Back from vacation. The automatic pop door worked great! Now I will have to rig a permanent one.
How I got into chickens. I guess the root of it is that my grandfather was a farmer. None of his five children took up the practice though, opting for modern living - job, suburban house, lawn, etc. Maybe some cats and dogs, you know, the usual stuff. Always loved my grandpa's farm, even though he only kept a horse and a dog during my lifetime. There were stories of other animals on the farm and a great old film of the family tearing down the old wooden barn. I was sad I missed all the cool stuff. It all fascinated me. Country living was in my blood, despite where my life was heading. I also loved history. When I was five we moved from Mason, MI to Temperance, MI and into a two-room school house. So though we lived in a very suburban area, there was this cool historical landmark that I LIVED IN> So history also fascinated me.
At the age of 9, my sister and I joined 4-H but never showed any animals. But I was around those who did. My forte was art, photography, baking, etc. We had a large garden growing up but I never grew anything for the county fair. Still, we canned veggies, baked, cooked, sewed and all the "primitive" things that were slipping by the wayside with my generation. I was frequently told that I should have been born a hundred years ago, even though my skills were considered commonplace in my family (later I was called Martha Stewart. DO NOT call me Martha Stewart, just sayin'). And actually, I don't like being told that I should have been born a century ago either, women being treated the way they were. But anyway, it's just developed from there. We were also members of the historical society and attended all the local historical occasions like Frenchtown Days and stuff, getting to dress up and act the part. We used to man the Eby cabin during the Monroe Co. Fair. It was fun. My sister and I would sit really still in the loft and scare people when we finally moved. They'd think we were mannequins and I remember being called a ghost on at least one occasion. Great stuff. But yeah, it's about sustainability and learning from those who came before us.
And then there was my obsession with birds. One of my first identifiable drawings was of a procession of birds carrying sticks with decapitated birds' heads on them. Don't ask! I have no idea what I was thinking at the time. We're talking like 4 or 5 years old. *shrug* We had parakeets and cockatiels for a time but when they died, we didn't get more so it was short-lived. I did love them though. I could identify most of our local birds as a child too. Birds remained pretty much the fiber of my artistic subject matter for the rest of my life as well. In college I made some pretty sweet zombie crows out of fabric, sculpy and wire. One of them is hanging at my parent's house still. Nearly all of my intaglio prints featured buzzards and crows too. So it was no stretch of the imagination that I had dreamed of owning birds.
Our first house was in Jackson, MI and I had three toddlers and no money. Plus we had a nasty neighbor who actually tried to kill one of our 100 yr old norway maples by having her yard guy pour round-up around the base. Needless to say it didn't work and she got a talking-to by the police. Luckily (in one respect at least) my husband's employer, Jacobson's, went bankrupt so we moved. So it wasn't until our next house that I was seriously thinking about owning chickens. I had the coop all planned out and everything. But then our neighbors started in on us. We just couldn't catch a break and there was no way I was going to put all the work into getting chickens only to give the neighbors the satisfaction of putting an end to it. They seemed to relish getting us in trouble. I hated it there. Buuuuuuut... thankfully (again, relatively speaking), Borders also went bankrupt so we had the opportunity to move again. YES PLEASE!
So now we're in Kent Co. Meijer isn't going anywhere and that's a good thing. I like it here. When we saw this house pop up on the market after a failed sale, we grabbed it. There's actually a list of how many of which types of farm animals we're allowed to have on the plat map. It was practically telling me I should start a farm, how could I say no? So I wasted no time in building a coop and literally within a few months of living here, drove out to Zeeland and picked up twelve chicks of various breeds. And I loved them, still love them. They never stop entertaining me. In fact, I just took a video this morning of Custard taking her week-old chicks outside for the first time and them all taking a dust bath together. Priceless.
