Why I'm Not Cut Out To Be a Farmer

There has been one thing nearly all my city friends gasp and moan about when I tell them I'm raising some chickens.

"You're not going to eat them, are you?" they all pant with horror.

And I assure them that yes, some of them are eventually eaten but this is the natural scheme of things, not to mention far preferable to eating caged and tortured poultry. I mean, my chickens run around happy for many months first and anyway, we don't butcher them ourselves, these very nice people do it for us, and have you ever tasted actual real chicken that has been running loose on a farm eating bugs and grass and all the things it wants? There's nothing like it.

But this year it happened. This year I haven't been able to eat any of our chickens.

Next thing you know I'll be like my mom's friend who lets all her birds die of old age.

I don't know if it's because I hatched so many of them myself in the incubator (which I put right behind my comuputer desk, a cat-free zone) rather than order them in the mail as I had the previous two years, or if I'm just getting mushy. I also took all those photos of Goldie's hidden clutch of babies, stashed away in our basement window. This year I got too attached.

And this year I haven't been able to eat a single morsel.

At least enough snow has melted for the birds to be able to go out. They don't care that it's still cold, or terribly windy, just that they can get to the ground to scratch in the earth.

Here's the intrepid Goldie, mother extraordinaire.

One of Goldie's offspring, now grown-up at 10 months of age. She gets her beard and earmuffs from her dad, Odo.

You can also see the beard on this girl...

...and her funny earmuffs.

From this year's hatches, we only kept one rooster--this fellow I call the Hamburglar (at top left), whose mother is obviously one of our two Silver Spangled Hamburgs (both called Kira). He is quickly becoming the bane of father Odo's existence. He came running over to see what the girls were doing at our deck.

There won't be any incubator hatching this year because of inbreeding. I've gotten so attached to these guys that I'm thinking maybe no new birds at all. Isn't Hamburglar handsome?

Some of the "Easter Eggs" these hens lay. Yep, they're naturally green/blue-green.

And furthermore on the farming thing--I hate gardening. With a passion. Plants don't make any noise when they're thirsty, they just quietly die on you, and that's exceedingly depressing. Maybe it's soon time to hang up my coveralls...