Free range chickens can mean a variety of things. As legally defined by the USDA, commercial operations can call their birds free range if each bird has a 3’x3’ space to move about in. The chickens don’t have to ever leave that area or see the light of day, but can still be referred to as free range. For most small farmers, it means that the birds spend at least part of the day roaming in an area large enough that they can forage for bugs, greens, and seeds and not decimate the area they’re in with their scratching and pecking.
It’s generally accepted that free-ranging is healthier for the birds and that they require significantly less supplemental feeding. It’s also accepted that if you free range your birds anywhere near your living area, the chickens will want to be near you, will leave their droppings in your paths and on your porch or deck, will dig in your garden and uproot your potted plants.
In our present living situation, with our compost-outhouse and outdoor kitchen, free range means that the chickens often keep you company while you visit the outhouse—last summer we even had a little bantam hen that went broody and decided to nest and hatch her chicks in a corner of our makeshift bathroom. Part of the morning ritual here is throwing water down on our wood pallet walkway to get rid of the chicken, duck, and goose poop left there overnight, and cleaning our kitchen counter space with bleach, sometimes actually having to shoo the chickens off of the counter first. Bucolic taken to ridiculous extremes.
We put up with the birds because once you’ve gotten used to your own fresh eggs, commercially grown grocery store eggs are intolerable. The yolks are pale, the whites are watery, and they have no flavor of their own. Home-grown eggs have rich golden, almost orange yolks, thick whites, and taste. And we like the birds. They have personalities, they’re cute, and with some handling and attention when they’re young they can turn out pretty friendly. But generally you don’t bond with them to the point that you could never eat them—a handy quality in a farm animal.
I couldn’t tell you how many hens we have right now—our flock has been culled a bit by predators since moving to this property almost 2 years ago. We have three roosters—the large and mean Pharaoh, an Auracauna who consistently menaced Keegan until we trained her to carry a big stick and when he came at her, to whack him like a piñata, Hermie, a smaller Mille Fleur who thinks he’s all that but will only attack you when he’s standing on something that puts him at your level—typical short man syndrome. Then there’s Jack, Clayton’s show rooster, an adorable little Old English Blue Wheaten who crows like he’s the king of the world but gets chased away by the larger hens and mostly spends quiet days with his mate, Diane, a lovely fawn-colored, pigeon-sized hen of the same variety. She may actually be his sister, but we don’t talk about it.
Typically, even free range chickens have a coop that they sleep in at night, safe from predators, and as long as that’s where they’re fed, they make their own way back to it in the evenings. With a new coop, or when you bring new birds home, there can be a training period where you either keep the birds shut in all day and night for a few days, or you have to make the rounds at dusk retrieving chickens from their roosts in trees and on top of milking stands, and putting them in the coop until they’ve gotten the clue that that’s where they sleep.
The coop should include nesting boxes which even free rangers will use, at least most of the time. In our case, however, our chickens roost in the goat barn at night and, lacking proper nest boxes, lay their eggs wherever they see fit, necessitating a sort of perpetual Easter egg hunt here at the farm.
Their favorite laying spots include the goats’ hay feeder, the abandoned rabbit hutches, under the corner of the floor of the outhouse, and any number of secluded little nooks in the long grass. Keegan is the designated egg hunter, securing a bounty of 5c each. Sunday, while I was doing the weekly maintenance of the toilet compost (a subject for another post), I spotted a beautiful nest of about 18 eggs. The nest was a little too hard for Keegan to reach, so I helped her retrieve the eggs. We made sure to leave two eggs there, so the chicken will continue to lay in that spot, making the hunt easier on us. The two we left we marked with a black Sharpie marker “X” so we’ll know those are the seed eggs, and we won’t inadvertently collect them and crack them open when they’re several months old.
Part of collecting eggs in this haphazard way means you never, ever crack an egg into a bowl with other cracked eggs, because if you get a rotten one it will explode into the bowl, ruining however many good ones you already had. And sometimes we discover eggs that appear to have been laid long enough ago that we don’t even bother to crack them open, we just assign the kids the “chore” of flinging them into the woods. They like to choose a tree for a target and see if they can get the eggs to explode on impact in that uniquely satisfying and revolting way that rotten eggs do.
Free range chickens can mean a variety of things. As legally defined by the USDA, commercial operations can call their birds free range if each bird has a 3’x3’ space to move about in. The chickens don’t have to ever leave that area or see the light of day, but can still be referred to as free range. For most small farmers, it means that the birds spend at least part of the day roaming in an area large enough that they can forage for bugs, greens, and seeds and not decimate the area they’re in with their scratching and pecking.
It’s generally accepted that free-ranging is healthier for the birds and that they require significantly less supplemental feeding. It’s also accepted that if you free range your birds anywhere near your living area, the chickens will want to be near you, will leave their droppings in your paths and on your porch or deck, will dig in your garden and uproot your potted plants.
In our present living situation, with our compost-outhouse and outdoor kitchen, free range means that the chickens often keep you company while you visit the outhouse—last summer we even had a little bantam hen that went broody and decided to nest and hatch her chicks in a corner of our makeshift bathroom. Part of the morning ritual here is throwing water down on our wood pallet walkway to get rid of the chicken, duck, and goose poop left there overnight, and cleaning our kitchen counter space with bleach, sometimes actually having to shoo the chickens off of the counter first. Bucolic taken to ridiculous extremes.
We put up with the birds because once you’ve gotten used to your own fresh eggs, commercially grown grocery store eggs are intolerable. The yolks are pale, the whites are watery, and they have no flavor of their own. Home-grown eggs have rich golden, almost orange yolks, thick whites, and taste. And we like the birds. They have personalities, they’re cute, and with some handling and attention when they’re young they can turn out pretty friendly. But generally you don’t bond with them to the point that you could never eat them—a handy quality in a farm animal.
I couldn’t tell you how many hens we have right now—our flock has been culled a bit by predators since moving to this property almost 2 years ago. We have three roosters—the large and mean Pharaoh, an Auracauna who consistently menaced Keegan until we trained her to carry a big stick and when he came at her, to whack him like a piñata, Hermie, a smaller Mille Fleur who thinks he’s all that but will only attack you when he’s standing on something that puts him at your level—typical short man syndrome. Then there’s Jack, Clayton’s show rooster, an adorable little Old English Blue Wheaten who crows like he’s the king of the world but gets chased away by the larger hens and mostly spends quiet days with his mate, Diane, a lovely fawn-colored, pigeon-sized hen of the same variety. She may actually be his sister, but we don’t talk about it.
Typically, even free range chickens have a coop that they sleep in at night, safe from predators, and as long as that’s where they’re fed, they make their own way back to it in the evenings. With a new coop, or when you bring new birds home, there can be a training period where you either keep the birds shut in all day and night for a few days, or you have to make the rounds at dusk retrieving chickens from their roosts in trees and on top of milking stands, and putting them in the coop until they’ve gotten the clue that that’s where they sleep.
The coop should include nesting boxes which even free rangers will use, at least most of the time. In our case, however, our chickens roost in the goat barn at night and, lacking proper nest boxes, lay their eggs wherever they see fit, necessitating a sort of perpetual Easter egg hunt here at the farm.
Their favorite laying spots include the goats’ hay feeder, the abandoned rabbit hutches, under the corner of the floor of the outhouse, and any number of secluded little nooks in the long grass. Keegan is the designated egg hunter, securing a bounty of 5c each. Sunday, while I was doing the weekly maintenance of the toilet compost (a subject for another post), I spotted a beautiful nest of about 18 eggs. The nest was a little too hard for Keegan to reach, so I helped her retrieve the eggs. We made sure to leave two eggs there, so the chicken will continue to lay in that spot, making the hunt easier on us. The two we left we marked with a black Sharpie marker “X” so we’ll know those are the seed eggs, and we won’t inadvertently collect them and crack them open when they’re several months old.
Part of collecting eggs in this haphazard way means you never, ever crack an egg into a bowl with other cracked eggs, because if you get a rotten one it will explode into the bowl, ruining however many good ones you already had. And sometimes we discover eggs that appear to have been laid long enough ago that we don’t even bother to crack them open, we just assign the kids the “chore” of flinging them into the woods. They like to choose a tree for a target and see if they can get the eggs to explode on impact in that uniquely satisfying and revolting way that rotten eggs do.
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