Homesteading Challenges

My corner has become an educational center for sustainability and connection to nature and our food sources.  I was just about to hop on my bike the other day and head off to work when a man stopped me and asked about my chickens.  He wanted to know how much money I had saved and whether raising chickens was a smart move financially.  I told him that it was not saving me any money and that it was costing me money.  I told him that saving money was not the point, that my desire was from a different motivation.  The agribusinesses have got the formula down and they can produce for you anything you want for cheap!  Raising the chickens for me is about understanding where my food comes from, how nature works and what work is involved in its production.  It's about control, controlling what my chickens eat and drink, how they spend their days, where they sleep and what is done with their waste.  Today I was sitting in my house and I could hear outside a girl with her dad, maybe 10, maybe on bikes.  She had a great voice and with wonderful projection said "Dad, we have GOT to get some chickens!" and that is another reason I love to raise my chik-a-dees.

I've been feeding and cleaning and loving an assortment of chickens for 5 months.  I think I've harvested about 30-40 eggs and have had the opportunity to gift just a handful.  In a sad chain of events, I found myself with an assortment of roosters.  The last dude to strut his stuff had a week of masculinty with my silkie, Lady Moonbeam.  It was scary to see the big red ameraucana mounting the little white silkie, and I was happy to get rid of the rooster.  About 3 or 4 days after the rooster left, the silkie became broody.  This means that hormonally she had transitioned from an egg layer to an egg tender.  She had begun to sit in the hen house not just to lay an egg, but all day long.  For the first few days I would find her sitting on the last egg she had layed, and if the new copper maran, Madame Chocolate, had layed an egg she would gather the other chicken's egg as well and be sitting flattened out over the eggs, keeping them warm.  For the first few days I would shoo her away and take the eggs.  Then after a few days of this she stopped laying her own eggs and just sat, on the copper maran egg if she could.  I decided that she was not going to be convinced out of this, I had three of her eggs saved up in my kitchen, not refrigerated, and I offered them to her.  She took them gratefully and began to sit on her three precious eggs, keeping them warm, turning them with her feet from time to time, leaving each day only for a few minutes to eat and drink and go to the bathroom.  I wasn't sure if the eggs were fertile, I mostly just wanted to make her happy by giving her what she wanted, although she would have been happier with a dozen eggs instead of just three.

The days passed in to weeks and she continued to sit all day and night on her precious eggs.  I worried that she would starve to death but began to notice that she would come down and out of the hen house once each day for just a few minutes to eat and drink and relieve herself.  In this comedy of errors one of my many mistakes or unaware missteps was to not write down the date when I gave her the eggs.  On Monday it was starting to feel like a long time to me, and I worried that she would sit forever on eggs that were duds.  I had awoken that morning from a dream where I cracked open the egg and removed the chick, she wasn't conscious and I began to massage her body with my fingers and I resuscitated her...in the dream that is.  So on Monday, mid morning, I noticed her come out of the coop to eat and stretch out.  I peaked in the hen house and removed one egg, the smallest of the three.  I walked to the other side of the garden and gave the egg a little tap on a brick.  The end flattened a little and I peeled up a little piece of shell.  Inside I saw the membrane thickened, a bit drawn away from the shell and vascular like a thick leaf.  After a few seconds I noticed the pulse of the membrane, the pulse of a heart beat and I flipped the shell back down and returned the egg to her mother...cursing my stupidity!  Later that day I checked on the eggs and the one that I had cracked had puffed its shell back into its original shape, I could see the crack lines, but it was a nice egg shape.

The next morning when the Silkie was out doing her think I checked on the eggs, there were only two!  I began to sift through all of the pine needles, looking for an egg, a shell, something!   I looked around the coop, and could find nothing.  But with my head in the box looking around I could hear little baby chirps.  I thought the chick had fallen out of the box, but when I took my head out to look below, no chirps.  When I put my head back into the box I could hear the chirping.  I lowered my head and realized the chirping was coming from the eggs!  I thought I was going crazy!  I decided that the other chickens probably ate the first chick when it hatched, so I called in the reinforcements.  My husband came home and we set up the bottom of our chicken coop/armoire as a nursery.  He drilled a hole and installed a light.  I lined the floor with cardboard and fresh pine shavings.  I placed Lady Moonbeam into her new home along with her two remaining eggs, the one I had cracked open and the other untouched egg.

to be continued...