I saw Chick Days
on the shelf at our library and, on a whim, decided to check it
out.  The book is a fast and easy read, and anyone who’s had
chickens probably won’t learn much from the text.  On the other
hand, the photos are beautiful and the format is very engaging, so I
could see the book being great on a coffee table, or for kids.  In
fact, it made me wish the author hadn’t tried to make this a how-to
guide and had stuck to the book’s strengths — watching three chicks
grow up into laying hens.



I’m also always interested to see which breeds make an author’s top ten list.  Jenna Woginrich’s include:

• Silkies
• Australorps
• Brahmas
• Barred Rocks
• Rhode Island Reds
• Ameraucanas
• Jersey Giants
• Buff Orpingtons
• Dominiques
• Wellsummer

(And she adds that
Wyandotte, Cornish, and Sussex make good choices if you want to eat your
chickens as well as enjoy their eggs.)  Woginrich’s list clearly
leans toward the more interesting-looking and family-friendly chickens
rather than toward the most productive birds, but her audience is the
suburban chicken-keeper whose flock are pets more than workhorses, so
the choices make sense.  If you’re interested in a more general list of top-ten chicken breeds, click here.

Last year, I wrote about preparing chickens for the winter,
but I didn’t entirely take my own advice.  I had read that it’s
handy to give your chickens free-choice whole grain for the winter
months (in addition to their regular ration) so they can use those empty
calories to produce heat and counteract winter’s chill.  But
actually making that happen seemed hard, so I skipped it.



This year, I had over half a bag of buckwheat left over from cover crop experiments,
so I filled a spare hanging feeder with the grain.  At first, I
thought our hens weren’t interested, but as the days got colder, they
started supplementing their feed with the buckwheat, and soon the feeder
was empty.  I guess they liked the idea after all.

As a side note, we’re hanging our new experimental heated bucket waterer
in the back corner by the grain feeder.  It does seem to be handy
to have feeders and waterers that hang so they stay out of the way and
are easy to fill.