Free range backyard chickens

Though not yet laying hens, our baby chickens have grown into young adults and are old enough to fend for themselves in the pecking order. Last week I combined the two coops into one large area which allows a lot more room for the chickens, and also makes our lives much easier in several ways. It allows us only 1 set of food and water dishes to fill and clean, and access to a door to throw food scraps and weeds into rather than having to push them through holes in the chicken wire. It also allows me to open the door in the mornings and let the chickens come out at their leisure (whereas before we had to lift Betty and Rosie out of their coop to let them roam in the yard). I have been letting them out most mornings and letting them roam the backyard all day long, scavenge for bugs, eat grass and weeds, take dirt baths and cuddle together in the dirt until they independently return to their coop when night falls each day. I feel like their quality of life has greatly improved since they have become “free range chickens,” rather than cooped-up hens who occasionally get to spend the day in the yard.

Maybe I feel a guilty need to treat them extra special since I killed their brother a couple of weeks ago, but I have greatly enjoyed getting to spend more time with the ladies, holding and feeding them and getting to better know their personalities. The sisters are very loyal to one another and cry out looking for each other if one is being held. One of them now sleeps roosting up high on top of the coop at night which is pretty silly to see. Despite being one-legged Betty runs pretty quickly whenever food is put out and nips at my toes when I don’t bring her anything to eat. Rosie is the pack leader and puts everyone in their place when the sisters get too feisty. I am becoming more enamored with them every day.

Stopping in Hatch to pick up the year’s 40 lbs of roasted green chile…it’s officially Fall!

Some days a girl just needs a reminder, y’know?

Thanks, whoever is out there making “you’re awesome” flyers.

Also, thank you someone, for finally using an apostrophe correctly in a flyer.

It is troubled times in our beehive this week. After checking on the girls a couple of weeks ago and finding them happy and busy as bees making honey and babies, we were dismayed to discover that they had shrunk drastically in numbers and had eaten ALL their honey. Every single bar of comb was eerily empty, and there were no babies to be seen. The bees have been acting sort of agitated and lost, and this week I got stung for the first time by our hive. It felt like such a betrayal, since they had been so docile up to this point. The sting was in my finger and I immediately put an onion on it to draw out the venom and applied lavendar oil religiously for 3 days which kept the swelling and itching way down.

After consulting with our beekeeping mentor, Jessie, it appears that we have lost our Queen. We are in talks with several people to figure out how to get a new Queen so late in the season, and I definitely feeling worried about the survival of our hive through the winter. I’m trying not to panic about it because I love the bees so much.

I have been feeding them honey and sugar syrup every day, hoping they won’t starve to death, and Jessie generously gave us a comb with some brood from one of her hives so they will have something to do and can potentially raise their own Queen if worse comes to worst. This is the last month before winter to open up the hives and assist the bees, so we don’t have much time to get them back on their way. Keep your fingers crossed for our ladies!

It has recently become clear to us that one of our young hens grew up to be, in fact, a rooster. For the past 2 weeks we (and surely our neighbors) have been cursing Hedwig every morning, beginning at sunrise, and every half-hour thereafter. Because roosters don’t make the best backyard pets in the middle of downtown and there aren’t many options for getting rid of them that don’t involve someone killing and eating them, the decision was finally made that that someone might as well be us.

I personally made the decision sometime in the past year that if I was going to be eating animals, then I wanted to be able to be able to raise and kill them myself. I’m not at the point in my life where that’s totally feasible, but this seemed like a good place to start.

And so with the guidance of my new friend Jack (an experienced rooster killer), I successfully killed, skinned, and dressed a chicken. I won’t go into the gory details, but there were prayers and thanks said, as well as crying from both myself and an onlooking-in-solidarity Silvia, as we watched him go to “the big farm in the sky.” I’m proud to say that I held the knife and did it myself. It was a pretty surreal experience and one of the most intense things I have ever done…I’m still not totally sure how I feel about it all. I’ve never been much of a meat eater, and can count on one hand the amount of times I’ve bought actual slabs of meat from the store (as in chicken breasts, pork loins, steaks, etc) and cooked them myself. I’ve hardly cut a piece of grocery store meat, let alone skinned and dressed an entire alive-just-moments-ago bird.

Last night, with the advice of my herbalism teacher Jen, Silvia roasted up our backyard rooster and we had a little feast. Hedwig was Kelli’s chicken, so she opted to skip the meal (and the killing).  We used the blood on our tomato plants - apparently it makes a great fertilizer - and we will use the bones for a rooster soup. Silvia had jokingly talked about killing our rooster as a sacrifice to the rain gods, since New Mexico has been in a pretty bad drought all Summer. Amazingly enough the city has been enveloped by intense thunderstorms almost every day since.

So thanks for your life, Hedwig - we are grateful!

Traveling is nice, but there’s no place like New Mexico.

Checking out hives last weekend with my bee mentor, Jessie, of Brown’s Downtown Bees.

The miracle of life.

Welcome to the world, baby bee.

I went over for dinner to my friends Sean and Mimi’s house this week, and Sean whipped up this amazingly hot pink veggie pasta masterpiece with vegetables straight from the garden. Sean and Mimi both work at Los Poblanos, and Sean has taught me a lot about farming over the years I have known him. These are my leftovers from the next day. The pesto is from Trader Joes and I am becoming mildly obsessed with putting it on everything. 

Dog nap during Kelli’s lunch break.