes together and give you a hand, and then make you some delicious quiche with jerky in it!
Your site makes me 100 kinds of happy. Someone “gifted” (read that as, dropped off in our yard) two bantam hens. The amount of scat they left in the yard, in all its stinky glory, turned me off from them (scat all over my house from the kids flinging it on each other also repulsed me).
But then I see how many eggs we eat a week and think, “okay, chickens, you and I have to make friends.”
Our redneck neighbors shot our gifted chickens because the chickens bit her tiny dog. That’s how they roll out here, I guess – little dogs are more important than free eggs.
Kim: EXCUSE ME???? Your neighbors shot your CHICKENS because they BIT their dog??? My chickens bite me all the time and it doesn’t exactly hurt (only sometimes). You realize this means war, don’t you? You may have to leave a burning bag of poo on their front porch one night. Not that I advocate such things, or anything. I’m speaking more metaphorically here. JK