fear encountered, moving on...

the thing i feared most about getting any farm animals was that i would mess up and they would die prematurely or unintentionally. so we were given three beautiful chickens and now we have two!! my jack russell terrier, riley, broke one of our chickens, forcing us to kill it after one week with us. believe me, i felt terrible about this; i wasn't paying attention to riley and he got in the pen and got to the chicken in a flash. i spent the morning with my friends stacey and jeremy, who processed the chicken for me, as i've never had to before. note to self... i need to learn how to kill and clean a chicken; my husband won't do it!!!

now that the worst has happened, i feel a tentative sense of relief because i know i won't make that mistake again. maybe i'll make a different mistake, but maybe i won't!

i really wish there was a book that was a real introduction to keeping chickens. i read chicken tractor and storey's guide to keeping chickens and still i didn't know that i shouldn't put the chickens on their roost. (apparently one should wait until they're strong enough to get there themselves or they'll get stuck there and get panicked, thus exciting a dog and distracting a person.)

anyways i am learning as i go. they seem happy as i've adjusted their house some and they seem to love worms, slugs, kale, and clover which is great because i have lots of these. and they won't eat an incapacitated garter snake.

they're doing a great job at building me an 4' x 8' garden patch of chicken sheet mulch in the chicken tractor!!! no eggs yet, but i'm patient!

a simple step... chickens...

i am so excited. we have been building a chicken coop and tractor this week and we're almost done. we need to finish the coop's roof and the tractor's liftable lid. we'll be taking my friends' 3 chickens, while they travel to australia to teach permaculture. they are cold-hardy white Chantecler chickens, which are appropriate for egg or meat production. wikipedia says they are the only "native" canadian breed; bred in quebec at the turn of the twentieth century.

we had chickens when i was a teenager living outside of stony plain, alberta, but i had nothing to do with them! i hated everything about country living, except horses!!

we will be working towards designing and implementing a closed system for our chickens. slowly building up a crop of plants for them in a year-round cycle and feeding them worms from the worm compost too. eventually it would be great to feed them only food we grow!!! that's an ultimate permaculture goal!!!