This postcard advertises “Zip-dang The Handmade Menagerie” 2606 Monroe St, Madison Wisconsin (www.zip-dang.com). The illustration by Marcia Sparks on canvas is called “Chicks” if I read it right.
We are in Madison for reasons other than chickenry, but I was pleased to find in yet another urban environment, chickens have not left the consciousness. Tomorrow you’ll see an even more artistic sign of chicken iconography….
As mentioned before, these post-its are often sketched in the moments before I leave for work – and sometimes that’s meant running off to the airport for a business trip.
Sometimes those dishes just don’t get done in time…
Ah, chicken arts and crafts. Our pal Allen was our chief supplier, once. Another post is going up detailing the “haul” of chicken paraphenalia we have CULLED and LEFTOVER from the entirety of what he swept thrift stores to find. A separate post will tackle what Allen sent us – not everyone is fortunate enough to have an Allen.
For everyone else – there’s Etsy community take on chickenry. Jason’s first etsy.com purchase was in fact chicken-related and since then, outside of occasional gifts for me, it’s been chickens all the way down. Here are a few I liked from a recent search for fun chicken stuff.
Buy this charming poster at: http://www.etsy.com/listing/56897813/mona-lisa-chickensupersized as well as other fine chicken artwork by mrchicken.
Etsy’s crafters that work with the chicken motif tend to have these variations: country-style, where if you have that kind of home the handmade item fits right it, ironic/iconic, and then children’s/goshdarncute.
A few examples of goshdarn are:
Aimee’s Homestead – http://www.etsy.com/shop/AimeesHomestead?ref=seller_info
She has other more dignified tea cozies but I felt this epitomized the crazy chicken feeling of modern life.
The above tea cozy listing is at http://www.etsy.com/listing/65137204/chicken-tea-cozy
This is not a painting of a wall and chair – the little chicks are vinyl cutouts by circlelinestudio you can buy to apply to your wall!
This vendor ACJInspiration sells the egg as well as the vinyl chicken:
And finally, of course, there’s the mobile art form known as the t-shirt. Etsy had many, but for all the dudes out there manfully shoveling chicken poop into the compost heap, here’s one for you by Happyfamily
You can buy this shirt here: http://www.etsy.com/listing/61501235/new-rooster-urban-farming-mens-cranberry
I don’t remember the day, but I remember the look of horror Jason had on his face when he came back, one egg in his hand from the coop.
“Cannibals!” he shrieked. ” They eat their own eggs!”
What had happened was this: prior to this experience, being brought home by us as teenagers unable to lay, then suddenly discovering the miracle of egg laying (but not sure exactly why it kept happeneing) – none of the chickens had ever seen the inside of an egg. They had no idea it was edible – even though they had tried really anything inside the coop (even to Jason’s dismay, a packing peanut he had to forcibly remove), the eggs had remained intact and sacred.
Until I think it was Bossy – had to lay an egg when one of the others was on the nesting bowl and so laid it elsewhere inside the coop. Well. Push come to shove, who knows how much that egg rolled around and finally, it broke.
Bossy ambles over and says “Aha, that looks tasty!” and thus had yellow yolk on her beak when Jason reached inside the coop for the other egg (probably Business Chicken’s) that was in the nesting bowl.
After that, it was a bad week, with Jason grabbing the eggs as fast as he could before work so they didn’t get into the habit of pecking what they had laid and eating them. You can’t be too careful. It’s like a taste for blood, or chocolate – you don’t want to let them acquire THE TASTE for EGG.
More from the Virginia Tech Cooperative Extension on egg-tasting prevention (there really is no cure).
As mentioned in other posts, Jason and I only have three chickens and the mess they make of the yard as they forage around is absorbed mostly by the yard. If you are in a city with larger lots, or out in the country where you can have more chickens, it makes more sense to get organized about coop cleaning in order to mine for the gold.
Chicken poop, when properly composted, makes awesome fertilizer. This blogger at Basic Living has a much larger operation and thus does her Herculean chicken shoveling task once a spring, but then is making amazing garden compost from it the rest of the time. The closest we get to her method is during the winter, where we park the coop under our deck to protect from snow, and put wood shavings down. When Jason rakes that area, he dumps it into one of our many green cones to compost. (We have a green cone now that’s just sitting and “baking” down all the winter dumpings).
More on the once a year method aka “Coop Poop Boogie” and the Seattle Tilth resource on composting chicken poop .
The City of Seattle puts out a great overall composting guide (PDF) here and some general tips here. Seattle Tilth goes all out with plans for different kinds of bins, charts, and ingredient lists – making good compost is a work of art as well as decomposition, and they have the Master Composter classes to prove it. See their compost page.
The City of Seattle offers green cones and yard composting cylinders at discounted rates to residents. For those readers not in the area, I’m purposefully not recommending a vendor because I see many – and for way more than we pay in Seattle. You may want to shop around online before committing to a purchase, or, follow the Tilth instructions to do a larger capacity compost setup.
I’m one of those people who can look at Etsy for hours and buy things I can never wear to anything. I was doing that late at night looking at lockets and I think the next morning when I went to leave Jason a chicken post-it, it haunted my dreams.
Egg gathering basket fresh from coop
Egg scrubbing brush in its set aside container
Above: Shy Chicken, normal size
This is one of those days where I wished Jason had a camera on his forehead because of the incongruity. And of course when I went to look, all the chickens went to look at me as though I were a popcorn dispenser and if I wasn’t carrying the bowl (they quickly found out) they ignored me. Nothing looked out of the ordinary. But!
Apparently as he was handling coop matters this morning Shy Chicken turned to him and fluffed up like a big, auburn feathery marshmallow. Jason was enchanted, since she’s the petite redhead and the least likely to bulk of all of them. So he researched online and found this thread, which gives several reasons, but he voted for warmth (since today was actually a cooler non-summer day for Seattle rather than the norm)
http://www.backyardchickens.com/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=1532027
Next time, we gotta get the photos!
This wasn’t the first time we’d seen Shy Chicken lay an egg, but it gives the real deal in terms of how dirty the nesting bowl can be and what the egg looks like (curiously clean) right out of the chicken. Also, seeing a hen give you the stank-eye (“What YOU lookin’ at?!!”) is pretty special. 🙂
Business Chicken 