Chickens

Tomatoes and chickens have been everywhere we went, except there were no chickens on the homestead at Refuge Cove.   So here's what I know and have learned about them so far.

Chickens are gross and dumb.  They will eat basically anything, so if you keep chickens you can keep two types of compost:  One with egg shells and other things that chickens shouldn't eat, and one that isn't actually compost because the chickens will eat it--rotten tomatoes, y'know, whatever you have.  Besides that, they need store-bought type food:  scratch, for throwing out into their pen and having them peck at it, and a grain mixture called mash.  The type of mash depends on the age of the birdies, e.g., laying hens should be fed "lay mash", and early babies should be fed "starter mash."  For hens that are laying eggs, we would throw in crushed oyster shells, which would increase the strength of their eggs.

Some chickens are nice.  Some chickens peck.  Some chickens are pissed off all the time.  According to rumour, there is a positive correlation between how much space they have and how nice they are, which would make sense, but even then you are going to have easily irritated ones who peck your hand when you try to reach under them for eggs.  In this case, stick something over their head.  A largish yogurt container works pretty well.

More on chickens being gross.  Chickens will poop all over everything, including their eggs, even if you try to collect them every 12 hours.  You have to do this because otherwise the chickens will attack their or each others' eggs, I'm not exactly clear on this.  Also, once one chicken starts laying eggs somewhere, all the rest of the chickens jump on the egg-laying bandwagon and try to lay their eggs there, even if it is a really filthy corner behind their feed barrels.  This is why you'll find a bunch of eggs under one hen in the evening--she didn't lay all those in the last twelve hours, she just was the most recent one to jump onto the eggs and start laying there.

After you collect the eggs, they are covered in dirt and chicken poop and who knows what else. However, they have some sort of magical air-tight coating that will keep them sterile for three weeks, unrefrigerated.  This is because a chicken wants to have a whole bunch of chicks at the same time, but isn't going to lay all the eggs in one day.  She'll lay eggs, then wander off, peck at food, lay some more, etc... and then when she decides that she has enough egg, she'll actually sit on them and heat them up to the point that (a) the air-tight coating will disappear and (b) they'll start incubating into chicken-babies.  (This is also why you want to take the eggs away from her every 12 hours, before she does this.)  So once you collect the eggs, they can sit out in their basket for a few days before you wash them with no ill effects.

Then you wash them in warm water and allow them to dry.  If they aren't dry before they go into the egg cartons, then they'll stick and crack when you try to take them out.  Then you have a carton of eggs!  Horray!

Chickens are still gross.

The way that I've been told to deal with the baby chicklets is "feed them and leave them alone," more or less.  So I don't know much, but I do know:  You can order day-old chicken babies in the mail.  In the mail!  For like $1.50/each or something.  Turkey babies are more expensive, like $4/bird because turkeys are so retardedly inbred that they do not know how to mate and must be artificially inseminated.  (At this point, the species should just die.  Seriously, them and pandas too.)