Chicken grains

I read an article yesterday in Sunset magazine about pasture-fed chickens. These are farm-raised chickens that get most of their food by foraging in an alfalfa pasture. Darn, i should have bought some alfalfa seed this year! I did buy oats and buckwheat and I already know they love buckwheat.

Free-range

Greg has let the chickens out this morning. It's impressive to see how much they can dig with their powerful feet. Actually, they can do a lot of plant damage...

Dirt bath

Although colder weather is coming, we are having a nice, dry and sunny day today. And the chickens are doing what they love to do in the sun -- taking a dirt bath in a hole they dug.

Bock bock

After they lay an egg, the chickens often make a lot of loud honking noises. If they were wild chickens, this would be the equivalent of saying, hey, predators, lunchtime. Why do they do this, I wonder?

Rat problem solved

I seem to have successfully blocked the neighborhood rats from raiding the chicken coop. A row of bricks at the entrance point seems to have blocked them, for now at least.

Cascade garden

These obviously aren't chickens, but these scarecrow people can be found outside the Cascade P-patch, where I have a garden plot. This spring, when it is too cold to grow anything else, I'm going to grow some greens for the chickens here.

Morning, girls

I must say this about chickens -- it's difficult to take a apicture of them because they move so fast.

Chicken video

We let the chickens out of the pen this weekend so they could walk around the garden. Here's what free-range chickens do when they get the chance.

Chicken in sun 2

I'm using my new cell phone (complete with keyboard!) to try some mobile blogging of the chickens, since I haven't been keeping up. Anything to avoid turning on the slow computer and getting it to run. I can't figure out how to turn the first picture, which is a shame because it's the better of the two.

Chicken in the sun