Dirt By Amy Stewart

Chicken Paintings!

I get a surprising number of e-mails from people who want to know when I'm going to do some more chicken paintings.  Well, good news:  I've got a series of them going up at Lost Coast Daily Painters over the next few weeks.  I usually post on Tuesday, so go check it out if you're interested.  As an experiment, I'm starting bidding at only 99 cents!  What a crazy deal.

And -- yes -- all the paintings are of Eleanor, our Rhode Island Red (seen here in upper right, jostling for position with Abigail for the preferred nesting box on a day when all four of them got eggy at once).  I'm sad to tell you that Eleanor died a few weeks ago--our first hen death.  To our complete surprise, she had cancer--and lots of it--which was discovered after the bird vet put her to sleep and then opened her up to take a look.   We're very sad about it but we're glad she didn't suffer long.  I think the other chickens miss her, too--it's really thrown off their social life to have her gone.

So I've done a series of portraits of Eleanor as a tribute.  She was a fine, dignified hen who didn't go in for tricks and hi-jinks like the other birds do.  She was more of a true barnyard animal, more interested in laying eggs and digging for worms than goofing off and acting like a pet.

My Silly Hen

Usually our chickens go through a very discreet winter moult, losing one little patch of feathers at a time, so you hardly notice it's happening. But not Eleanor.  Poor girl--she seems to have dropped half her feathers at once.  She looks like half a chicken. Fortunately chickens don't spend much time looking in the mirror, so she has no idea how silly she looks.  Also--luckily for her--it has not been terribly cold yet.  I hate the idea of her dropping all her feathers just when she needs them to keep her warm at night.

I Feel Bad About My Neck.

Another sign that autumn is here:  the chickens have started their winter moult.  Poor Abigail is losing all her neck feathers at once. Very undignified.  Not to mention a little punk.

The Girls Review Their Press Coverage

Organic Gardening magazine sent a photographer to the house a few months ago to take some pictures of me and the chickens; the results are in the November issue.  As you can see, the hens were thrilled to see themselves in print.

If you're here just for the chicken blogging, check out the Chickens category.

Those Naughty Hens

We thought we had foiled the chickens' attempts to lay eggs outside their box by clearing out the nest they had made and blocking the entrance to it, but Eleanor stubbornly refused to give up and made herself a new nest under the berry vines, where the tangle of thorns almost prevented us from finding it.  All four hens have been lectured sternly and sent to bed.   I have no idea what's gotten into them.  They've gone quite wild.

Our Naughty Chickens

We had noticed that we weren't getting as many eggs from Eleanor, and we thought it was awfully odd that we got no eggs at all yesterday, but we didn't think much of it until Scott found an egg in the compost pile today.  What was it doing there?  Then he noticed that Eleanor was going off by herself and was hard to find.  That's unusual, because usually when they're free-ranging in the backyard, they stick together.

So after a little investigation, we found this nest behind a tall clump of tansy.  It looks like Eleanor, Abigail, and Bess have all taken to laying an egg in this spot when it suits them.  So the girls were rounded up and herded back into the coop, where they will be spending a little more time over the next few days while they get re-acquainted with the concept of laying an egg in an egg box.  They are, after all, farm animals.  When they go off and start acting like wild birds, building nests wherever they please, it's up to us farmers to get them back in line.

Eleanor--by popular demand!

8 x 10, oil on gessoed board.  Click to bid.

The other day I was thinking about blogs, and how difficult it would have been to start a blog without digital photography.  In other words, what if all this internet stuff had happened, but somehow no one had thought to invent digital photography along the way and we were all still using film cameras, getting pictures developed, scanning them, etc?  It would be impossible for me to run outside and take a picture of the garden and post it online a few minutes later.

So here I am, illustrating my blog with oil paintings. Is that a step backward?  Of course, the oil paintings do have to be photographed... with a digital camera.

