By Johanna Silver, Sunset test garden coordinator

The flooring of our coop has caused some trouble over the seasons. I've scoured the blog for any mention, but it seems none of the saga ever made it into a post. The record, then, lives in photos.

This post recounts Ophelia's crop failure. Notice that the flooring is straw:

What was omitted from all of that Ophelia drama was that her crop was impacted because she was eating all that straw.

This post was in the middle of the health problems (hence the yogurt regimen and Elizabeth's daily crop massages) and you'll notice that the floor is bare. We'd gotten rid of the straw but hadn't figured out what, if anything, should replace it.

It didn't take long to realize that bare soil a) gets muddy and messy when wet, and b) smells when pooped on. So by this post, we'd switched to large bark mulch.

The bark mulch works really well for us. We can add layers to it should it get messy or start to smell, and we can muck it out pretty easily when it's time to do a deep cleaning. It's actually due for a mucking. The bark is piled up so high that we're having trouble opening the door to the coop!

A passerby recently commented that it is cruel to have chickens standing on bark mulch because they can't scratch and dust-bathe. But actually, they can and do all the time. 

This is the least exciting picture ever, but it's my proof that the girls can kick the bark and scratch away.

We use wood shavings in the lay boxes because it keeps them nice and soft for egg-laying (less cracking when there's a fluffy landing). We decided against using them for the entirety of the coop because Ophelia still seems to enjoy eating them.

So that's how we do it. We are curious about how other keepers of backyard flocks handle flooring material. Margo recently learned that the folks at Full Circle Dairy in the San Joaquin Valley house their chickens on SAND! 

How about you, fellow keepers of backyard flocks?

By Jim McCann, Sunset Art Director

I have to admit I’m a sucker for gross TV. One look at my DVR season-pass index and you’d think a 15-year-old kid was living in the house. Ever watch The Verminators on the Discovery Channel? Sick! Monsters Inside Me on the Animal Planet? Aahsome! I Survived on Biography? Only good when someone grapples with an underfed animal or overactive shredder.

Watching this niche genre of programming fills me with pure unadulterated pleasure, but I never expected it to advance any knowledge I had to where I would recall information I learned and use as a basis in recognizing a real-life problem.

It just shows to go ya.

Robust rodents

Last April, Team Chicken noticed that rats were getting into our coop (Click here for article). I’m mean who’s kidding whom? Chicken feed looks like something you’d buy in a pet store to feed your guinea pig. And ours was a copious supply frequently spiked with a trail mix of other goodies, served up freely in a bright shiny tray. 24/7. A veritable varmint apartment.

    No worries. We tracked down all entry points and covered them up with bricks. Yeah, bricks. You got a problem with that?

Did someone say amateurs?

More recently, I happened to be in with the hens and noticed a small gap where a fence that doubles as the back of the coop meets one of the many adobe walls we have here on the Sunset campus. On the adobe wall, I noticed the telltale sign of a rodent portal: a darkened blotch of grime caused by the excessive rubbing from the dirty, rancid, oily fur of a rat—something I learned while watching “The Vermimators.”

You still with me? Good, ’cause it gets worse.

The fence I mentioned before? It wraps around two sides of the coop and looks like board and batten siding. Of the seven or eight battens, three were covered top to bottom with that same rat grime. Like someone had painted it on. With a brush made from the pelt of a volunteered rat. And to make matters worse, a narrow ledge about a foot below the top of the fence was covered in rat poo. Enough to fill a small shoebox.

Clearly a violation on my vomit meter.

And all of this combined with the fact that some of the smaller holes we had left unplugged seemed to grow exponentially overnight. Oh, and the bricks? I think the rats pushed them out of the way.

Fear sets in

During an impromptu meeting of Team Chicken, it seemed our imaginations got the better of us. Could there be rat droppings in the chicken food? Were the chickens eating it? And if they were eating it, were we slowly killing our coworkers by giving them our chicken eggs to make their omelets?

(http://www.sunset.com/food-wine/techniques/omelets-made-easy-00400000012188/)

Are there a million pieces of rat poo underneath the mulch in the coop? What about urine? Could the hantavirus be present and might we succumb to it were we to breathe it in?

I never signed up for this.

Watching it on television is one thing, but to have the image of a sea of rats pouring over ground you’re standing on is another. I was having constant anxiety about the soles of my shoes.

The meeting adjourned, but not before we concluded with the following: we were all mortified; we were shocked it had gone on unnoticed for as long as it did; we’d get someone else to fix it. Not because we’re above it, but because at some point one must realize their own limitations. We’d like to think of ourselves as rookies in training when it comes to our chickens. When it comes to rats, we’ll leave it to the professionals.

Happy Halloween.

by Brianne McElhiney,  Sunset Assistant to the editor-in-chief

I'm sure your backyard chickens love donuts.  Does that mean you should feed them these tasty glazed delicacies?  Probably not.  Following the tragic death of our chicken Alana, we had the vet investigate her cause of death by performing a necropsy (read more about it here).  The determined cause was kidney failure, but the vet also remarked that Alana had excessive amounts of fat in her system.  "More fat, more flavor," I typically say, but since we are not eating our chickens, we need to keep them lean and healthy in hopes that they will live long, happy, egg-bearing lives.  

What to feed your chickens: 

What one feeds a chicken is determined by the chicken's age and purpose and the time of year.  The best way to provide your chickens with a balanced diet is to purchase ration from your local feed store.  Rations available include:

• Chick ration
• Broiler ration
• Pullet ration
• Lay ration
• Breeder ration

If you decide to allow your chickens to range feed on the grasses around your home, be sure to provide them with the following supplements to ensure balanced nutrition:  

• Grit - aids in proper digestion
• Calcium - promotes strong egg shells 
• Phosphorus - helps digest calcium
• A bit of salt - deficiency may result in fewer and smaller eggs and can lead to cannibalistic behavior

Instead of feeding them cookies as treats, feed them scratch.  Scratch is much healthier for chickens than cookies and they love it.  You may also use it to train your chickens to come when you call them, and if you throw it in their coop, they will stir up the bedding— helping to loosen it up and keep it dry.  Seeds are also chicken-pleasing treats.  

During molting season your girls will need more protein.  Feathers are 85% protein and adding more protein to their diets will help speed up the process resulting in happier chickens.  Low-fat, no-sodium cottage cheese or dried cat food are two good options.  

Unlike your children, your chickens will gladly eat their fruits and veggies.  Feel free to give them any produce you may have lying around.  

How much to feed your chickens:

This will vary on the season and the temperature.  Typically aim for about a cup per chicken per day.  During the colder months or during molting, give them about a 1/4 cup more each.  Don't over-do it on the scratch because it will throw off the percentage of protein they need in their diet.  A handful or so once or twice a day is plenty.  

Recap:

1. Don't feed them donuts, tacos, or chicken
2. Feed them ration or allow them to range feed
3. If you range feed your chickens be sure to provide them with supplements
4. Feed them scratch and seeds as treats... not cookies or graham crackers
5. Incorporate low-fat, sodium-free cottage cheese or dry cat food into their diets during molting
6. Feel free to give them fruits and veggies
7. Don't let your chickens near any plants you don't want them to eat
8. Make sure they have constant access to a water source 

And a joke:

By Jim McCann, Sunset Art Director

    Google the term ‘chicken hawk’ and you’ll find a handful of varying definitions. For instance, chicken hawk can refer to someone in the public eye who fervently supports war but actively avoided service. It can be used to describe a person who spends an inordinate amount of time trying to get stuff for free. Or, when someone who decides for whatever reason to get a Mohawk-style haircut but then at the last minute opts to leave an inch or so of hair where it should be shaved, not fully committing to the look. They’re now sporting a chicken hawk.

When I hear the term chicken hawk, I think of this guy:

We’re getting progressive in the business of raising chickens here at Sunset. For almost two years, our hens have been cooped up. Literally. Unaware of the considerable pleasures that lay just beyond their reach in our test garden. Impounded. Scratching in an area so small I couldn’t park my car in it.

But recently, Margo True, Sunset’s Food Editor and shepherd of our One-Block Diet franchise, rushed into my office and proclaimed, “Release the chickens! We must put them out to scratch to their hearts content in our garden! Free to feel the sun and able to dine on bugs and slugs. Free to release their bowels into our soil and fertilize the earth so that our crops are nourished and thrive!” (I may have paraphrased a bit)

“Plus, they’re fat and need exercise,” she added with slightly less vigor.

Sounded good to me.

So test garden guru, Johanna Silver set up this: 

http://oneblockdiet.sunset.com/2009/10/exercise-for-overweight-chickens.html

Looks great, right? Wait...where’s the roof?

When Johanna returns from vacation, I’ll have to remind her of the hawks.

Chickens are chicken.

It happened late last spring. I was out tending to the flock when off in the distance a predator bird let out a loud screech. The reaction from our chickens was nothing short of amazing. All six birds stopped what they were doing and froze. Completely. Like a gaggle of feathery statues, they cast a vacant stare up at the corrugated plastic above our heads. For like 20 seconds. Amazing because it was basic instinct in its finest form.

