Note, this post is part of a new series, a weekly journal, where I spend less time worrying about writing pretty prose and more time sharing what we are currently working on/ dealing with on the farm.

As we ramp up to start offering American Bresse hatching eggs, chicks, and young chickens for sale next spring, we find ourselves trying to balance multiple generations. This is hard, at best, when dealing with all ladies. But when you introduce little cockerels into the mix it gets down right sketchy.

Tansy, our resident roo (still a cockerel himself at 6 months old) is HUGE. But he is a gentle giant. He carefully protects his ladies and has learned to live in peace with our goose. We took extra care to handle him when he was young, and it has paid off. Originally we were going to re-home him due to a defect in appearance (light feathering on his legs), but he’s proven to be a wonderful rooster with a unique cock-a-doodle-doo that ends in a clear vibrato.

Here comes the cold

Tomorrow we have our first cold front of the year coming in with daytime highs in the 50’s and overnight temperatures in the 30’s. So today we are scrambling to put up a new pen to hold the 8-week group that will offer greater protection than chicken wire wrapped around a canopy as a make-shift run. Last Friday I spotted my first sparrow of the season – indicating winter is finally on the march towards us. After an extremely hot and dry spring/ summer/ fall, I’m ready for a bit of sweater weather.

Taking Chicken Photos

As we finish up building out the new web pages for our chickens, part of our work was taking pictures of our breeding stock. The example here of Tansy is the first one I had a chance to process. Work is never done! I look forward to finding time to finish processing the rest of the images for publishing.

The works is fun. But at the same time it has me looking back at previous photos – including those of our original chickens. We only have 1 hen left from that group we got in 2014. Blackberry – a barred rock – is our resident matriarch. But her health is quickly fading and we face a tough decision soon. Winter will only make things more challenging for her achy bones.