Inner City Farmer

Lester, the oddly named hen that I raised from a chick, died sometime last night. She was nine months old.

My best guess is that the cold got to her. I babied my other hens during their first winter, but I neglected to to the same for poor old Lester. I should have shut the door of the chicken house the last couple nights and perhaps even put a space heater in there, but I forgot and now my best layer is dead. This one is on me. I don’t feel good about it at all.

Having yet to plant my fall garden, I look forward every week to exchanging my eggs for the vegetables supplied by my neighbors/friends, Chad and Lindsay. Chad always goes out of his way to make sure his vegetables are fit to be traded. When I asked him what exactly he was doing in the photograph I took of him and Lindsay, he told me he was listening to the pattycake squash to hear if it was any good, a technique perhaps only known to him.

The chickens remain the heart and soul of my little farm and the eggs they produce one of my main forms of currency so I was a bit disappointed a couple weeks back to discover that my Polish Crested is a rooster. That means that out of the six chicks I adopted in the spring only one hen survived! Not the best survival rate, but I comfort myself knowing that the one hen that made it has started producing eggs. I now have four egg-laying hens in all and they’re doing a great job of keeping me and my friends well supplied with eggs. I’ve been rewarding them with late-afternoon romps in the backyard. Oddly, the rooster doesn’t quite know what to do when allowed outside of the coop, which I blame partly on the fact that, with all those feathers in his face, he can’t see beyond four feet!

The chicks I got in late March are now nearly full grown. They’ve been living in the same coop as the three older hens for about the last six weeks. They have a separate “den,” essentially a box made out of scrap particle board with cinder blocks covering the entrance, where they can eat their own food (first “grower” and now “developer”) in peace and escape the hens’ wrath. To get inside the den, they sneak through and around the cinder blocks, something the fat old hens can’t do.

One of the funniest things about my five chickens is that they are all different breeds. I have a Wyandotte, a Black Australorp, a Rhode Island Red, a hatchery-created breed called an Ideal 236, and a Polish Crested, which might be the freakiest-looking chicken of all time. Here’s a close-up of its face, as seen through a cinder block:

As my garden continues to burn out and fade away, I have become even more dependent upon eggs for sustenance. Much to their credit, my hens are producing, usually at least two eggs a day. In fact, I’m getting a little sick of omelets. Who’s up for a trade?

Self-Sufficiency Meter: 30%