We got a glimpse of these magnificent birds this past summer when temperatures here in Menlo Park reached a scorching 104˚. A family of hawks (we couldn’t identify but we think they were red-tailed) visited the fountain in our center courtyard.

They had no doubt come to drink and bathe. The question was, at least in my mind, were they looking to feed?

Chicken running

And to say our chickens are skittish is nothing short of an understatement.

On Elizabeth Jardina’s (Fact-checker, chicken blogger) last day at Sunset, she wanted to spend time with them outside the coop (pre- Johanna’s contraption) and enjoy them in our garden free from wood and wire. Standing there it was hard to ignore the similarities. The birds, scratching new terrain, grabbing low-hanging fruit from tomato plants. And EJ, with a ticket to Prague in her back pocket and plans to return to school in pursuit of a master’s degree. It was a poignant moment. A moment shattered by a tiny black finch.

Yeah. A dumb little bird.

From the corner of my eye, I saw the finch dart overhead and out of sight. But that tenth of a second was enough to send poor Ophelia over the edge. She took flight, like a bat out of hell, from where she blissfully dined on cherry tomatoes, over our compost piles and into the secure confinement of the coop. Her reaction was so overtly prudent it sent the others into an unprecedented panic.

So after seeing Johanna’s chicken run, I posed the question to Team Chicken: What about the hawks?

From the hawk’s perspective, our chickens enjoying the limited freedom of our garden within an oval-shaped fence may look like this:

By Johanna Silver, Sunset test garden coordinator

It's true -- our chickens are overweight. The vet told Elizabeth that part of the reason Alana got so sick was obesity and that our birds would benefit from some exercise.

Margo approached me about how to get our flock into shape. I didn't tell her at the time, but I immediately thought of the book Yoga for Chickens, by Lynn Brunelle.

Seeing as a yoga class for chickens would probably be pretty ineffective I decided to go another route. I used chicken wire and rebar to fence off an area in the garden and let them spend the day free-ranging and enjoying the change in scenery.

Ruby, so excited by all the new dirt, forgets to wipe her beak.

Smart chickens know it's important to stay hydrated while working out.

Hopefully between increased exercise and some potential diet changes (like not having food available 24/7) our girls will stay healthy and shed those extra pounds.

By Johanna Silver, Sunset test garden coordinator

My birthday is tomorrow, and a box from Denver arrived at work today. It's always exciting to see what goodies Mom and Dad (mostly Mom) have picked out. In addition to some new underwear and a 2010 planner, I got this:

It's the most incredible chicken bag EVER (trust me, this is not the first chicken purse I've received on a birthday).

It looks so realistic that I had to give it a turn in the lay boxes. I'm going to be styling this weekend!

My mom said she got it at the farmers' market in Santa Fe, should any of you want to track down your own fabulous chicken bag. Good luck!

By Johanna Silver, Sunset test garden coordinator       

I noticed something surprising about our girls after feeding them cucumbers the other week: They went straight for the seeds and left the rest of the juicy fruit to rot on the ground. 

The only other time I raised chickens was the year of my life I spent as a teacher-in-residence at Slide Ranch in Marin County, CA. The flock we kept was pretty different from the spoiled Sunset girls. They didn't have names; they were taken to the axe (not the vet) if they fell sick; and they often ended up in soup (not that we didn't love them. I LOVED them).

Feeding was also handled differently. The Slide Ranch flock was fed a crumble mix once in the morning, allowed to free-range all day, and would devour kitchen scraps at night. By contrast the Sunset girls have access to a crumble all day long, don't free-range, and don't finish kitchen scraps. The Slide Ranch hens might leave a few peels or stalks that weren't appealing, but they never would have let juicy cukes slip by.

Are our chickens really as spoiled as I think they are? Does having access to crumble all day fill them up more than free-ranging would? What has made them so picky as to only eat seeds?

We'd love to hear your experiences. Does your flock finish their tasty kitchen scraps?

By Johanna Silver, Sunset test garden coordinator

I found our birds panting in today's heat and captured this closeup with my iPhone while feeding them refreshing, overgrown cucumbers.

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

We found out what happened to deceased chicken Alana. I got a call this morning about the results of the necropsy (which is just another word for an autopsy that doesn't happen to a person).

There is good news. She didn't have anything infectious: not Marek's, not botulism, not worms, not bumblefoot or Newcastle or the flu.

She also didn't have heavy metal poisoning or any kind of digestive trouble. (My worst-case scenario: She'd somehow eaten a twist-tie or something from a bunch of spinach, which I'd let slip by.)

What she did have was kidney failure. No explanation. It falls under the umbrella of "metabolic disorder" that the vet had mentioned. Also, there was some inflammation around her heart, which was unexplained.

So no danger to the rest of the flock. Just a one-off thing that happens when you have chickens.

In an unrelated, but also related note: Farm City author and Oakland resident Novella Carpenter is hosting an open house of her urban Ghosttown Farm on Saturday, Aug. 29. Among the planned events are a chicken slaughter workshop, which is useful both for folks who plan to raise birds for meat, but also for suburban learners like ourselves who would like to know how to put a miserably sick chicken out of its misery. It's free.

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

Sick chicken Alana did not recover.

Here's what happened: On Friday, she was crouched in the coop with a droopy tail and no energy.

On Saturday, she seemed better. Perked up, walking, eating, drinking.

By Monday, she was worse again. So I brought her inside so I could keep an eye on her. In a cardboard box in my cubicle. We gave her graham crackers and yogurt and a couple of strawberries, which she demolished within minutes. That was a good sign, the vigorous appetite.

Photo by Emily Chow, Sunset editorial intern

Tuesday passed with not much movement. On Wednesday, she had her best day ever when I gave her a bite-sized piece of glazed doughnut.

We started to think she was faking.

Any animal who goes after a doughnut with that much gusto has to feel at least okay. At lunch, I took her outside, and while I ate yogurt, she puttered around (actually walked a little!) eating a small bunch of oxalis and a nascent sow thistle. (Weeds were her second favorite food. Behind doughnuts.)

One of her toes seemed splayed strangely, so I started to think that perhaps she had injured her leg somehow, that her reluctance to walk was physical injury rather than overall malaise. I actually put her back in the coop overnight, hopeful that she would continue to improve.

Thursday, I thought she'd vanished. She wasn't in the yard with the other chickens, she didn't seem to be in their house, she wasn't hiding in a corner anywhere. I actually came inside to ask the other chicken-keepers if they'd pulled her earlier in the morning. No, they hadn't.

I went back out and gave the coop another look. She was way, way up in the house, on the topmost roost. She looked at me, and it was clear that she either couldn't or wouldn't come down.

The chickens put themselves to bed each night and huddle together on the roosts, but it is highly unusual for them to not hop down when the sun rises. I reached into the house and scooped Alana up and brought her inside.

But no tempting morsel of food seemed interesting to her. I offered yogurt, a delicious hamburger bun, layer pellets, fruit. Nothing. She ignored her water. And she wouldn't stand up at all. She did, a couple of times, reach for the hamburger bun, but she was so weak that she would just fall over.

We decided last year that we would give our chickens limited veterinary care. (After our other Ameraucana Ophelia had an impacted crop last year that required surgery.) Not to be cruel, but as an acknowledgment that these are farm animals. Plus, not very many vets will even see chickens, and the kinds of maladies they come down with are not always effectively treatable.

As Jody Main told us, "If a chicken goes, she goes fast."

And yet, on Thursday, Alana seemed to be going, but not fast enough, honestly. I got spooked by the idea of a chicken dying in my cubicle.

Margo, on the other hand, only wanted to know what was wrong with her. She rightly pointed out that the chicken had been notably sick for five days, and we had no plausible guesses. We thought maybe she was egg bound, but we couldn't feel an egg. We thought she'd injured her leg, but there was no apparent injury. We just flat didn't know.

Margo found an avian vet in Mountain View, and I took her there.

At Miramonte Veterinary Hospital, I filled out forms talking about what our chickens eat, where they live, how old they are, what vaccines they've received. Then we saw Dr. Kenton Taylor. Patient and thorough, he examined Alana, put her on the floor and tried to convince her to walk, checked under each wing, felt for an egg (he didn't feel one either) and then told me what could be wrong with her.

His first guess: Marek's disease. Even though she was vaccinated against it as a chick, I asked? Maybe. He said it was somewhat unclear how long the vaccine lasts.

Then, it was a panoply of untreatable and terrible possibilities: heavy metal poisoning, botulism, a metabolic disorder that caused an organ to fail.

The bottom line: "Right now, being immobile, her prognosis doesn't look good."

The best thing to do, then, would be to put her out of her suffering and send her body to the state lab, where it would undergo necropsy. That way, we'd know what went wrong with her and help us learn if we needed to do anything different with the rest of the flock.

There was little doubt in my mind that it was the right thing to do. Which is why I was so surprised that I started to cry. And couldn't stop.

