Lots of people write to me and ask for more chicken posts.  So here, by popular demand, are some pictures of the girls.  There’s not a great deal of news to report–they are all healthy and happy, and they spend almost all day free-ranging in the backyard now.  Dolley had an impacted crop for a while, and then it got very swollen and seemed like it was no longer able to expand and contract the way it needs to in order...

My good friend Michele over at Sign of the Shovel and GardenRant asked me how on earth I keep the chickens from destroying the garden.  I thought this was a blog-worthy topic, so here you go: Forget about annuals.  Anything that self-sows is history.  The girls love to scratch in the dirt, and when they do that, they uproot tiny seedlings and probably even eat some seeds.  The bright side?  They do the same thing to...

Dolley’s moulting!  Look at this scraggly girl.  For those of you who aren’t chicken owners–and why not, may I ask?–hens go through a moult in the winter where they lose their feathers in patches and grow them back.  Here you can see quills coming back in to cover a bare patch on her breast.  I sure wish they wouldn’t lose all their feathers just as the cold weather sets in, but that’s...

Spotted in the English countryside:  just about the smartest little chicken house a flock could ever want.  (Sorry for the fence in the foreground; there was no getting around that.) On the left, a nice wooden coop with nesting boxes sticking out the side, making it easy to collect eggs from the outside.  Windows that can be shuttered up on the coldest winter nights.  A nice big run, screened on top, with board along the...

Walk into just about any grocery store in London and you can buy these gorgeous eggs.    Made us feel like we’d brought our chickens with us on this trip. ...

That’s right, advertisements for TV shows. On your eggs. I am not making this up. I’ve written before about EggFusion, a company that has developed a laser etching technology that allows eggshells to be engraved with, say, an expiration date or other information. But then it occurred to the execs at CBS that there was a moment in our day that was not already dominated by television and advertising:  that moment that we spend...