Our Peaceable Kingdom

The wolf shall also dwell with the lamb,
and the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together;
and a little child shall lead them.

~Isaiah 11:6


Under careful supervision, we started letting the chickens out at the same time Fletch was around. The chickens were terrified of him at first and all flew across the yard in a big pile of feathers and clucking. Fletch definitely looked interested and took a few stalking steps toward them, but I gave a warning and Tiegan gave him petting, and he has barely looked at them since.

After a couple days, the chickens calmed down enough to come out of the coop, even with Fletch standing guard:


I really wish I had been out earlier with my camera, when Fletch was literally lying down in the grass while the chickens ate the grass around him. That inspired my thinking about our own peaceable kingdom, which has really come along this summer. We have our own little lion lying down with our fat ... chickens, and we have little children leading them as well.

To lead the chickens, we have been working (though not very hard) on training the chickens to come when they are called (a little crazy, but not impossible). Tiegan and I have used split cherry tomatoes as treats to teach the chickens to come when we call "chick-chick" to them. Dolley and Abigail like those so much that they come right away now (sometimes even without being shown the treat!), and while they eat we can pick them up to get them back into the coop (which is our real goal, because herding chickens is a pain). Sally seems to like strawberry tops better, and Martha would rather have her regular grain (when she gets close enough to even look — she's the flighty one). 

Anyway, the other day I called "chick-chick" and Tiegan jogged toward the coop, with every chicken following her at a dead run for the coop door (and there treats). Success!

Until they stopped dead in their tracks, necks stretched high. Eyes wide.

And then Fletch appeared on his little cat feet by the coop door, and the chickens went in the other direction.

Peaceable, yes. Best friends? Not yet.


But we're all getting close.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What to Do With an Unripe Watermelon

Image
Back on the first weekend of August we were so excited to see how big our watermelons were getting. We checked all the signs of ripeness: good sound, firm skin, yellow bottom. So Kirk brought one in: And we sliced it open: Shit. This is not meant to be a yellow watermelon. It only even looks that way in the photo because of the lighting — it's really white throughout. It's Sweet Favorite, and it's supposed to be red.  After the huge wave of disappointment rolled through the room, we all took a bite anyway.  It's not sweet, but it's not sour or bitter, either. It tastes like watermelon, just without the sugar. Kind of like a watermelon-flavored cucumber. It's too big to let go to waste, and we felt obligated to wrap it up and keep it in the fridge until we figured out something to with it.   Dish #1: Watermelon Kachumber Kachumber is an Indian salad that is normally made with cucumber. Here we used some of our unripe w
Read more

So Where's Everybody From?

Image
I don't have any new garden pictures or updates for you today. I have to say, it's getting kind of hard to get a good photo during the one hour of waning daylight left by the time I get home from work. These are the darkest days now, as we hurtle toward the solstice. Without any photos for me to share with you today, I thought it would be a good time to ask: Where're y'all from? If you have never kept a blog of your own, you might not know that the writer of one gets a bunch of stats about who has hit on the webpage. Most of it's not very interesting: I don't care how many of you use your iPhone vs. a PC or what browser you use to surf the web. The one interesting part, though, is the map . Blogger keeps track of what country readers are in when they check out my page. It's fascinating! Here's my readership map for November: I figured my readers were mostly my Facebook friends, and I know where they are. But now my list of countries is gettin
Read more

Last Weekend of Winter

Image
It's the last weekend of winter! Next weekend we'll be beyond the equinox, and the days will be ever-so-slightly longer than the nights.  We still have snow on the ground, lots of wind, and temperatures in the 30s, but we plowed ahead with our almost-spring garden chores anyway. Here's what we did this weekend: 1. Got the chickens out on the raised bed where to prep the soil for planting greens: 2. Poked around the greenhouse tunnels to harvest the last veggies: parsnips and a couple leeks, plus a few leftover fall cabbages for the chickens (which they were very  excited about). We do still have some spinach, mache and kale left as well, but not much. 3. Improved the maple sugaring set-up by building a bigger firebox: Kirk used leftover bricks we had lying around to make a floor (so as not to ruin the bricks on our patio), then got nine cinderblocks to make the three walls of the firebox (solid side toward the fire). He also picked up some steel
Read more