I've done my best to moderate my attachment to these chickens. Indeed, I have often found myself disappointed by the limitations of their personality, and the way they peck at each other, and how I don't think they know the difference between me and any other person. I've worked to not fool myself about how there's little difference between these chickens and the chickens I eat. But after having Alana sit next to me for much of the week, trying to coax her into eating anything, hoping fervently that she would get better — then, knowing that there was nothing more to do, that she would die — it was a little overwhelming.

The nice folks at the vet's office, of course, were not at all surprised. They give people the sad news that their pets are beyond help all the time, so they gave me a few more minutes with Alana. Perched up on the table, she could barely keep her eyes open.

I regained my composure and poked my head out the door. The vet tech, whose name I never even learned, wrapped Alana up in a towel and took her to the back of the office. I did not see her again.

Alana, chicken
August 2007–August 2009

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

You may remember that we once had a rooster. Nugget. We got him when he was a chick-let, a rescue chicken. We opened our coop and (as much as you really can expect) our hearts to our little fluff of maroon. I held Nugget's little warm body in my hands and introduced him to visitors at Sunset's Celebration Weekend two years ago.

Then, the awkwardness of adolescence revealed it unlikely "she'd" ever lay an egg because she was totally a dude. Also, beating up on our other chickens. Even more unacceptable, giving me a hard time, pecking me every time I went into the coop.

And then he started crowing.

This put us on the wrong side of the law, as well as our plan of a happy coop of hens.

We shied away from the idea of killing him, even though Sunset magazine is a premier source for recipes for roast chicken, almond-crusted chicken, chicken stewed with green chiles or green olives, or turned into a summer corn chowder with avocado.

It's funny: I'm naturally squeamish, so I dreaded the idea of the blood and terror of killing him, but I became the strongest advocate for it. If you are going to eat meat, why not meat you raise yourself? If you've got the nerve to eat flesh, why not take a principled stance?

In a last-ditch effort, I even shopped around the idea of feeding him to the alligator gar at the California Academy of Sciences, figuring it would be a relatively honorable end for him. The alligator gar, actually a large, toothy fish, has to eat; he eats chickens. It's fulfilling the natural order of things. (A colleague's father-in-law is an ichthyologist there, which is why she suggested it. I didn't make that up myself.) Anyway, people thought I was a psycho who wanted the rooster to engage in some kind of gladiatorial nonsense. Which I DENY.

Eventually, he ended up going to live in the country, keeping his head, but leaving me feeling conflicted about my love of chicken korma.

Which is why I was so interested in how our colleague Samantha Schoech dealt with her backyard flock. Turns out, her Tilly was a rooster too. And this weekend, her husband and a couple of trusty friends killed him. In their backyard. Tonight, she's planning to make pozole.

Sam's blog has a video of the dispatching itself, which I steeled myself to watch. Only it wasn't that bad. If you're interested in animal husbandry, I recommend watching it to see if you can deal with the gory bits.

Want more about chicken "processing"? You must also check out our colleague-in-honest-food, Hank Shaw's blog Hunter Angler Gardener Cook. (He is a rooster assassin for his Italian neighbors.)

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

Hank Shaw in his garden, in front of a gigantic cardoon.

Handmade boar salami....home-cured olives...wine grown in the back yard....fat, juicy venison sausages.

We ate this—and much, much more—on Saturday at the home of Hank Shaw, a political writer, and his partner, Holly Heyser, a journalism professor at Sacramento State.

Hank was also nominated for the James Beard blog award this year. We shared a table with him and Holly and his mom at the awards ceremony in New York back in May, and really enjoyed their company and like-mindedness. Hank writes fascinating accounts of making food from scratch, which in his case involves hunting and fishing as well as gardening. Holly grew up hunting in Minnesota and has a blog of her own about, as she says, "acquiring food the hard way."

Talk about a gracious guy. Even though he lost to us, he invited us to a cookout at his place on the east side of Sacramento. 

Dinner fell on what turned out to be a fearsomely scorching day in his neighborhood—as in, 108 F°. Nonetheless, a small group of us One-Blockers left our cool coastal habitat behind, lured by his promise of wild game.

A Wild Feast

The minute we walked in the door, Hank had his homemade and very respectable sangiovese ready for pouring, and a glistening array of things to eat:

* Good home-cured olives, which I found impressive since we've tried to make them ourselves, without success (yet!)
* Hank's own pickled beets, carrots, and sunchokes
* Totally delicious shad rillettes—a sort of loose pâté, traditionally made with pork or rabbit but here with  tasty local shad that Hank caught with his dad recently on the American River. I had no idea that shad existed in the West. I thought they were strictly an East Coast species. Now I'm hankering to catch some shad myself. (Their roe are particularly amazing, fyi.)
* Excellent saucisson sec, a dry salami from a wild boar Hank bagged in Monterey County. Secret ingredient: 1974 Heitz Cellars Angelica, made from Mission grapes. This fortified wine was the first wine made in California back in the 1700s.
* Lonzino, air-cured from the loin of above boar—more delicate and thinly sliced, so it looked like rose petals
* Fennel- and ouzo-cured salmon, made with an Alaskan pink salmon caught by one of Hank's friends

Bear in mind, these were just the appetizers. I hadn't seen snacks so hefty since my New Year's in Moscow, when I noshed on an enormous spread of zakuski.

After a fully appreciating all that was on the table, we presented Hank with a couple of just-baked fruit pies, plus gifts from the One-Block Diet: last year's honey from hive Veronica and this spring's honey from Midge, plus a bottle of red-wine vinegar and some fresh eggs from the flock.

Then he took us on a tour of their abode.

The Tour

The first guided look-around of a person's house is always fun, isn't it? It's especially interesting when the place is full of strange and quirky stuff. Hank and Holly live in that kind of house, and seeing how Hank makes his food only increased our pleasure in eating it.

Hank's homemade wine, hanging out with the books.
Each carboy holds one varietal; included here are
Tempranillo, Sangiovese, and deep, dark
Portuguese Touriga.The two tiny carboys in back are
Zinfandel, which Hank made from his own grapes
(the rest used grapes he bought).

The garden, where Hank grows everything from beets
to heat-resistant romaine to salsify. 

It occupies a chunk of their 1/4-acre back yard,
but there's plenty of space to grow more stuff. We
semi-seriously suggested he try growing wheat—
since he actually has the space for it.

A few of Hank's vines (I think these are mainly Zinfandel).
More grapes grow against a far wall.

In the garage, garden zucchini dry on a rack.
Several ripe figs were set out to dry on a work
surface nearby.

And best of all...

The "curing fridge"—a battered but useful appliance
in the garage, equipped with a thermostat control
and a teeny humidifier (at bottom right).

Hank at the grill while we gab under the tree.

Hank slowly and tenderly grilled a slew of those venison sausages until they were shiny, taut, and on the verge of bursting. The rest of us sat around under the big shady tree just beyond and gabbed for a while.

The Dinner

We went indoors—merciful air conditioning!—and feasted on those sausages, stuffed into giant buns with homemade pickles; firm, meaty marinated octopus liberally seasoned with paprika; two pasta salads—one with the couscous-like Sardinian pasta called fregola, studded with bocconcini (tiny fresh mozzarella balls), and the other with barley and sundried tomatoes—and a lovely, simple little beet salad with feta cheese and lovage. So much care and generosity went into this dinner. Hank even made the paprika. As in, he grew the peppers, dried them, and ground them. Having made our own salt, we knew this wasn't as crazy as it sounds. These kinds of things are worth doing, if for no other reason that it makes you really, really appreciate paprika and salt.

Hank served his honey lemon-verbena ice cream, I cut up the pies, and we chewed our last bites in a semi-stupor. Hank brought out some little glasses filled with that precious 1974 Heitz Angelica, which tasted surprisingly similar to Italian nocino, a walnut liqueur. Delicious. 

Then Hank and Holly, pied pipers that they are, ushered us into what they proudly call their Opium Den. It's a library with deep pink walls, a comfy sofa, a fireplace, and a mantle adorned with bare skulls of past game. As we sank into the sofa, Hank plied us with homemade absinthe. Yow. You could practically see the fumes emerging from our lips as we tried it. It only took a couple of sips to finish us off.

We eased into our cars and drove home, sated from head to toe and marveling at all that Hank and Holly do. Before we left, they accepted our invitation to munch freshly baked pizzas from our brand-new wood-fired oven, topped, naturally, with whatever will be ripest and most flavorful in the One-Block garden. Coming soon.

UPDATE: Here's what Hank wrote about the evening (and you can see the food he made, too).

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

The other day I read an inspiring bit of reader mail about egg-layers who quack instead of cluck. With the writer's permission, I've copied it here.