Anyway, this is Eleanor, our Rhode Island Red.  And this is the posture I most often find her in, with her head down, digging for worms.  She's my favorite chicken to paint because I love those orange and red feathers.  Of our four chickens, she is really the quintessential barnyard hen.  She doesn't go in for silly little tricks or the other kinds of antics that our other chickens get into.  What she wants to do is get up in the morning, scratch around for food, and lay an egg. She lays lovely, dark brown eggs, and she acts like she rules the roost, although Dolley, one of our Araucanas, is also under the impression that she's in charge of the flock.

Thanks to whoever posted the suggestion about chicken paintings. I'll do a few more.

The Girls!

Lots of people write to me and ask for more chicken posts.  So here, by popular demand, are some pictures of the girls.  There's not a great deal of news to report--they are all healthy and happy, and they spend almost all day free-ranging in the backyard now. 

Dolley had an impacted crop for a while, and then it got very swollen and seemed like it was no longer able to expand and contract the way it needs to in order for food to keep moving along.  But I've found that if I massage her crop, the food gets going and the whole thing seems to start working again.  The funny part is that she really, really seems to enjoy this.  I put her on my lap, give it a little massage, and she closes her eyes and leans up against me.  Perhaps I should give them all massages.

Other than that, everyone is well. We continue to get just about one egg per chicken per day--far more than we can eat. Bess likes to hop up on the windowsill and look in at us when we're in the kitchen.  She seemed particularly interested in the basket of strawberries I had on the counter.  Sometimes all four of them crowd around the window, looking in at us or simply settling down in the shade of the house for a little afternoon nap.

Gardening With Hens

My good friend Michele over at Sign of the Shovel and GardenRant asked me how on earth I keep the chickens from destroying the garden.  I thought this was a blog-worthy topic, so here you go:

1. Forget about annuals.  Anything that self-sows is history.  The girls love to scratch in the dirt, and when they do that, they uproot tiny seedlings and probably even eat some seeds.  The bright side?  They do the same thing to weeds.
3. Fence off the food crops.  If you love it, so do they.  Fortunately, a silly little 18-in tall wire fence works just fine.  Chickens are not very adventurous, and when I've put the girls into the vegetable patch just for fun, they have completely freaked out and tried to escape, ignoring the salad bar before them.
4. Brand new plants might get accidentally dug up.  Fence off a newly-planted area or fashion a little cage of chicken wire and cover new plants for a few weeks while they put down roots.
5. Don't plant anything poisonous, like monkshood, foxglove, oleander, etc.
6. Remember that different chickens have different tastes.  One might develop a taste for your geraniums, while others leave it alone.  In my garden, I've found some nibbles on heather, geraniums, yarrow (but just a few plants--not all of them) and Maximilian sunflower.
7. On the plus side, my girls love snails and slugs.  So I'm gradually moving all the plants that snails eat to the part of the garden they have access to.  Hello, dahlia!
8. So what does grow in the chicken garden?  Plenty.  Here's what grows in the part of the garden where my chickens free-range:

Lamb's ear
Catmint
Yarrow (especially the silvery "moonshine" varieties)
Anenome
Artichoke
Salvia
Perennial herbs, including rosemary, oregano, thyme, sage
Shasta daisies
Phlomis
Hellebore
Lady's  mantle
Roses
Artemisia
Butterfly bush
Alstroemeria
Feverfew

We Interrupt Our Regularly-Scheduled Programming for This Important Chicken News

Dolley's moulting!  Look at this scraggly girl.  For those of you who aren't chicken owners--and why not, may I ask?--hens go through a moult in the winter where they lose their feathers in patches and grow them back.  Here you can see quills coming back in to cover a bare patch on her breast.  I sure wish they wouldn't lose all their feathers just as the cold weather sets in, but that's nature's design.  It takes protein to grow feathers, so they take a break from egg-laying in the winter to get this job done.  She's the first one to really start moulting--the others are just losing a feather here and there. 

It's hard to get her to sit still for photos, and she doesn't like us to pull her feathers back and explose that bare chicken skin to the wind, but we managed to get a couple of shots.  She's actually lost quite a bit more on her back than you can see here, and the quills look so creepy when they grow in--they're a grey-blue color and they make her look like a porcupine, or a pincushion.  Poor girl!