Crowing Hen…How to Get Her to Stop!
Backyard chickens make great pets and wonderful fresh eggs in suburban gardens, as long as a hen doesn’t start to crow like a rooster. Hanbury House shares what works and what doesn’t to stop the crowing.
Napoleon Returns from Exile: [Another Update on Our Crowing Hen]
Remember Penguin? She remains my favorite hen, even though she briefly went through a hormonal phase where she thought was a rooster. Because she started crowing early in the morning, last December she was exiled over to my friend’s flock across the street. Click here to read my post about having to banish her to Elba, I mean the neighbor’s house. For the last eight months, she has been a model citizen in K’s backyard flock, never once crowing or…
I just had to tell someone…
..out of the 100,000+ member pages at BYC, one of my pages was featured on the homepage of BackyardChickens.com today. When I started out with chickens 4 years ago, there were few resources promoting gardening methods to happily co-exist with pet chickens, other than keeping the chickens locked up all the time. Lots of folks said a pretty garden with free range chickens couldn’t be done; chickens would eventually destroy everything. I learned that isn’t true. In 2009, I decided…
Long Beach Residents want Backyard Chickens, Bees, and Dwarf Goats
I usually like to post links to TV and newspaper articles related to backyard chickens all together on a different page, but this one hits a bit closer to home and was on the front page of the local paper yesterday. Excerpt taken from the Long Beach Press Telegram, June 18th, 2012. Residents want Long Beach to allow livestock by By Greg Mellen Staff Writer LONG BEACH – If urban farm advocates have their way, several meetings last week could lead…
10 Tips for Gardening with Backyard Chickens
Having a nice yard and garden as well as eating fresh homegrown produce is something many of us enjoy, including backyard chickens. Here are some of my favorite gardening practices for keeping happy free range chickens and still having a productive garden for the family. Don’t keep more chickens than you really need. The more chickens you have, the more damage you get. I can’t stress this one enough. Fence off the vegetable garden area with permanent fencing. Picket fences…
Weird Egg
Have you ever gotten a weird egg? The first time we got one, it sure seemed bizarre. If you keep chickens long enough, you are bound to eventually get one, too. My neighbor came over and asked me last week “Why is her Easter Egger laying shell less eggs?” She is not the crazy chicken lady that I am, and has yet to read every chicken book she could get her hands on. This was her first chicken to…
A Clever Automatic Coop Door – No Electricity or Battery Needed
I feel a automatic coop door opener is a must have for every urban chicken keeper, especially if your spouse, like mine, is not too keen about being woken up at dawn everyday by hens anxious about getting on with their business for the day. However, getting power to a coop can be a challenge and some of the battery powered or solar powered automatic door openers can be very expensive. I stumbled on to this nifty automatic coop door…
A bad experience with sand in the chicken run
Sand vs. Shavings is one of those things, each chicken keeper has their own personal preference, based on their run situation and location of their coop. In 2008 when I was in the planning stages of building my chicken coop, a few individuals in the online chicken community were heavily promoting the use of sand in a chicken run. They made it sound like the best thing since sliced bread. None of my chicken keeping resource books mentioned using it as…
Joint Custody
My two broody hens stared at each other in their separate nests for the last 4 weeks, on fake eggs and then on the fertile Cochin eggs I bought on ebay. I had been thinking about the possibility of letting them sit with their chicks together, too. However, most of the expert chicken sources recommend separating broody hens from the rest of the flock and from each other. I have read a few horror stories on backyardchickens.com where two broody…
A Visit from the Hawk
Coopers Hawk sitting in our backyard Chinese Elm tree, trying to decide which chicken it wants for lunch. Hawks are a serious concern for free ranging chickens, even for flocks living in urban areas, like ours. Since I spend a lot of time outside and love watching birds, I have noticed we get plenty of fly overs from Coopers Hawks, Prairie Falcons, American Kestrals, and Red Tail Hawks. With 3 chicken keepers on the block and a big park that…