*  *  *  *  *

The April edition of Sunset couldn’t have had more perfect timing for my backyard projects. I had just finished planting my vegetable garden in my raised planter beds, and was looking forward to home grown eggs from my newly purchased chicks. The only difference being my chicks had webbed feet and bills.
        Ducks are often overlooked as egg producers but depending on the breed lay as many eggs as chickens. Their eggs are larger and are good for general eating. They have slightly higher oil content which makes them great for baking. They are also easy to raise, and more disease resistant and withstand a wider temperature range than chickens. Best of all they will take care of your bugs AND weeds! They love to forage around the backyard for snails, slugs, and whatever else they can find.
        They make great pets and most cities that allow chickens will also let you have ducks. They don’t need a pond but love a shallow tub or “Kiddy pool” to splash in. Some breeds like Pekins can be loud so just make sure you research breeds before you buy. Ducks make great pets and their hilarious antics are a nonstop source of entertainment in my yard.  — Nicole Goss

*  *  *  *  *

She sent these pictures too. They look like happy ducks, don't they?
   

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

I'm feeling ruffled. Jack Shafer, the increasingly cranky media critic over at Slate.com, wrote a column yesterday suggesting that raising backyard chickens is a bogus trend.

(Busting bogus trends is his thing—a point of pride.)

Shafer cited recent articles from newspapers around the country that he calls "all-feather, no-bone journalism," including pieces from The Oregonian, Arizona Republic, Chicago Tribune, the Associated Press, and the one that I suspect pushed him over the edge, in his hometown paper, the Washington Post.

Tragically, he did not mention this blog or my chicken-raising story from our April issue. (Even if he's calling us bogus, I'll take the link!)

The problem with his column, of course, is that it is itself bogus.

Selling chicks as fast as he can hatch them

This morning I called Bud Wood, who owns Murray McMurray Hatchery in Webster City, Iowa.

Wood was quiet for a moment when I suggested that this backyard-chicken thing was just a puffed-up, fake media trend. "If it isn't a trend I don't know what we're selling," he said.

At Murray McMurray Hatchery (est. 1917), they raise 110 varieties of chickens, many rare and heritage, and they sell 100,000 chicks a month when they're incubating and shipping as many chicks as they can.

Which, I might add, includes every month this year since February.

"Last year and this year, we have been running at full capacity, and we still have a 4- to 6-week wait to fill an order," he told me. "Two or four years ago, we pretty much sold out every week but we weren't running at full capacity and we would sell out a week ahead of time. Now, we are running the incubators as full as we can keep them."

A few years ago, he would sell 100,000 chicks a month in March, April, and May; the rest of the year, he would hatch fewer chicks because he got fewer orders. Not this year. They've been selling 100,000 a month since February, and they're sold out through July.

Plus, over the past 10 years, the size of McMurray's orders of chicks has been steadily trending downward. (The minimum you can order there is 25, because when they ship chicks through the mail they have to keep each other warm.)

"We see our orders going smaller and smaller," Wood says. "I used to sell a lot of orders in 100 boxes. Now 75 percent of our orders are boxes of 25. Ten years ago, the average order was 45 or 50 birds."

Wood says that as order size has been shrinking, he's concurrently been hearing about his customers dividing their boxes of 25 between three or four people, leaving each of them with a handful—perfect for a backyard coop. 

Changing laws on behalf of a "bogus" trend?

Then there's the matter of cities all over the U.S. taking up the issue of backyard chickens. Last summer, my go-to online chicken community, BackyardChickens.com, started a forum for people to discuss local chicken laws and how to change them. 

Ahead-of-the-trend college town Madison, WI, was an early-adopter; their city council changed the law to allow backyard hens in 2004. Ann Arbor, MI, began allowing them in June 2008. Fort Collins's city council voted to allow them last fall. Currently, Provo, UT is in the process of working through changing its law. In Salem, OR, Columbia, MO, and Knoxville, TN, citizens are lobbying for similar changes in city code.

Weird, all that political action on behalf of a fake trend.

Maybe the chicken advocates in those cities are only speaking in front of their city councils and boards of health for the benefit of lazy, bogus-trend-writing newspaper journalists?

This trend is too old? Thus it is not a trend?

The least convincing part of Shafer's column is the way his argument makes a last-minute U-turn in the third-from-last paragraph:

If backyard hen keeping is indeed a trend, it constitutes such a long-standing trend that it has ceased to be one. On March 29, 2002, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece about the "McMansion" coops some chicken owners were building for their birds. The April 5, 2004, Arizona Daily Star noted the high attendance drawn by Kim Fox at her chicken-raising speeches in Tucson... The Sept. 14, 2003, Seattle Times explored the world of the city's backyard chicken farmers. In the summer of 2003, both USA Today and Newsday profiled the author of Keep Chickens! Tending Small Flocks in Cities, Suburbs, and Other Small Spaces. "We sold 2,000 laying hens last year," the owner of a downtown Houston feed store told the Houston Chronicle for its March 30, 1993, edition. Dialing the Nexis machine back even earlier, we find a syndicated Martha Stewart piece in the April 23, 1986, San Diego Union-Tribune oddly titled "Home-Grown Eggs—Can't Beat 'Em."

Hang on here a second. I don't think that any of this spring's rash of chicken articles (mine included) is suggesting that we have invented the idea of raising chickens in backyards. Heck, I wrote about chickens for the first time in summer of 2006.

I don't understand: The fact that people have been raising chickens in their backyards before doesn't mean that there isn't more interest in it now, right? What's bogus about a long-simmering trend? This argument garners a FAIL from me.

Because here's the thing: I've been involved in this backyard chicken thing for a while now. We got our hens in August 2007, and at that time, I was a leeetle bit freaked out about being responsible for the ladies. I mean, what did I know about chickens? So I Googled. A lot. I devoured other people's anecdotes, searched for ideas to make our chickens happier, pored over accounts of chickens' favorite snacks and foodstuffs that would make them sick. I lurked on the BackyardChickens.com forum for days and weeks. 

There's much, much more being written about backyard chickens on the Internet these days than even two years ago. They're on blogs everywhere, there are classes popping up in far corners of the West, plus coop tours in places like Salt Lake City (June 27, peeps) and Tucson (May 23) and Fort Collins (it was April 18). Even forward-thinking Portland's Tour de Coops, after which most of the city tours are modeled, is only 6 years old. It's not that they were always there and I just wasn't looking; trust me, I was looking. It's that the chicken thing is catching on.

And Jack Shafer, that old rooster, can go crow about something else.

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

Last Sunday, Erika Ehmsen, Johanna Silver, Amy Machnak, and I sat in a darkened theater at the Millennium Broadway Hotel, nerves tingling. As some of you know, we'd been nominated—along with fellow one-block-diet bloggers Elizabeth Jardina, Rick LaFrentz, and Margaret Sloan—for a James Beard Journalism award.

Since we were sitting at a table near the exit sign, way way at the back, I was sure we wouldn't win. After all, no one would put us here if we were actually meant to get to the stage in any reasonable amount of time. I gently suggested that everyone just relax and enjoy dinner and give up the dream of winning an award.

So we did, and got to know our tablemates—fellow nominee Hank Shaw; his wife, Holly; and his lovely mother--all come from Sacramento. Hank writes a very entertaining, knowledgeable, pull-no-punches blog called Hunter Angler Gardener Cook. Like us, he's trying to show how possible it is for you to make your own food — from scratch. He tends to hunt and forage, we tend to garden and make wine, but the intention is very much the same. We felt glad to be sharing our table with a kindred spirit.

Then Kelly Choi, announcing the winners for the award ahead of ours (for Audio Webcast or Radio Show), accidentally opened the wrong envelope. "Erika Ehmsen, Elizabeth..." Oh, my lord. She'd flubbed, but we knew we'd won. Whoever got the Audio Webcast award, well, sorry, dude, our screaming completely drowned out your moment. Then we ran to the stage. (Ok, Erika walked. She's pregnant and wise.)

Hank Shaw's mother very kindly took this picture of us accepting our award:

 

Left to right: Johanna, me, Amy, and Erika, beside ourselves with joy.

And moments later, in the lobby:

Courtesy Hanna Lee

The rest of the evening is a bit of a blur. Some very fine journalists won awards, including the multiple James-Beard award winner Alan Richman, of GQ magazine, and we cheered them all. For the full list, click here. Erika, bless her, was Tweeting like mad the entire time.

The next night, we put on our fanciest duds and went to the chef awards, at Lincoln Center. What a scene. We were quietly ushered around the red carpet, ah well. Amy's shoes deserved to have a prance before the papparazzi!

Amy's shoes. Actually, she had to mince, not prance.

The awards ceremony, which this year honored Women in Food, lasted three and a half hours, and although many deserving (and terrific) chefs won (including San Francisco's Nate Appleman and Maria Hines of Seattle), we were as famished as wolves by the time it was over. We dashed out and devoured tidbits put out by some of the top female chefs in the country (my favorite: Anita Lo's steak tartare with anchovy broth).

It was Quite a Scene. Besides the best and most celebrated chefs in the country, we spotted Salman Rushdie (we unabashedly had our pictures taken with him, on a camera that, alas, was lost at JFK).

Amy, Johanna, and me in the thick of it.                                   Top Chef Jeff McInnis and Erika.              

