There’s been a Black Australorp hen trying to be broody for the last couple of weeks, so we saved her some eggs and made her a sod nest in a little cage on the porch and put her and her 14 eggs in there day before yesterday. Now she’s decided that never mind, she’s not really all that broody after all. So the girls have been instructed to “break her up”"– throw her off the nest whenever they go down to collect eggs. If she’s not serious about setting, then I want her to get back into laying! Another hen, a bantam, made a nest under the rose bush outside the kitchen window and hatched out eight tiny silver chicks. By the time she had only one egg left, she was so busy keeping up with her new babies that she sort of abandoned the last egg. We picked it up and listened to it and could hear a chick inside, so I wore it in my bra all afternoon. It pecked away all day (made me jump a couple of times) until I had to leave to go deliver a wedding cake, at which point my oldest daughter took over and wore it in a bandanna around her neck. Just as the egg was getting ready to hatch, my daughter bent over to put it beneath the hen so she’d accept it as her own, and the egg rolled out of the kerchief and cracked open, and out came the chick. It seemed a little weak at first, but we can’t tell it from the others now. The hen’s an excellent mother—puffs up and turns into the Tasmanian Devil if you get too close!
Our closest neighbor, a retired guy who grew up around here, has hatched out around a hundred chicks this year between broody hens and an incubator. He says he’s aiming for two hundred! When I asked him what he was going to do with all those chickens he said,”Miss Rose, they’s hard times a-comin’!” He figures he can keep himself and his wife going as long as they’ve got chicken to eat. There seems to be some real concern among the old-timers around here that things are about to get bad. Another Great Depression; maybe warfare on American soil; Armageddon? I’m not sure what the particular concerns are for my neighbor, but I’d have to agree that it does indeed seem that hard times are coming: just making ends meet is getting harder than ever, even with growing a significant portion of our own food!
I think it’s appropriate to be concerned about the future, or at least be aware that our current way of life isn’t sustainable. We need to design our lives in such a way that if catastrophe occurs, we’re still on our feet. I don’t think it requires us to always be prepared for disaster, just to have a sense of self reliance and common sense. Here in the mountains people are generally prepared for the power to go out at any time, and especially in the winter; so many houses have wood heat, and even houses with electric heat often have backup wood heat, or at least a kerosene heater stashed somewhere for emergencies. Having a sense of community—knowing your neighbors and being prepared to help (or ask for help!) when necessary is so important, too. I don’t have the answers, I just know I want to steer my life in the direction of being able to take care of myself and my family, and in whatever way I can, of my community.
So next week we will receive one of our two annual shipments of Cornish cross chicks. These birds are for eating, not laying eggs. We get twenty-five of them twice a year. Some we freeze when they get big enough, and some we keep around “on the hoof” and butcher as needed.You can order chicks through the mail from Murray Mcmurray hatchery.
And for more information about hard times see: