Nearly Wordless Wednesday: 5/23/12

My hens average nearly a dozen eggs per week—and I'm very grateful, too!

Fresh eggs from my backyard hens in a glass quart measuring cup
LaGrange, Georgia—21 Feb 2010

Nearly Wordless Wednesday: 5/2/12

I reuse commercial egg cartons to store my own chickens' eggs.

My little brown hens lay brown eggs. And pink eggs. And suntan eggs. And café-au-lait eggs.
LaGrange, Georgia—4 August 2011

Nearly Wordless Wednesday: 4/18/12

He's gorgeous, and he knows it.

Leroy the rooster is loud and proud in my backyard chicken run.
LaGrange, Georgia—20 June 2010

Just for Fun: An FP&P word map

Commonly used words and tags from FP&P in a common farmyard silhouette.
Created with Tagxedo on 23 Mar 2012.

Funny how real life and blogging life sometimes cross paths!

Working on an assignment for Information Graphics class, I stumbled upon Tagxedo, which bills itself as an online "word cloud [creator] with styles." Enter any text, URL, news story, or other document, set a few parameters, and voilà! You have a visual representation of the doc's most commonly used words. The bigger the word, the more often it appears in the original text. 

As part of my assignment submission, I used this blog's URL as the text source, and chose the rooster shape you see above. Of course, you can upload your own .jpg file to set the shape on your Tagxedo cloud.

Head over to Tagxedo to see what kind of fun you can create. If you choose to post your word clouds on your blog, I hope you'll leave the URL in the comments section so we can see what you whipped up.

Chickens: "Old-fashioned" animals

Eggs from my backyard hens, November 2009

Every freshly-laid egg looks a little different from all the others. These were laid by my three hens in November, when the days are short, and chickens wind down the egg-laying season to begin their yearly feather moult.

Late-fall eggs are very exciting for backyard poultry enthusiasts. My friends in Minnesota and Michigan say their chickens stop laying in October, and don't start again until spring is well underway. There's a lot to be said for mild winters and a long growing season.

Since I've blogged about old-fashioned plants and abandoned old houses, it makes sense to blog about chickens. Sixty or so years ago, nearly every household included a chicken coop. Many working people raised their own meat birds, and kept layer hens too. It made sense in a time before refrigerated food transport and big grocery chains. People were close to their food sources—they were directly responsible for what they ate, and for how well they kept the livestock they would eventually consume.

I keep chickens for their eggs. It means a lot to me to know my birds are happy and healthy; when I eat their eggs, I know just what the girls ate to produce them. My hens eat cracked corn (scratch grains), insects, leftover cornbread and rolls, alfalfa pellets, steamed brown rice, watermelon and canteloupe rinds, raisins, white clover and other greenery from the lawn, and as many juicy bugs as I can round up for them. (They seem to get a special thrill out of the common garden slugs that gloopity-glop onto my porch in the summer.) My chickens also have room to roam, unlike battery-caged hens in commercial egg operations.

There's a lot more I could write about chickens—and Lord knows I will some other time. Wherever you see heirloom-variety plants around the ruins of an old house, remember that "old-fashioned animals" likely once lived there, too.