Spring has sprung. Birds are singing, froggies are calling, woodpeckers are drumming, and the earth is fairly bursting sending forth tiny green shoots. More daylight means more eggs in my henhouse, too. I head out to the coop in the morning, smell the fresh spring air, and GAA-ACK… …my boots hit mud. It’s spring, but […]

How to keep eggs from freezing in the coop is a concern for many of us this time of year. During the colder months each egg that you collect is like a prized possession.  They can be few and far between.  Having to trash them because they are frozen and/or cracked can be heart breaking. […]

A home-grown turkey for Christmas dinner was part of our vision when we started on the turkey raising journey. I was so excited to raise two turkeys – one for Thanksgiving dinner and one for Christmas dinner.  It all seemed nostalgic to me.  I envisioned a male and female, happily living at LL Farm.  In […]

Winter is here. The days are getting shorter and as a result, the chickens need to be secured in their coop earlier and earlier to be safe from nocturnal predators. Chickens are all but blind at night so their ability to escape danger once the sun goes down is pretty much non-existent. One of the […]

This month’s “Cool Coop” promises to boldly go where no coop has gone before… Continue reading as Mike Ferrier from New England describes in detail the construction and launching of the USS EggSurprise: Figuring Out What We Needed We had barely started thinking about a coop when the chicks arrived. All seven of them were shipped […]

The Big Red Barn isn’t our “chicken coop” per se, but about a third of our chickens call it home. We call them…you guessed it, the “barn chickens”. Some of our chickens are anti-social and though we have a perfectly functioning chicken coop with amenities to fit every chicken’s needs and desires, some prefer to […]

Road trip! A car, snacks, friends and an awesome destination in mind. That is how my adventure to the Mother Earth News Fair in West Bend, Wisconsin, began. I have to tell you, it was an amazing experience. In fact, I think the term “Fair” does not do the event justice at all. It is […]

These days the gardens, back porches, side steps, railings and cellar ways are filling up with oversized squashes, odd baskets of cucumbers or buckets of green beans, stalks of garlic and ripening tomatoes. Here, too, the yards, coops, barns, garage and assorted sheds on the homestead are filled with various sizes of poultry! There is […]

As a gardener and a chicken keeper, I’m always trying new ways to coexist with my free ranging flock. I’ve given presentations through my local Extension Center and Master Gardener chapter on how I take advantage of the benefits of having backyard chickens (free fertilizer and pest control) and at the same time protect my […]

Looking to make an easy, DIY dust bath? Click here to learn how… A lot of new chicken keepers — or even those just expanding their flocks — worry about the introduction of new chicks from the brooder to the coop. But, it’s not as scary as you think, so long as the temperatures are […]