My Pet Chicken Blog

Happy Holidays, my fellow Hen Hoarders! I had the most amazing idea for a holiday post.  It involved an unwanted gingerbread house (licked clean), little tiny plastic people running in fear, and an attack by Chickenzilla! It was going to be epic. EPIC. So I threw on a jacket, grabbed the camera, ran outside into the early […]

When I first started raising chickens, one of my biggest concerns was how they would interact with each other, and my family.  Everyone has seen the cartoon hen who bullies the flock, or has heard stories about the aggressive rooster who attacks whenever you step into the barnyard. I wanted to make sure to get […]

Chickens are so easy to raise that they fit almost anywhere. Many are in small suburban backyards where predator loads are smaller, and flocks are a little easier to protect. However, some of us live on larger, wilder land and have to deal with an additional variety of predators that would love a good chicken […]

I may have a flock of spoiled chickens. My brother-in-law has started his first job: he works at a bagel shop, and he knows the way to my hens’ hearts. His company normally donates any leftover bagels to halfway houses and homeless shelters, but on occasion, in support of spoiled chickens, he brings the inedibly stale […]

In my neighborhood, olive trees are a pretty common landscaping tree. They’re in many parks and backyards, dropping olives, staining sidewalks and shoes, and making a general mess.  Olive picking sounds like fun, but you don’t know pain until you’ve sprained an ankle on a slimy olive pit, slid down the sidewalk, and been dumped unceremoniously […]

I feel blessed to have a small chunk of this earth to call my own. I really do want to make the best of it. Yet, my efforts to create the attractive and productive outdoor space that I imagine have been woefully inadequate.  While I dream of harvesting homegrown crops to feed my family the way […]

I’m embarrassed by my chickens–yup! I won’t show you any pictures of them right now because I’m too mortified by the way they look.  It’s a shame, too, because there would otherwise be some cool photo opportunities. For instance, I have a mama hen and a bunch of baby chicks that we are raising outside a […]

Chickens are not always the most cooperative subjects to take pictures of, as we’ve discussed before. Sometimes, you get chicken bloopers. We wanted some great chicken pictures for our website of our newest breeds and assortments of hatching eggs… and we did get them, eventually. As with any photo shoot, there were some unique (and hilarious) shots—our chicken bloopers—that we […]

How many of us have some unwanted  garden helpers? I may have a few chicken garden helpers here and there. Likely story, Nugget. No one is buying it. I could put in a higher fence, as even my fattest hens can easily scale my low, 4-foot fence when the motivation is free reign of the garden… […]

My post about the Five Rules for Keeping Multiple Roosters is one that tends to get a lot of interest—and that makes sense! After all, if you’re hatching your own chicks at home, unless you have divine powers, you’re more or less guaranteed to hatch too many roosters for a laying flock. You typically want […]