When I was about halfway through my Henhouse Series, a friend said I had to visit Cosima. Her henhouse was a Taj Mahal of henhouses she said. Look here and you can see the center posts that is key in holding up the green roof. When I finally visited Cosima I had to agree. Her henhouse is a work of art. She said they built this cordwood masonry henhouse using Robert L. Roy's books and that this is actually…
There was nothing photogenic about our chores this glorious autumn weekend - mowing, weeding, cutting back - so I'll concentrate on an exploration of another Heath henhouse. Joey built, overbuilt he said, this 10x12 foot henhouse for his ten hens. You can see he has a lot of help! He read a lot and looked at a lot of henhouses, and talked to a lot of people before he built his. The forethought shows. His luck shows too.…
We enjoyed our 13 year old granson's company all last week - a very busy week. There was canoeing, dinner parties, cake baking, mowing lawns, feeding chickens and all manner of End of the Road activities. One day we returned to Birch Glen Stables which is practically around the corner for his second riding lesson. The first was last year, but he had not forgotten how to groom and put on the saddle. This year the lesson was…
The Holiday Weekend started for me on Friday afternoon when I visited the Heath School's Garden Day. The classes have been working before now, of course, but on Garden Day, the whole day is given over to planting, weeding, mulching - and learning. I am impressed with their energy, which I expected, but also with the quality of the child-sized tools they are using. Many hands make light work was certainly the motto on Friday. You may wonder…
Because I wrote about the Founding Gardeners by Andrea Wulf here, a friend just sent me The Founding Foodies: How Washington, Jefferson and Franklin Revolutionized American Cuisine. I was fascinated at the way that Wulf described how the agricultural techniques of the Founding Fathers reflected their politcal and philosophical views. I should not have been surprised that men who spent so much time in their gardens and thinking about their garden and their land would also have thought…
We live in a fortunate part of the world. Recently my husband and I were counting our local blessings: good neighbors, relatively benign bureaucracies, easy traffic, and beautiful landscapes with hills and streams, woodlands and meadows. Those landscapes have changed in a major but subtle way over the 30 years since we moved to Heath. The dairy farms that were here in Heath have all disappeared as have many dairy operations in other towns. A few farm stands…
For several days the weather has been chilly, raw, showery, rainy and generally unpleasant. Not gardening weather. We all know we cannot dig wet soil. However, the chickens remain cheerful and production continues. They are happy to stay inside, maybe because they know I'll give them an extra small ration of cracked corn. Don't forget tomorrow is the last day you can enter the Give Away drawing for Starter Vegetable Gardens by Barbara Pleasant. Just click here…
It is very hard to get a good photo of the chickens drinking at their new Avian Aqua Miser waterer, but the first chicken on the right had been drinking and the second chicken on the right is still taking good long sip. What you cannot see in the photo are the little 'nipples' that work on a similar principle to a hamster waterer. The 5 gallon bucket has water and the chickens poke at the nipples that release…
The snow was falling when I woke. I hope this is the first of the four final snowstorms predicted for this winter. While the snow is beautiful, the view inside the hen house was not as lovely. For the third morning in a row I went out to find a dead chicken, killed by a weasel. I don't know if it is possible to keep a determined and hungry weasel out of a hen house. I will spare…
Snowstorm! The chickens can't wait... I wish I had a portable chicken house! No joke.