We had a very, very good time, piling happily into taxis for an after-party at Prune, Gabrielle Hamilton's tiny, excellent, jewel of a restaurant down in the East Village. (She'd been nominated for Best Chef New York City.) Gabrielle makes the best hamburgers EVER, intensely flavorful and so juicy they squirt.

I remember the clock saying 3:30 when I closed my eyes.

--------

Now, back we are at Sunset with all of us winners together, in front of the crazy-tall hops that we'll be using in an upcoming batch of beer:

Left to right, Sunset's Beard-winning bloggers: Elizabeth Jardina (with Honey), Rick LaFrentz, Amy Machnak, me (with Ophelia), Johanna Silver, Margaret Sloan, and Erika Ehmsen.

and because they were part of it too...the very patient Honey and Ophelia, representing the coop:

:

By Erika Ehmsen, Sunset copy chief

We’re looking over a four-leaf clover that Chicago’s French Pastry School sent to wish us luck at this Sunday’s James Beard Foundation Awards. (Thanks, guys!) Four of us are headed to New York for the ceremony, and we’re excited and nervous—and not just about what to wear!

Our One-Block project is in great company in the Best Food Blog category: Our fellow nominees are Bon Appétit columnist Andrew Knowlton’s The BA Foodist and Sacramento omnivore Hank Shaw’s Hunter Angler Gardener Cook, which takes locavore to a near-complete DIY level. We’re looking forward to swapping stories with Shaw, Knowlton, and all of the other food and wine writers we’ll be meeting this weekend.

Want to hear who we’re talking to and find out if we win? We’ll be posting live updates from the Media Awards ceremony on Sunset’s Twitter page. Sign up to follow us by clicking here—it’s free, easy, fun, and admittedly a bit addictive. Wish us luck, and see you on the Interweb!

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher. Photo by E. Spencer Toy.

What are you looking at? I hope it's not the lack of rear feathers of our own Ruby, which I wrote about last week.

Because, seriously, Ruby's feeling fine. And I was heartened by the commenters who piped up on the issue. The consensus seems to be this: If she's acting fine, she's probably fine. A bald behind just happens to some chickens.

Still, it's not polite to stare.

Excuse us while we do a little crowing.

We've been nominated for a James Beard Foundation Award! Yes, this very blog.

The category is: Blog Focusing on Food, Beverage, Restaurants, or Nutrition. (Yep, that sounds like us.) The winner will be announced at a ceremony in New York City on May 3.

And this is right on the heels of the news that our One-Block Feast story from August '08 was nominated for an International Association of Culinary Professionals award.

Spring is feeling very springy indeed.

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher. Photos by E. Spencer Toy. (Not the indelicate one at the bottom. That one is by Margo True, the intrepid.)

This is Ruby. I mean, she's the chicken. The person is me.

You remember her. She's our perky Rhode Island red, one of the boldest girls, originally our little runt.

Well, Ruby's got an issue. (How to put this politely?)

She's got a weird bald spot on her butt.

It's soft; it's bald; it doesn't seem to be causing her any distress. When I saw it initially, I panicked and thought she was eggbound. (Eggbound is a very bad, very scary condition. It happens when an egg gets stuck inside a chicken; you have to soak the chicken in warm water and try to coax the egg out with "personal lubricant" or oil, and pray that it doesn't break. If it does, the shards of eggshell will likely kill your bird. If she doesn't deliver the egg she'll die. A lot of eggbound situations end up with your chicken dying.)

But eggbound birds seem really sick. Lethargic, straining to get the egg out. And Ruby seemed fine. Perky, even. Continued to lay eggs. Just with a squishy, tennis ball–size bald spot on her backside.

Our Ameraucanas and buff Orpingtons both molted in early January; Ruby and her fellow Rhode Island red did not. Might this be a very specific kind of late molting? On her rear?

I've found other, similar stories on the Internet, but no satisfying answers about what it might be. Some people theorize mites, but our other chickens don't have mites. And Ruby's not at the bottom of our pecking order (that would be Honey), so I find it unlikely that any of the other girls would be pecking away at her nether-feathers.

As long as she keeps laying, I suppose she's okay, but it's disconcerting to get a glimpse of her pink, er, altogether when she turns around.

Readers? Ideas?

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

Good news! Our print story last August about our summer one-block feast, We Had a Dream, has been nominated for an International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) journalism award.

To read our story, click here.

We're thrilled about the nomination, since the IACP has thousands of members—and other nominees include such food-magazine luminaries as Gourmet, Saveur, and Food & Wine. The winners of the awards will be announced at a gala ceremony in Denver on April 4.

We'll let you know how we do!

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

We began with salad, wheatberry ciabatta, and homemade butter.

Our winter feast started with a happy accident.

Back in September, Team Kitchen and Team Garden drew up a list of cool-season crops that would do well in our area, and planned a menu around it. First we'd have a salad of Belgian endive and escarole, with a fresh poached egg on top and croutons from extremely homemade wheat bread (as in, we grew the wheat and ground it).

Well, the endive never sprouted. And we couldn't find escarole seeds. Who knew there'd be a run on escarole seeds?

Moral: Be flexible. Johanna, our test garden coordinator, had also planted some red butterhead lettuce and arugula, so Team Kitchen adapted.

It was easy; the lettuces were beautiful. We hardcooked the egg instead of poaching it, because a liquidy poached yolk, great on crisp endive and escarole, would've turned the tender lettuces into a sticky clump. We added small chunks of sweet, juicy tangerines from our tree, garlic-rubbed croutons, and a vinaigrette made with tangerine juice, our olive oil, and sea salt.

Red butterhead lettuce and arugula salad with tangerines and hard-cooked eggs.

We had plenty of wine to go with the food. The Syrah was in bottle at last and had recovered from its bottle-shock; it was back to its original blackberry suaveness. The Chardonnay still tasted fine—like a crisp green apple.

Sunset Chardonnay and Syrah, left; right, wine editor Sara Schneider sips the white as managing editor Alan Phinney tears off a chunk of ciabatta. (By the way, that construction site you see through the windows here will be a big outdoor kitchen, to be completed by June.
Come to our Celebration Weekend and see it for yourself.)

The stunning brassicas from the garden—cauliflower, broccoli romanesco, Savoy cabbage, kale, broccoli rabe, mustard greens—gave us our main courses: a winter vegetable chowder and spicy braised greens with preserved lemon.

Our chowder was packed with cauliflower, broccoli romanesco, and broccoli rabe,
plus a few potatoes saved from fall. On top: broccoli rabe flowers and purple rosemary blooms.

Braised Savoy cabbage, mustard greens, and
Tuscan kale with preserved lemon and chile.

The broccoli romanesco was so beautiful and strange that we used it as decor, too.

We ended not with our original dessert—olive oil tangerine cake, which turned out to be a total clunker given we were destroying the original recipe—but with something that arose naturally from our short list of available ingredients, which included honey, eggs, "imported" cream, and tangerines.

Tangerine honey crème caramel.

We had a very nice afternoon.

Recipe editor Amy Machnak and researcher Elizabeth Jardina.

Test garden coordinator Johanna Silver in the middle of
what must've been a vivid story.

Me (at left) and copy chief Erika Ehmsen.

SO WHERE ARE THE RECIPES?

They and the story of how we raised the ingredients for this winter menu will be showing up in larger form at some point in the months ahead—I promise.

For now, please have some salad. It's hearty enough to eat when it's cold, but bright and lively, too—which suits our California March, the month when winter slides into spring.

Red Butterhead Lettuce and Arugula Salad with Tangerines and Hard-Cooked Eggs

MAKES 6 to 8 servings TIME About 1 hour

We used our own chickens’ eggs, but we let them sit in the fridge for at least a week to let the air pocket inside each shell expand and make the eggs easier to peel.

6 to 8 eggs (not super-fresh)
2 tsp. fresh tangerine juice
1/2 tsp. each finely grated tangerine zest and sea salt
1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil, divided
3 to 4 thin slices wheatberry ciabatta or other whole wheat bread,
     cut into 1/2-in. dice (about 1 1/2 cups)
2 cloves garlic, mashed to a paste with 1/4 tsp. sea salt
5 loosely packed cups arugula leaves
6 loosely packed cups red butterhead lettuce leaves
     (about 1/2 small head)
2 large or 4 small tangerines

1. Preheat oven to 400°. Put eggs in a small pot and cover with about 1 in. of water. Bring to a boil; immediately lower heat to a simmer and cook 10 minutes. When eggs are finished, transfer to ice water; let cool 1 minute. Crack eggs all over on counter and return to ice water for 5 minutes. Peel under cold water. Set aside.
2. Meanwhile, whisk tangerine juice, zest, and salt together in a small bowl. Whisk in 1/4 cup olive oil. Set aside.
3. In a heatproof cup, microwave remaining 1/4 cup olive oil with mashed garlic for 10 seconds. Put bread cubes on a baking pan and drizzle with garlic oil, tossing to coat. Spread in a single layer and bake about 15 minutes, or until crisp, stirring once or twice. Set aside.
4. Rinse greens and dry twice in a salad spinner. Peel tangerines and remove thready white pith; then cut fruit crosswise into chunks, removing any seeds.
5. In a large bowl, toss greens gently but thoroughly with only enough dressing to coat. Add tangerines and croutons and toss just to mix. Divide salad among plates. Add a quartered egg to each plate and drizzle eggs with a little more dressing. Or pile it all on a platter if you like, so people can help themselves.

