Home is where the heart is but, unfortunately, that doesn’t exactly cut muster with housing of chickens. This said, when Mack’s Mom and sister brought the hens up they offered up their expertise on the building of a chicken house/nesting box/coop.

I thank my lucky stars they did!

I’ll write more on a day I didn’t get another job rejection and am thus depressed (I’ll write more on the job hunt as well! Lucky!). I’ll instead direct you to something positive and the product of everyone’s hard work:

On one of our visits down to Oregon visiting Mack’s parents something inside me changed (or snapped) and suddenly I wanted chickens. This in itself was really odd since I’m scared of chickens. Or at least I was more so then I am now. Something about their beady eyes and sharp talons was a major turn off to me. Until I had farm fresh eggs. After that? Suddenly chickens weren’t all that bad in my book.

As we prepare to get some chickens for our backyard I decided it was high-time I do some research and learn more about these predators (joking) who will soon be making our lives a whole lot more chaotic.

1. More than 50 billion chickens are reared annually as a source of food, for both their meat and their eggs.
2. The vast majority of poultry are raised using intensive farming techniques. According to the Worldwatch Institute, 74 percent of the world’s poultry meat, and 68 percent of eggs are produced this way.
3. The broody hen will stop laying and instead will focus on the incubation of the eggs (a full clutch (all the eggs produced by birds or reptiles at a single time) is usually about 12 eggs).
4. Incubation for eggs is about 21 days (if the egg has been fertilized).
5. Chickens may live for five to eleven years, depending on the breed.
6. Meat chicken generally lives six weeks before slaughter.
7. Chickens can sense fear. This excites them.**
8. A chicken is 75% water.
9. A chicken once had its head cut off and survived for over eighteen months, headless.
10. There are more chickens on Earth than there are humans.
11. There are four cities in the United States that have the word “chicken” in their name: Chicken, Alaska; Chicken Bristle, Illinois; Chicken Bristle, Kentucky; and Chicken Town, Pennsylvania.
12. The chicken is the closest living relative of the tyrannosaurus-rex.
13. Hens will try to lay in nests that already contain eggs, and have been known to move eggs from neighboring nests into their own. Hens can also be extremely stubborn about always laying in the same location.
14. The fear of chickens is called ‘Alektorophobia’.
15. On average, a hen layouts 300 eggs per year.

* emphasis on “I didn’t know”.
** citation needed.

my sources: Amazing Chicken Facts, Wikipedia: Chicken, and 20 Little Known Facts about Chickens

Now that you’ve read the long (and probably boring) details of all that went into the preparation of our EarthBox, I’ll now give you the pictures, supply list, and process which we used to build our own EarthBox.

It started as this…

And ended like this!

Read the rest of this entry »