Spring Chickens

Spring bulbs are up!

The first signs of spring have arrived in Santa Fe.

 Yesterday we got a nice layer of snow to soak the ground a bit and today the sun is shinning, a light breeze is blowing, and the world is beckoning us gardeners to get started.

My family and I are coming upon six years on this land and it's funny how the list of projects never gets shorter. It's like your skin cells, the skin is always there, but the cells change every seven years. In this case, the list is always there but the projects change every year.

This year I have an extra incentive to take the yard work up a notch. Our house is going to be on the Santa Fe Kitchen Garden Tour, along with two of my neighbors in this wonderful little neighborhood La Resolana. This is now an annual event that HomeGrown NM and Edible Santa Fe co-sponsor. Last year was the first year and I gather that 350 people went on the tour. I'm glad the tour is not until July as I have a lot of work to do before they come to inspect my yard for kitchen garden goodness.

Luckily the rest of my family is out of town this weekend so I could actually put together the year's garden plan. This year I am going to focus on only the foods that we regularly eat and that are low-maintenance to grow in this climate. Last year I expanded the garden by about 700 square feet. 150 of that was for Clayton - my then 3 year old son - who chose to plant sunflowers, corn, and pumpkins. His garden is right out my bedroom window so I had a splendid view of sunflowers and lots of birds snapping up the seeds through the growing season. The rest ended up being too much space for me to grow into in one year, a lot of the food went to seed...or actually to the chickens.

Three years ago we decided to start raising chickens and I have to say it has been the best addition to our backyard homestead we have made. I'm pleased to live in Agua Fria Village with Santa Fe County zoning codes in a neighborhood with lax covenants, so almost anything here goes. Chickens, horses, dogs, llamas, donkeys, all a-okay. It's worth the extra 10 minutes to town to have the semi-rural experience and semi-rural rules.

I call the chickens my "ladies." And quite the ladies they are, all 17 of them. They happily live in our front yard in their chicken palace under two juniper trees, an apple tree, and a pear tree. They have a chicken coop which they use almost exclusively for egg-laying as they prefer to roost in the juniper trees outside which provide them plenty of branches and protection. We set up a viewing bench in front of the coop and spend warm summer afternoons watching their antics and trying to remember what we names them.

Chicken entrance

The chicken palace

Under the juniper tree.

My favorite lady is the Barred Dominique. She is smart and sassy, true to her french name. She was the first chicken to figure out how to fly over the fence to get the juicy grubs in the garden on the other side and has successfully fended off two coyote attacks. Plus her sassy french name harkens back to my own french heritage on my mother's side.

Dominique. Isn't she lovely? And smart too.

And of course, I can't leave out a picture of the polish bantams. They make most humans laugh. This one is named Elvis, for his later years' hairdo of course. Not the smartest breed in the coop though.

Polish bantam

All our chickens are heritage varieties: Brahma, Cochins, Wyandotte, Araucanas, Columbians, Mille Fleurs (with the feathers on their feet), and mystery chickens I am still trying to identify. 

And wow can these chickens lay! The best layers are the Brahma hens which we bought as young adults from a farmer in Espanola. They laid their large brown eggs all winter long. We haven't bought eggs for ourselves in over a year. 

Now as spring is beginning and the days are longer (most chickens stop laying eggs when there is less than 13 hours of daylight) we are overwhelmed with eggs. I've started to sell eggs for $4/dozen to help cover the cost of their expensive but nutrient-rich organic feed from the local Feed Bin to neighbors, colleagues, and friends. I know this may seem pricey to some, but it doesn't even cover our costs. My "consumer base" is still less than the amount of eggs we have, but marketing and building consumer loyalty is a bit out of my capacity at the moment. I'll just keep putting the word out there and maybe a sign on my fence "eggs for sale" in hopes that they sell themselves. I'll continue to donate the surplus as hard boiled breakfast to the day-laborers in Guadalupe Park until then.

About a days worth of blue, white, green, brown, and pink eggs. Each variety of chicken lays a different colored egg.

As we don't need any more layers this year, we are investing in the Cochin Frizzle ornamental variety instead. I'm sure you can see why! Purely for fun and because our four year old loves these.

How could a chicken be cuter than that?!

We are ordering twelve baby chicks as last year more than half turned out to be roosters. We are told we can expect the same ratio this year. I hope so, or we'll have to raise the cost of our eggs just to pay for these pretty ladies. Their specialty is being pretty, they don't lay many eggs to earn their keep.

I personally enjoy hearing roosters crowing at dawn (and sometimes at all hours of the day) as it reminds me of the three years I lived in Panama in the campo. However, if you want to maintain good relationships with your neighbors, in a backyard coop, roosters are good for only one thing:

Cock-a-doodle-doo! Rooster Stew!