Daryl is laying!

We have three laying hens, acquired in May. Two of them are ‘silver-laced Wyandottes’, and we don’t know what the third one is. She’s all black. We used to call them ‘the black one’, ‘the stupid one’, and ‘the other one’. But then my mom found names that stuck: Larry, Daryl and Daryl. (From the Bob Newhart show, for all you young’uns that don’t get the reference. “Howdy. I’m Larry, and this is my brother Daryl and my other brother Daryl.”) There they are at right. Larry is the black one, who’s looking at you, as if she’s saying ‘Are you lookin’ at me?!’. Daryl and Daryl are the Wyandottes, and look almost identical.



Anyway. One of the Daryls is now laying. The eggs are small still. We are getting one every other day or so for the last week. I expect that soon the other Daryl will catch up, and then the black one (Larry) will come along a little later. Larry was definitely younger than Daryl and Daryl.

What fun! I keep running back to the coop a dozen times a day to see if we have any new eggs! They don’t mind, because I usually bring a little cracked corn scratch or a grasshopper when I check on them.



Speaking of the coop, here’s a picture of it. I built it inside the foundation of an old shed. The white part is the ‘chicken tractor’, that we they lived in all summer. We can, in principle, move around on the grass. I built that last spring. But it’s very heavy, and we’ll probably make something different for next year, and this one will stay where it is, and function as the actual coop, weather-tight with nesting boxes. The top lifts up, so that you can reach in and grab the eggs without ever having to get your feet dirty!

The big structure to the right is the run. The two things are attached via a very simple hole in the fencing! The girls have free rein in there, and we put in all kinds of things for them to peck at and turn into compost. Mostly we add cut weeds and straw, but also kitchen scraps (our mostly meatless diet means most scraps can go right in---they love the cucumber ends, and ends of greens!), and sometimes grasshoppers and other bugs. They are working all of that into compost faster than you’d ever think possible, and are enriching it at the same time. There is absolutely zero odor. But with 3 chickens in 120 square feet, you wouldn’t expect any.

I will probably add a shade-tarp roof before winter comes. The roof slope is about 45 degrees, so we shouldn’t have much trouble with snow collecting on it!

We are so enamored of the ‘ladies’ that we keep putting in new things to see if they will ‘play’ with them. So you can see we slid some boards across so they could play ‘Queen of the roost’, and they do, knocking each other off, and jumping from roost to roost. We also gave them an old wooden ladder, that they have learned to climb on. The latest addition is a wooden feeder, with a cover. They love to jump up there when they hear us coming, and squawk at us for goodies.

Note also the cedar fence in the background. That’s new since last year. Gradually the old homestead is being made new again!