…Enjoying Our Own Backyard…
-Hadlie and our friendliest Chicken Scarlet-
I thought I would share some of our homey photos, and our summer backyard fun.
After years of thinking about getting chickens, we finally took the plunge two months ago. Although we are vegetarians we eat eggs, and having fresh eggs from chickens we care for has always been a goal.
Knowing where our eggs come from (just like any food we eat) is such a treat. Knowing we aren’t supporting all the factory farming that takes place in this country simply makes my heart sing.
We built a coop and a yard for them, but they are already spoiled running around our entire backyard most days – they are some lucky chickens! Not only will these birds provide us delicious eggs, but they are so incredibly entertaining. We can sit in our backyard watching them run around, peck the ground, chase each other and explore for hours. (Well, while we drink home-brew.)
My sweetie did a lot of work getting garden beds into our yard last year, and I’m so glad he did! This year we had good friends give us corn starts. I’ve never grown corn, it’s not really one of my favorite vegetables, but for some reason it has been SO fun to watch that corn grow. Between the corn and the chickens, I feel like a real farmer this summer! 🙂
With our bird feeders full of sunflower seeds, we now have a beautiful crop of sunflowers! In addition to all the amazing birds we saw all spring, we had 2 different nests in our yard, Chickadees and Red-Shafted Flickers. The Flickers actually pecked a nest into the telephone pole in our front yard-pretty incredible.
I will write my Backyard Farming Part II when we husk our corn, gather our first eggs and harvest our melons!
Environmental Communications 
Oh my goodness it’s beautiful! You need to invite me over for a tour of your garden! I agree on corn, kind of useless without a lot of it but it grows SO fast that it makes it fun! The chickens will love the sunflower heads to go crazy on once they start sagging – I gave mine to my next door neighbor’s chickens this past weekend as most of my sunflowers are ALREADY done for the season, can you believe it! Love seeing peeks into your own little world 🙂
Oh PS Ashley English does an awesome, easy, eco-friendly chicken book – http://www.smallmeasure.com/books/
Thanks for the sweet comments Aimee, you gave me the idea! Yes, I need to have you over, I should host our next ladies night. 🙂 To be completely forthright, I took the image of the sunflower two weeks ago, ours are drooping now too. The chickens go nuts under the bird feeder, I hadn’t thought about chopping them down to let them eat off of them, great idea! Thanks for the suggestion on the book. I have been reading some from the library, and I’m certainly learning as I go, luckily they are pretty easy. We ate our first corn last night-just okay…