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free-range

Chicken Treat Recipe

Homemade Chicken Treats Homemade Treats for Chickens

Oh words, how they matter. Example: when you type “homemade chicken treats” into a search engine you’ll get an altogether different result than when you type “Homemade treats for chickens.”  In one case the chicken is the treat and in the other it is the recipient of one. An important distinction, particularly from the fowl’s perspective. Or is that foul? This recipe speaks to the latter: a winter treat for your backyard hens involving categorically non-chicken ingredients.

Home-grown

This weekend was all about homesteading rhythms and rotations.  We moved our third batch of chicks out of a heated corral and into an out door coop; we transferred Cornish Rocks into a new on-pasture paddock; we planted the garden; and after weeks of YouTube how-to videos we harvested our first meat birds. By “we” I mean The Husband and the Mother In Law (MIL); I operated the water nozzle, the most important task in chicken harvesting, ask anyone.
Best laid plans
After spending our winter planning the precise layout and content of our first ‘real’ garden we decided last second to plant elsewhere and give the larger space to our chickens. Call us nuts, but either the trees around the new garden grew exponentially over the winter or the Earth’s orbit around the sun is slightly askew this spring because we definitely remember there being more sunlight in that area. I admit it would have been handier had we made this shade-related observation prior to planting all the full-sun seeds. Eager to find a fix I scoured the web for vegetable varieties willing to thrive in not-exactly-tons-of-sun-like-we-remembered situations and it turns out turnips and beans would be well suited. Thank goodness for that on account of me hankering for a plate of those two things practically on a daily basis.

Plucking
As for the poultry dispatchment and evisceration I will say I took considerable comfort in the predictability of anatomy. Everything was situated exactly where YouTube said they would be and nothing unexpected occurred during the course of harvesting. The tasks I worried most about were accomplished quickly and then the mechanics of the process kicked in. Plus the MIL has an uncanny knack for defusing tense, possibly gross moments with sly and unpredictable humor. 
Dressed, our birds weighed in at four and a half pounds apiece. The Husband stuffed one with boquet garni from his herb garden and slid it in the oven. Delicious. We’ve been customers of October Rose Farm long enough to know pastures and sunshine and fresh air make better baked chicken than antibiotics and growth hormones and steroids. Go figure. Unanticipated was our increased sense of independence, security and satisfaction. Home-grown is a powerful liberty. Even when you screw up the garden.
The new hen yard.
Dinner


Winter-Blues Old Bear

WinterBlues

As I lay in bed this morning under a pile of blankets – gazing through the window into the woods; watching it snow and snow and snow on a world already covered in snow; spotting a doe making her way across my vista, a lean, silent creature delicately nosing the base of this tree and that in her search for anything at all worth eating, and I thought to myself: oh how I hate New York winters. I really, really hate them. Wish I could sleep through them. Please make it stop. I pulled the covers over my head. If I stayed under here until our next vacation could the family cope? I know: snow and dark and cold are supposed to be no big deal to a northerner. I try not to mind them. But they just suck: they suck out my life force, make my bones ache. Make me wish I could stay under my covers until Spring. But the dog whined at the door and the chickens gabbled for chow so I pulled myself together and rolled out. Outside a tidy path had been laid in the snow between the coops and when I opened the door I found half the flock assembled for a meeting and the nesting box loaded: 10 eggs.

eggs

Apparently neither knee-high snow, nor plunging temperatures, nor a sun absent from the sky for five days straight could dampen this dutiful flock’s mood. Lilac the Rooster guarded the door, behavior that ordinarily earned him considerable pain and suffering in the form of relentless pecks to the head, but when a guy’s domineering ways protect a girl from the wind and makes the house warmer, well now, hens can be persuaded to see him differently.

Rooster

Three seconds after coming back inside Tigger found her ball and whined go out again. Such a stupid dog. Was there ever a morning when I felt less like playing catch? I pulled my coat back on and grabbed the camera. Why not. Why not document all the things that make winter in New York such a drag. Back in the hen yard I opened the coop for a flock beauty shot and – holy macaroni – two more eggs! Twelve in a single 24-hour period from a flock of seven hens, and a record for the Schutt Farmette. Hurray for us? I watched the fat, sausage-roll dog barrel through the snow, smiling like this was her happiest day on Earth, and had to laugh.  Then she was done; tuckered out; panting and wanting back inside for a nap. Me too. Back under my covers to wait it out. Like a grumpy, stiff, sore, winter-blues old bear. I hate winters in New York. By the way, does anyone need eggs?

sausage-running

Hawk in the Hen Yard

Monkeys before the Monolith.
Camouflaged…until it snows.

As the weather turns cold a most unwelcome visitor is transgressing the boundaries of our yard: an adolescent red-tailed hawk.  I’m slow to the window so it’s still a streak in my periphery but The Husband has seen it perch on the deck rail just feet from henhouse and high in the tree bough overhanging the hen yard. Silently sighting in our girls.
Hedwig Whoolio Mac Owlton
It is just a young thing now but what I know about young things is that they grow up fast. If a full grown hawk can carry off a rabbit a fat chicken is most certainly within its weigh limit capabilities and come winter, when easy prey are difficult for that hawk to spot under the protective blanket of snow, our hen yard will look like a free-range buffet.
Did you know Great Horned Owls are natural predators of Red Tailed Hawks? Let’s see if the installation of Hedwig Whoolio Mac Owlton precludes young Hawkeyed Joe from thinning out our flock this winter. 
Owl Sentry
Lilac The Rooster giving the stink eye