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Getting Your Ducks in a Row for Raising Baby Chicks: Eight Questions and Answers
When you adopt baby chicks, you’re taking small, helpless, peeping balls of fluff under your wing. It’s a big responsibility, and if you’ve never done it before, you should make sure you understand the list of basics before you undertake this big venture. If you have done it before, it’s good to pull out that list and review it just to make sure you have all your ducks in a row . Raising baby chicks is not hard, after all, but there are a few things you have to consider and a few things you need to do right.
A Carton of Eggs: Part 5—Vital Farms Organic Pasture-Raised Eggs
This is part five of a series about the information printed on egg cartons. When you buy eggs with “cage-free” stamped on the carton, you probably think you’re doing the right thing. Cage-free eggs are a huge improvement from eggs that come from hens living in tiny, cramped battery cage torture chambers. But as Vital Farms points out, hens laying cage free eggs probably live in one square foot of space in a cramped barn and never get to go outside. Vital Farms advertises its eggs as “pasture raised” and guarantees that each hen gets 108 square feet of outdoor space.
When Your Hen Dies
After our pet chicken dies, then what? We are often loath to talk about it, because too many people just don’t get it. While nearly everybody understands the importance of our cats and dogs in our lives, to most folks, chickens are “just chickens.”
A Short History of Organic Eggs
You’re in the egg aisle at the supermarket and want to get eggs from hens that are treated humanely. So, you grab the eggs with the green and white USDA Organic label and put them in your cart. Organic must be good, right? But what does it even mean in terms of how the hens are treated? Perhaps not very much.
Coop - A Year of Poultry, Pigs and Parenting by Michael Perry - A Review
Author, humorist, and radio-show host Michael Perry tells us the story of his first year in an old house on a Wisconsin acreage with his new wife and daughter. It is a tale of lurching forward with pigs and chickens and gardening and hay-making and wood splitting and don’t forget building a chicken coop, and of course a home birth—all while maintaining a full-time career. And other impracticalities. Nonfiction. Really.
Are Chickens Dinosaurs?
Was Tyrannosaurus rex really just a big chicken? Are chickens are the closest living relative to Tyrannosaurus rex? Are chickens directly descended from T. rex? Are chickens dinosaurs? All your questions answered right here!
Betty the Transgender Chicken – What Happened Next
You may know the story of Betty the transgender chicken - the hen that underwent spontaneous sex reversal and became a rooster - and you may be wondering what happened to Betty after that story ended. This is the next story.
The Life and Times of Betty the Transgender Chicken - Spontaneous Sex Reversal in Chickens
What makes a hen a hen and a rooster a rooster? And what makes a hen a rooster?
A Carton of Eggs: Part 3 - Wild Harvest Cage Free Large Brown Eggs
This is part three of a series about the information printed on egg cartons. I’ve found you can learn from all that carton information once you figure out what it's actually saying. And sometimes you can learn a whole lot by what it doesn’t say. Wild Harvest is a brand aimed at consumers who prefer natural and organic products. These are consumers who expect that the producers of the food products they buy are adhering to strong and consistent animal welfare standards. Are these consumers getting what they think they’re getting when they buy Wild Harvest eggs?
Getting Your Coop Ready for Winter - Battening Down the Chickens
The basic requirements to keep your chickens happy and healthy during the cold winter months.
Poop (Dealing With Those Piles of Chicken Manure)
Chickens in your backyard provide a unique ambience. They also provide nonstop entertainment. And don’t forget the eggs - they generously offer daily eggs. What else? Oh, yeah. Poop. They give us lots of poop. They are veritable pooping machines! Who would have imagined?! Here’s how to deal with it.
Sweater Girls - Chickens in Sweaters and Other Preposterous Notions
Remember when chicken sweaters were the BIG FASHION THING? Maybe not. It actually only lasted a day in my coop. But it’s a day the Hipster Hens will never forget.
Sour Crop and Flystrike: The Little Red Hen Gets Well
This is the saga of how one tenacious little red hen at death's door fought her way back to the land of the living. It is also the tale of my search for the needle of truth about a confusing chicken disease and its treatment in the haystack of conflicting information on the internet. Sometimes, in order to do the right thing for your sick chicken, you have to sift through a lot of hay, then grit your teeth and hope you’re grabbing the needle.
Baseball, Sick Chickens, and Love
A hen can go from normal to fly-blown in 24 hours, and can go from fly-blown to dead in an equally short period of time.
Fixing Those Pesky Leaking Chicken Water Founts
Every double-walled water fount will eventually start to leak due to tiny holes in the sleeve that allow air to enter. Repair is simply a matter of filling those holes. Read this post to learn how to do the fix, and I’ll even throw in a magic trick!
Everything About Chicken Sex
Sometimes when a mommy hen and a daddy rooster love each other very, very much……