Boston Gets in the Mood

Sometimes a hen gets broody, which means that she gets the urge to sit on eggs night and day. Here's how it all works: Hens lay about an egg a day during the part of the year when the days are longer than 15 hours. After they've laid a clutch of eggs in a nest (maybe 8 or 10), they stop laying and sit on the eggs 24/7. They get off the nest a few times a day to get a bite to eat, but basically they sit there all day long, with their feathers puffed up to cover all the eggs, looking like a toad in a trance.

When we had chickens before, our hens never got broody. They couldn't care less that we took their eggs away every day, and they never seemed to stay in a nest longer than it took to lay an egg -- 20 minutes, maybe. But Jordan noticed that Boston, the smaller of our two feather-foots, was in the nest every time we went into the hen house, and she'd started sleeping there instead of on the perches with everyone else. Kabob the rooster insists that all his hens sleep on the highest perch, which is about six feet off the ground, but he made an exception in her case.

We tried to "break her up," the technical term for talking a hen out of sitting on a nest. What a joke! We threw her off the nest. We took her outside. We walked around with her. We even took her into the house to hang out with us. No luck -- as soon as we put her back in the hen house, she was back on a nest.

"It's August," said Margy, "and too late for hatching chicks! They'll still be little when it gets cold, and they'll freeze." But soft-hearted Jordan hated to see Boston wasting her time, so on about the third day of Boston's vigil we stuck the day's eggs under her.

Moving the Chickens Outside

Time passed, the chicks grew, and we had to expand to a second cardboard box. Finally, we removed everything movable from the utility room and built a chicken-wire wall, complete with door, and turned half the room over to the them. We lined the walls and floor with a blue tarp, and put branches collected from outside through the wire and across the room to make perches.

Finally, we cleared out the back half of the pool house, a fairly spacious outbuilding, made another chicken-wire wall, and moved the chickens out to their new home. The final building project was fencing in a chicken run along the back of our fenced-in swimming pool.

Happy chickens! At about five months (that is, early July), we found the first egg, about half the size of a regular grocery store egg. (Chickens start small and work up.) We put up a row of nest boxes (left over from our previous chicken set-up), and put a golf ball in each one. Chickens can't tell an egg from a golf ball, so when they see a golf ball in a nest, they figure that this must be where eggs go, and they lay there. By early August, we were getting 8-10 eggs a day, and pestering out friends to take them. Once they got to a more normal size, we signed up as an egg vendor with the local food co-op, and starting selling them a couple dozen eggs every week or so. But it's more fun to give them away.