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

Simmered eggs (aka hard-boiled eggs). These were a breeze to peel, and they're tender.


Every cook of any experience knows the frustration of boiling a nice fresh egg—and then losing half of it in the peeling. We've been through this a few times with our flock's output. Now we're patient: We wait three days for the membrane to loosen up.  Otherwise, it clings to the white like Kevlar on Batman. For the scientific particulars of why this happens (with the egg, I mean), see the wonderful chapter on eggs in Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking.

Beyond patience, it's important to simmer, not boil, your egg if you want tender whites. That's why some cookbooks and magazine recipes call for "hard-cooked" instead of "hard-boiled" eggs, out of worry that readers will rush to the stove and boil their half-dozen till they're practically bouncy.

Our last pearl of wisdom: Immediately plunge the cooked egg into ice water. This forces the membrane to release its grip from the white. Then crack it gently all over and put it back in the ice bath for a few minutes, so water can seep in beneath the shell, further loosening what's below.

Here's a foolproof formula for

Simmered Eggs

Put eggs that are at least 3 days old in a small saucepan and cover with about an inch of water. Bring almost to a boil. Right before the boiling point, turn heat down to a simmer and cook eggs, partly covered, for 10 minutes. Scoop them out with a slotted spoon and plunge them into a bowl of ice and cold water. After a minute, take each one out, crack it gently all over and then roll it gently on the counter, and plop it back in the water.

Let sit 5 minutes. Peel under cold water and enjoy feeling the shell slip off the smooth surface of the egg.

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

Four of our chicks at about two weeks old, back in August of 2007.

If you've been enjoying our blog posts about our various one-block feast projects, and don't yet know about our downloadable how-to guides for each, check them out by clicking on the one that interests you.

The Guides:

How to Raise Chickens

How to Make Beer

How to Make Olive Oil

How to Raise Honeybees

How to Make Wine

How to Make Vinegar

How to Make Salt

How to Grow Summer Crops

How We Made Cheese

How to Attract Beneficial Insects (we threw this one in just for fun, and because it's helpful)

Send us your comments, if you like...and stay tuned for the launch of new projects as we head into spring.

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

"The acme of food packaging."

—Alan Davidson, The Oxford Companion to Food (Oxford University Press, 1999)

Ophelia in the nest box, with her blue egg (the other is a decoy). Photo by Elizabeth Jardina

Every day, our chickens deliver eggs to us—anywhere between two and six, depending on the weather (in winter, they slow down). Even though we've been collecting them for over a year now, we can't quite take them for granted. Each egg is slightly different in shape, or color, or thickness of shell, and still seems faintly miraculous to me. I mean, put yourself in the hen's position. Reproducing yourself every day (or trying to, at least) is no small feat.

It's pretty hard to catch a chicken in the act of laying an egg, if you have a day job. The thing pops out in less than a minute (although we did get close with Ophelia, above). If you're really curious, watch this video, courtesy of a Barred Rock owner.

What about the preamble, though—the formation of a bulky egg with a shell on it, within the chicken?

Here's how it works.

Sketch courtesy of University of Illinois Extension

Every female chick is born with thousands of undeveloped yolks, or ova, grouped together near the middle of her backbone in a larger cluster, the ovary.

When a hen is ready to lay, these ova begin to mature, and every 24 to 26 hours, a fully formed egg yolk is released into the oviduct. As the yolk moves down this tube, it's coated with layers of gel-like albumen (that'd be your egg white) and wrapped in a thin, translucent membrane. If a rooster had been on the scene, sperm would probably have fertilized the yolk before it met the albumen.

Then comes the amazing part. As the soft, shell-less egg moves toward the exit, it passes through a floating cloud of  calcite (calcium carbonate).

The egg's membrane, which I'd thought of mainly as that annoying film that you have to peel off a hard-boiled egg, is actually pretty wondrous. All over its surface are precisely spaced protein points. These attract the calcite particles, which build up on the membrane in crisp, geometric columns until they make a shell. Essentially, they form a thin crystal that covers the egg. How appropriate that Fabergé used eggs as the model for his fantastic creations.

Shortly afterward, the hen gets an urge and climbs into the nest box. After a bit of heaving and panting, out pops the egg. There it is, protein-rich, marvelous, ready to go. We take it away to eat, and the hen starts making another one, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world.

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

It's been way too long since Team Chicken's last group egg-feast. So when Sunset researcher (and Team Chicken member) Elizabeth Jardina came back from the Pacific Northwest last week with a bagful of knobbly wild Oregon truffles—both white (Tuber oregonense) and black (Leucangium carthusianum)—we decided it was time.

Team Chicken's breakfast on Friday: omelets and soft-scrambled eggs from our flock out back, with shavings of white truffle (left, in back) and black truffle.

This may seem extravagant until you consider that Elizabeth spent less than $25 on nearly 2 ounces of these things...which is a fraction of what truffles cost in Italy (T. magnatum) or France (T. melanosporum).

To be honest, Oregon truffles don't taste like Italian or French truffles. They're much, much milder. Still good and worth eating, though, especially at these prices. The blacks  have an interesting pineapply sweetness I think I'd like to get to know better. The whites have a wonderful ripe earthiness, but it's just a whisper of what a white truffle from Alba, in northern Italy, can do. A good Alba truffle will suffuse the room, the house (or restaurant), and the inside of your head with its crazy, musky fragrance...in the best possible way.

The best way to concentrate the flavor of these truffles is actually not to eat them over or folded into eggs, although they were just fine that way. Later that day, we discovered that they were most powerful when finely shredded on a Microplane and mixed with butter. We dolloped the truffle butter onto hot linguine and spread it on toast. Slurp, slurp. The rest we've saved (in the freezer, where its flavor will, we're told, keep developing) for our next egg feast.

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

Remember Nugget, our adopted chick who turned out to be a rooster?

                                  Nugget in full cock-a-doodle-doo, at Sunset back in October.

Well, I've just gotten off the phone with the lovely woman who adopted him (she still asks to remain incognito). "You mean the big red one? Yes, he's still here."

How is he doing?

"Well, he doesn't tend to pay any attention to us. But he does like his little hens."

I flashed on a memory of Nugget, in the week before his exit, energetically hopping on the backs of our hens and ignoring food and water. (The hens did their best to shake him off.) I guess that was just the beginning of Nugget, The Chicken Casanova.

Is he unusually amorous for a rooster? I asked.

"He's just a young rooster that really likes his hens. He doesn't tear up their heads or anything."

Yikes. Apparently this is common behavior in a mating rooster.

What about his feistiness around people? Once he'd discovered our hens, he wasn't exactly the sweetest creature in the coop.

"To be frank, he's been drop-kicked a couple of times." Yow. "Now we're more dominant than he is. It's like how you have to be with a very hard-headed dog. You have to be alpha."

Those of you with fiesty-rooster problems might want to know that when you drop-kick a rooster (says Nugget's new owner), you have to do it "like you mean it." It will not hurt the rooster (just don't go crazy). Roosters tend to calm down after the first year and get easygoing for another three or four; then, depending on the rooster, they go through another aggressive spurt--and some develop a tendency to fly up in your face when they attack. "You do anything you can to discourage that. If he does that, he's put down immediately. No rooster in the world is worth someone's eye."

You also have to respect the rooster as the protector of his chickens, she adds, and not get between him and them. It's his gene-driven job to take care of them, after all. "Walk easy and do easy." If you have food, that's different; you're best friend to the whole flock, at least for a few minutes.

A little more about Nugget's new life:

Every morning, he and his flock of hens saunter out into the 30-acre ranch that his benefactor runs. The day is spent pecking up tasty bits, hopping on the hens, and defending them. Every now and then, the flock crosses paths with a group of guinea hens (apparently Nugget and the Guinea Rooster have gone at it several times; now they tolerate each other). Because of the many dogs around, the chickens are fairly safe from predators like racoons and coyotes. At night they're enclosed.

And any day now, mini-Nuggets will arrive on the scene. Nugget's owner has taken some of the flock's eggs to a school so the kids can see chicks hatch.

So, despite his orneriness, Nugget has turned out to be not such a bad rooster. He seems to be, er, productive. He doesn't rip up his hens. His owner thinks he's "cute and pretty." And he is definitely lucky.

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

I was fooling around with edible flowers in the Sunset test kitchen the other day, figuring out a recipe for an upcoming story, and had piles of pretty baby roses left over.

Why not feed them to our chickens? We give them all kinds of tempting test-kitchen food scraps to make their eggs more luscious. Roses would make a very exciting hen breakfast. Or maybe they'd even make the eggs fragrant!

