Carrie
Not in the cooking sense, you understand. Our chickens will live out their senior years in the chicken assisted living facility known as Triskelion Farm.
Having had mixed success with chicks this year, trying to widen our range of both colored eggs and exotic chickens, our ratio of cocks to hens managed to come out too high. Consequently, we have been playing catchup in the hope that the new coop occupants would both play nicely together and not start a "who is cock of the coop" war! Thanks to Heather we have some pretty Marans with a boatload of creative names, and the photos really don't do them justice.
"Little", who spent the first few weeks of his life on everything except life-support, has now caught up with the others and is a very colorful and robust young man. Having tried to save money by designing our own coop (back of envelope design shown below) and getting the ever-handy Todd to build it, we have had to give in and add another coop in the small run, to accommodate the growing (literally) number of chickens. Thus a small village is growing up at the back of the arena, much to the puzzlement of the cows who spend hours gazing into the runs.
As you can see the vegetable choice is much wider than just two, and our color chart for nutrition is well covered. We aren't really self-sufficient but we do have enough produce to last the winter, supplemented with regular eggs and dairy products.
What is more pertinent, we know where they came from, and what went into the ground and onto the leaves. Also thanks to Keith and Michelle, and the "poop barter", we also have a much wider choice of veggies than we could ever grow ourselves. Jorg and I count ourselves lucky in these troubled times that we have the means and the health to use the beautiful space that we have in this way.*"Meat and two veg" was the traditional British meal post-WW2. Much lampooned by the rest of the world - under or over-done meat, soggy cabbage, burnt potatoes, we've heard it all.
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