Hens and Their Hen House

On Tuesday my mother, MM, and I drove an hour north to pick up two young Polish hens to add to MM’s flock.

We now have 18 hens.  And now that some of them have started laying {chickens are 4-6 months old before they begin to lay} we now get 1-3 eggs a day.  Here’s our eggs from this week:

Eventually–when all 18 are laying daily–we’ll sell the eggs and put the money in MM’s little saving account.  Hopefully by October.

MM loves her chickens.  We give her a piece of bread–in this case a biscuit from Sunday’s breakfast–and she crumbles it up and throws it to the chickens.  Or sometimes, like last night, we’ll catch her nibbling on the bread and she’ll give us that sneaky little smile.  HA!

I saw a new-to-me Martha Stewart show on cheese earlier this week.  While I found the cheese-making aspect so interesting–in fact, they made the same cheese I did a couple of weeks ago!–I also enjoyed the whole sustainable agriculture aspect that many of the homemade cheese makers valued.

And it made me realize that’s what I keep trying to teach MM about {hey, it DOES have a title after all!}.  I want her to know that animals just don’t live in petting zoos, that eggs come from chickens, that fruits and vegetables come from the garden, milk & yogurt & cheese comes from cows, and heck, even her Christmas tree comes from a field behind her grandparents’ house.

I want her to know that things just don’t appear at the grocery store or on the dinner table, that they are there because of someone’s hard work and dedication.  That they cared for the animal or plant first.

So that got me to talking to my mother and grandmother about it.  {Yesterday we spent the morning peeling fifty-plus pounds of pears from our cousin’s tree so we could make homemade pear preserves…so that gave us plenty of time to talk!}  And now we’re going to look into getting a cow for MM.  I’m not sure what route I want to go–either a small just-weened {beef} heifer that we could grow and sell or a pregnant {dairy} cow that we could milk.  Anyone have suggestions?

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You can check out the rest of yesterday’s photos here.

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