The chickens did their usual NBA impressions, leaping up to see what I had in the feed bowl. I scattered the blossoms on the coop floor and waited.

As you can see, the roses were a complete dud. I've never seen our chickens turn their beaks up at anything before.

Wow, even their backs. Clearly these roses needed a few worms or aphids to make them worth trying.

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

No partridge in a pear tree on our one-block diet, but we do have....

Six fluffy chickens on perches. (Two are on the lowest perch.)

Happy Holidays!

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

Here's what we're giving for Christmas this year:

Photograph by Spencer Toy

Yes! The fruits of our summer one-block diet.

Happy Holidays, everybody.

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

When our flock laid their first little eggs, we were so amazed and pleased that we preserved the first two from each, as mementos. Maybe it's a little silly, but hey, if you've never seen a chicken lay an egg—or held a heavy, just-laid, smooth warm egg in your hand—you're happy to have a reminder of your first experiences of both.

We took the little eggs, blew out their contents, carefully rinsed and dried the shells, and packed them in bubble wrap. There they sat, swaddled and invisible, for months. Finally I thought, What's the point of this when none of us can see them? So now they're on display.

The four brown eggs in front were laid yesterday. Who knew that eggs get bigger along with the hen?

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

It's started raining here in Northern California. Finally, two months after the calendar officially declared it autumn, it's feeling truly autumnal. Cloudy mornings, early sunsets.

We've overhauled the Test Garden somewhat in the past few months, pulling out some underperforming roses and planting a new flower bed from seed.

Only problem, of course, is that what's mostly taken root are volunteers—plants that in other circumstances would be welcome, but in the middle of my seeded bed are nothing but pests. Below, nasturtiums (on the left) and borage, whose cucumber-scented sprouts vigorously colonize any damp, well-composted piece of soil.

The other thing we have a lot of are olives, falling from a giant, decades-old tree that stretches over our chicken coop and part of the garden. Its fruit is raining down on us at this time of year, plump and black.

Don't they look beautiful? Yeah, that's an illusion. The reason that they're "ripening" on the tree so quickly is that we have olive fly, which our own oil-makers Team Olive discovered last year. Our infested fruit—a beautiful blue-black, with a lovely powdery blush—falls all over that half of the garden.

Luckily, the world provides, and our chickens eat. They are mad for the nasturtium sprouts—can't get enough of the borage—and they even love the maggot-infested olives. Check it out.

Last year, I was worried about them eating whole olive pits, but since then I've learned some things about the intricacies of chicken digestive systems. In short: Chickens have two stomachs, the glandular one called the proventriculus  and the mechanical one, the gizzard. Sometimes people call all animal entrails "the gizzards," but it's a real organ with a specific meaning. It's where the grit and small stones that chickens eat end up; they help grind up the hard seeds and other fibrous foods that are part of a healthy chicken's diet.

The garden gives, the chickens take. It's got a nice circle-of-life quality to it.

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

For weeks now, we've been having nothing but brown eggs. That's because our two Ameraucanas, Ophelia and Alana (producers of blue and green eggs, respectively) have been vigorously molting. This annual cycle of feather-shedding and -regrowing is supposed to last somewhere around 6 weeks, and is perfectly normal.

Today, at last, Ophelia laid her first post-molt egg. An exceptionally smooth, small egg, too. It's as if her body has snapped back to an adolescent-hen state.

From what I've read, chickens lay better-tasting and better-formed eggs after they molt. We'll see.

In the meantime, it's just nice have her blue egg in the carton.

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

With cooler weather and longer nights, our birds' bodies have decided that it's time to surrender their feathers and grow new ones. Molting.

Most chickens molt once a year, usually during the fall or winter. That means that they redirect their energies from making eggs to making feathers. The Ameracaunas were the first to start losing their feathers.

Luckily, I'd read the blog of the wonderful garden writer Amy Stewart from a couple of years ago, when her chicken Dolley started losing her feathers, so I knew what to expect.

Below, Ophelia with her new coat of downy feathers.

Charlotte too is starting to lose the feathers on her chest, making her look slight.

The chickens, when molting, are skittish. More shy than usual. They don't want to be touched, although they do eat at their regular voracious clip. (They need nutrition to replace all those feathers.) And they don't do the egg squat when you pet them.

Alana was our first chicken to start to lose her feathers. She's almost all re-grown now. Luckily, the feathers on her neck, which were plucked out by the other chickens over the summer have regrown too. (See a photo of Ophelia's unappealing bare neck here. But it's nothing compared to Amy Stewart's Abigail: See her alarming-looking neck here.)

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

Paradise on earth, that is. Our scheme to get him out of the henhouse has been a total unexpected triumph.

It didn't look good initially, though. When we crept out to the henhouse after dark, Nugget had gone to sleep not on the floor of the henhouse as usual, but way up on a perch.

Drat! Now we'd have to knock him off the perch. Gently. It seemed impossible. Surely we would wake up every chicken in the place and cause a feather tornado.

Somehow, it worked. Chickens really do become comatose when they sleep. We used a long stick to kind of topple Nugget off. He landed with a fat thump on the chicken-wire floor and then staggered over to the exit, where we poked him till he pflumphed into the box held tight over the door. He was sort of sweet, like a sleepy toddler. We immediately taped up the box and then put some bricks on it. Maybe overkill--he's not exactly a raging gorilla--but we didn't want to get pecked.

Then we hauled the box (surprisingly light, actually) into a back room inside so that Nugget wouldn't wake up hearing the hens and be frantic to get out. We wrote his name on the box. Then we left.

*********************

Early the next morning, Pat McCarty arrived to hear Nugget cockadoodling briskly from inside the box. Here he is in the back of her car:

In San Jose, she handed him over to Tina. Boxed Nugget joined several other rescued roosters on their way down to San Juan Bautista.

Tina with her cargo.

It must have been lively in the back of that car.

Nugget arrived safely. Tina took some shots of his fellow boarders in SJB:

The hedgehog.

One of the three chinchillas.

Stunningly, Nugget behaved himself so beautifully that his new owner decided not to send him to the bachelor orchard but to keep him herself, with her own flock of docile hens! She actually used the word "tame." Caramba. "She has seen some mean and wild roosters, and Nugget is NOT one of them," reported Tina. "Lucky Nugget!! He'll have plenty of open (and protected space) and still have some of his own ladies."

Well, glory be. He gets to live and have a harem, too, in the country. He's in rooster paradise.

I leave you with Nugget, tamed.

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

Just last weekend, Nugget seemed doomed. By Sunday, he had no place to go other than Half Moon Bay Feed & Fuel, where we bought our chicks. The helpful person who answered the phone there said, without hesitation, "Sure, we'll take him!" When I asked what would happen to Nugget, the guy said, "You want the truth, or the sugar-coated truth?" Basically, the chances of someone waltzing into the feed store, spotting Nugget, and giving him a home in green pastures amid sleek and curvaceous hens -- well, they were pretty remote. More likely, he'd end up in a stew.

He's really a good-looking rooster, too. Big, red, proud, and protective.

Then on Monday, I found an e-mail sitting in my in-box from a woman named Tina. Tina had been reading the blog mainly for the bee posts, since she's a bee person, but was taken aback by the iffy news about Nugget. Her e-mail, which sat atop a chain of other e-mails between her and a small network of chicken-rescuers—a flurry of action in cyberspace!—urged me to immediately call a number down in San Juan Bautista "if the other option is the dinner table. :((  ".

So I called. A woman with a quiet voice picked up. She doesn't want me to use her name or address because she worries about people knocking on her door to pick up animals and do bad things to them. She says she's a "private individual" who helps find new homes for farm animals, and she's choosy about who she allows to adopt. "I have three emus," she said.

"Wow," I said. "How many animals do you have altogether?"

A pause. "Lots."

"What other kinds of animals do you have?'

"I have a hedgehog in the bathtub and three chinchillas in my living room. And I have a barn full of rabbits."

This lady had been raised on a ranch, but unlike most of the farm people I'd heard from on the topic of chickens, she didn't believe in executing them when they were no longer needed.

She told me what she had in mind for Nugget. "He will go to a 30-acre orchard, totally fenced, where he will join lots of other roosters. They don't fight because there are no hens. THe farmer uses them to eat the bugs."

Lucky, lucky Nugget.

She continued: "They roost in the trees and have three different watering spots." She giggled. "They form little buddy groups! It's a happy spot for chickens. If I were a rooster, that's where I'd want to be."

So, dear reader, Nugget goes off to chicken paradise. Fate has never smiled more widely on a rooster.

Here's how it will go down (I hope):

Tomorrow night, after dark when Nugget is groggy with sleep, we will sneak into the coop. One of us will hold a cardboard box over the entrance to the henhouse, a box big enough for Nugget. The other will go around the side of the house, open the door there, and with a long thick stick and wigglings of a flashlight, urge him gently out the main entrance (WITHOUT waking up the rest of the flock and causing a tornado of thundering wings and frantic squawks) and into the box. Box will be instantly closed and taped shut. We'll put the box inside the office for the night. Shortly after dawn, Pat McCarty will pick him up and transport him to San Jose, where she'll hand him off to Tina. Tina will drive him down to San Juan Bautista, to his happy forever after. 

