Mark and I decided
our readers were best-equipped to choose the winner of our “I
wish I’d known” contest, and the entries are finally all up on the web for you to
peruse.  To vote, either place a comment on your favorite
entry (or entries) here on the blog, or head over to facebook to hit the like button
or comment.  Either way, all votes must be in by September 6!



Here’s a sumup of all
the entries to make voting even easier:



“I
wish I’d known chickens were so easy”

“I wished I’d known that chickens
were so very easy to keep from the onset.  Coop and run
through a rough, snowy winter.  Portable coop and
electro-net fence in the non-winter months.  Easy
peasy!”
— Kenny






Chicken TV

“The best time to listen is right
before they go to sleep. I think they share their secrets from
the
day with each other.”
— Jackie




Chicken
love

“I WISH I’D KNOWN HOW MUCH I CAN
LOVE A
CHICKEN!!!  If I’d known this I
would have gotten chickens sooner.”
— Theresa

“I
wish I’d known how loud chickens are”
“For me, the one thing I
wish I knew was how
loud the hens can be. We live in the city and thought that if we
didn’t have a rooster we would be in the clear for noise.”

— Mason

Chickens
are hard to contain
“We encourage our
chickens to free range from late
fall to early spring because they mix up/fertilize the soil and
eat up grubs in our gardens so nicely.  But from spring to
late summer, we really want them to stay in their nice, large
chicken yard.”
— Jane

“I
wish I’d known grown birds would peck the wee ones”
“When it was time to
start raising generation 2,
we figured the maternal instinct would make it easy to let them
adopt the new babies. By the time we realized that the grown
birds would peck to death the wee ones, we had to learn about
segregation.”
— Joe

Drainage
around a chicken coop
“My run was at the
bottom of a slope where I throw tons of snow from my
driveway.  Well, spring run off and heavy rains gave me
lots of mud and stink.”
— Helen

Lamenting
the old-fashioned chicken coop
“I may have made some
of the same mistakes,
but now am recognizing some specific features in chicken
husbanding from my childhood that hadn’t necessarily been
pointed
out before.”
— Charity

Planning
for chicken manure collection
“I wish I had known
how
fabulous chicken poop was for garden fertilizer.  We’d have
designed the coop a bit differently.”
— Robin

Mite
prevention
“The
chickens were only in the truck cap during the night, to
protect
them from a long list of predators (opossums, raccoons, 
Eastern Hog Nose snakes, bobcats and coyotes).  Yeah, all
of
those and it happened to be mites that almost ‘did in’ at
least
one of our hens.”
— Eva

Protecting
chickens from predators
“It was the
only time I have
ever hollered ‘Honey, get your gun!'”
— Carolyn

Problem-solving
a troubled hatch
“The Hen in the other
picture set twice this Spring…..the only
problem is that we hatched out 4 chicks from both settings.
Dud
eggs.”

— Edith