I Just rambled on and on in the comments section of someone else's blog about chickens ( at least the blogger had mentioned chickens...it could have worse! It's not like she had been discussing personal finance or anything). I tend to ramble on about chickens, I just can't help it....I love them. I truly do! I mean, I'm not one of those crazy "I hypnotize my chickens and teach them tricks" sort of people or anything(not that many tricks anyway...just your normal "sit", "stay", "whistle Yankee Doodle" sort of thing.) Definitely not crazy...just a healthy, obsessive love. Why do you love them you may ask (or you may not...in which case,...go away). There are many, many, many reasons to love chickens, ...well at least three.
Okey dokey, first of all, and the most obvious, they lay eggs. Yeah, yeah...you think you know all about eggs. You've been eating them since you were too small to use a fork...or avoiding them with absolute revulsion (if you're one of those people). But, if you've never had an organic, truly free-range chicken egg, your life has been meaningless. Trust me. Chickens that are allowed to wander and forage to heart's content produce eggs with a large, deep yellow, almost orange yolk. (If you are buying "free-range" grocery store eggs imagining a flock of happy chickens wandering around a farmyard, check the color of the yolks. If they are the regular, anemic yellow, that chicken is eating nothing but prepared grains. She is never even laying (Hey, a pun!) her eyes on a blade of grass or a cricket. How "free-range" could she possibly be? ) According to Mother Earth News, truly free-range chicken eggs are also lower in bad cholesterol than regular eggs and higher in Omega 3's. And the taste...it's astounding. It's like difference between a tomato from the grocery store and a fresh, warm, sun-ripened tomato from your backyard. Yup, it's that good! It's also a whole different level of freshness. Did you know that a fresh egg will slip completely from it's shell with a neat little plop? None of that snotty stuff left trailing from the shell to slime around your fingers. I've kept our homegrown eggs for 3 weeks before the whites start to cling to the shell. Three weeks...can you imagine how old those grocery store eggs are?
Okay, second...they are wonderful pest eaters and fertilizer...ers. They eat a tremendous amount of ticks, grasshoppers, maggots, flies and who knows what else. They hang around when I'm gardening because I always flick them the grubs that I come across. I'm sure if they could see a chigger, they would eat those too! We even throw them the leftovers from the kids plates (once it's been handled, mashed and basically drooled on by a kid...DH and I can't stomach finishing it ourselves). And all that good foraging comes out the other end after a while. A lot of fertilizer drops directly from the chicken right into the garden. Nothing like eliminating (ooh, another pun!) the middle man!
And last, but not least, they are just so darn pretty! Their shape, their feathers, the silly way they walk, all the colors they come in...they are the perfect lawn ornament. All the expensive landscaping in all the world cannot make up for the lack of chickens strutting across the lawn. Sorry, I'm not a crazy chicken lady,...it is just true.
The more astute of you (or at least those whose eyes haven't glazed over in boredom) may have noticed that I left out one rather important aspect of chicken ownership. You can eat them too. SHHHH! Don't say that very loudly around here! We are a chicken sanctuary (and a goat sanctuary, and a sheep sanctuary) much to Mr Whirled's aggravation.
It's a good thing I don't like pigs...
Project 365/52
So I don't find the prairie quite as spooky on Halloween as the Northeast of my childhood. The shadowy woods, looming mountains and swirling leaves could hide all manner of ancient ghouls, goblins and headless horsemen. Here everything here is windswept and open. There is no where for a decent bogeyman to hide, unless he wants to pop out of a badger hole, ...or leap out from behind a round bale. 