Drumsticks crossed!

* * * * * * * * * * * * * 

Immediately after talking to Ms. San Juan B, I Googled chinchillas. Could anything be cuter? Somewhere there must be a Japanese cartoon about this creature.

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

You may be wondering what happened to Ophelia.

You remember Ophelia. Our Ameraucana hen with an oversized crop. The chicken who, bizarrely, had chicken surgery. The one we were keeping in a cardboard box in art director Jim McCann's office and hand-feeding yogurt.

Good news: She seems healthy. Her crop is still larger than the others' — but it's puffy and soft, not hard and angry like it was before the surgery.

Now, a puffy crop is not strictly a sign of good health. That's part of the reason it took me so long to update the blog; I was afraid that she was battling some kind of sneaky infection that would suddenly claim her. I wanted to avoid a triumphal post — "Ophelia is better!" — after which she would promptly keel over.

It's been three months though. And she's still perky, still laying an egg a day.

The vet told us that for chickens — any bird really — if they're sick, they won't lay. And Ophelia is plugging along.

She (and the others) do get supplemental plain yogurt as part of their diet now. The beneficial bacteria in it is supposed to help regulate the natural fungi-bacteria balance in their digestive systems. Plus, they think it's delicious. And I think it's hilarious to watch them eat it, so everyone is happy.

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

What to do with Nugget? Now that he's sprouted into a fiesty, illegal rooster? Some of us really didn't want to face the truth and were hoping he was just a big mutt hen with a bad temper. After all, he had not yet crowed.

Test Garden Coordinator Johanna Silver, who's been around many a chicken in her time, came out and said it: "Guys, Nugget's a dude. Big green tail. Upright stance. Aggressive with his feet."

So, for the past two weeks — as poor Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset Researcher, has steadily collected peck-welts from Nugget's beak — Team Chicken has been mulling how best to deal with him.

We got together in a conference room and discussed it. Initially the solution had seemed obvious: eat him. By joining our flock, he'd become part of our one-block diet, after all. Coq au vin, fried chicken, and chicken cacciatore were mentioned. Johanna, who has had experience with chicken-harvesting, volunteered to get him ready for the pot, with help from whoever was interested.

But then we thought about it some more. Here's how the conversation went, more or less:

-- Is there something slightly vindictive about us killing him? He's just doing his job and being a rooster.

-- What if we took him back to McDonalds?

-- What about the SPCA?

-- Who would adopt a full-blown rooster? He's no pet. He'd be put to sleep the next day.

-- We could give him away, but probably the only people who would take him would also eat him. The world is pretty bleak if you're a rooster.

-- You people need to get real. This is what you do with farm animals!

-- I actually don't think we should kill him.  It's be different with hens. You eat their meat when they stop laying because it's part of the cycle. Let's find him a home.

-- Also, he was initially given to us so that we would take care of him and let him live.

This last argument ended up deciding matters. We wanted to respect the feelings of Pat McCarty, one of our entertainment-kitchen cooks, who brought us tiny Nugget back in May and definitely did not want him ending up as dinner. Johanna would ask her farmer friend, who has chickens galore, to take him. And Pat would search for homes, too.

Well ...

The farmer friend had too many chickens of his own, and actually needed to cull a few. And Pat contacted just about every farm-animal sanctuary in the Bay Area (and a few beyond), and all were full.

Meanwhile, Nugget is getting bolder and stronger by the day. He's also terrorizing poor Honey, flying at her like a demon from hell and chasing her into the henhouse. (Whenever I go visit the chickens now, I take a pitchfork, just in case I need it.)

If we can find a place for Nugget  FAST — as in, the next few days — we'll give him away. Otherwise, we're going to reconsider those chicken recipes.

 Nugget on the move:

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

I've been avoiding blogging about this, but there's really no denying it at this point: Nugget is a rooster.

And not a secret, demure rooster. A big ol' red roostery rooster.

This poses a few problems for us. First and foremost, we can't keep a rooster at our headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., because the city code forbids it. (All that crowing!)

Second, as he's grown up, he's gotten nasty. He's taken to attacking me when I come into the coop, which is okay on days when I'm wearing boots and jeans but is decidedly uncool on days when I wear a dress. He breaks the skin and leaves little red peck marks.

Third, if we left him there, our hens would eventually end up with chicks of their own — and we're not in the business of more chickens.

It's a hard life, being a rooster. Half of all chickens are born male, of course, but chickens don't pair up one hen to one rooster. The recommended ratio is one rooster to 10 hens — sometimes more. The inevitable consequence is that a lot of young roosters never grow up to be adults. When you think of people killing their Sunday chicken, that chicken is likely a rooster. Why kill an egg machine when you can kill a squabbly fighter?

Which brings me to temperament. Some roosters are reportedly lovely — pets, even. All over the Internet, there are accounts of roosters who follow people around the garden and leap into their laps like cats.

Those stories are outnumbered by desperate pleas asking "What do I do now that my rooster has gone mean?" Because when a rooster gets to be 22 to 24 weeks, his natural instincts kick in. Your flock of hens? He doesn't see them as yours. They're his. And you are an interloper, threatening them.

Roosters of the red varieties — Rhode Island Reds, New Hampshire Reds, mutts like Nugget — have the worst reputations, because some strains in those varieties were bred only with egg-production in mind, no consideration given to charming personalities. Nugget, who aggressively tries to stay between me and the hens when I walk into the coop, and who bites my ankles and calves and feet in an attempt to get me away from them seems to have inherited every bad habit.

The advice often given on BackyardChickens.com is that a rooster that attacks you sees the stew pot.

I recently sent out an email to Team Chicken taking a hardline stance, suggesting that we kill Nugget.

Other members of Team Chicken were not so sure. After all, we're not in the farming business, exactly. And we've named him Nugget, for pet's sake.

Figuring out the right thing to do in this situation feels tricky to me and the rest of Team Chicken. Some people report good rooster rehoming experiences — finding a friend who lives in the country who can keep a rooster, for example. But horror stories lurk: How do you know your rooster won't be used as bait in a cockfighting operation? Or otherwise mistreated? Or simply taken in by a sturdier sort of person, who will swing the hatchet that you didn't have the nerve for?

And the idea that we would shy away from this part of raising animals — farm animals — seems coy to me. We're literally in the business of writing recipes for easy chicken dinners. One of our top magazine cover lines is "Crispy chicken tacos." If we're all chicken-eaters, why not eat this chicken? We know his history; we know he's been raised humanely; and we know that if we have to kill him, we would do so humanely and respectfully.

The answer looms large: It's the unpleasantness. It's the difference between chicken you buy plucked and wrapped up in the supermarket, and the chicken that you dispatch yourself, with the heavy thud of an ax.

We may find a new home for him yet. Test Garden Coordinator Johanna Silver has a lead on a farm that may be able to take him. I'll update when we know more.

You've read our story, and followed our blog — now get Team Chicken's advice in one handy download.

In our guide to backyard chickens:

• Are chickens for you? 6 questions to ask
• Materials, prices, and sources
• What chicks and hens need
• Why you don't need a rooster
• The 4 steps to raising chicks
• Where to get advice
• And more helpful info

Download it

More to come!

At last, after much trial and error, we eat! See how our crops became a summer feast. | Jump to the recipes.

Coming up next: How we're eating from the garden every day.

Veggie-garden primer | Sunset guides to growing edibles

Ophelia breakfasts on yogurt from a spoon, fed by Elizabeth Jardina, researcher.

Hives Veronica (left) and Betty (right) get a morning visit from Margaret Sloan, production coordinator and Kimberley Burch, imaging specialist.

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

Ophelia came out of surgery this afternoon. When I picked her up at Adobe Animal Hospital, she was a little groggy, but seemed okay.

The vet helpfully gave us the icky — whatever it was — that had been clogging her crop. In a plastic bag. Looked like straw, maybe. There was no way that any amount of chicken massage could have broken up that gross tangle.

You can't even see her incision because it's covered by feathers.

She's not really supposed to eat or drink tonight, and I was worried about her being with the rest of the other chickens, so I closed her in the chicken house — she jumped up to the roost, presumably to sleep. The other chickens will have to stay in their (completely closed) yard tonight instead of their snug house. It will be confusing to them, but they'll live.

I originally planned to put her in with Nugget, but Nugget immediately began pecking Ophelia when I tried it out, so I whisked her out.

I have a very bad feeling about Nugget. I'm afraid Nugget is a rooster.

What are the ethics of getting a "rescue" chicken and then eating it? Re-homing a rooster can be nearly impossible, and I'm not sure what we can do with him.

But first things first. This weekend's task is helping Ophelia get better.

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

Ophelia is in surgery.

Her crop was worse this morning, and after consulting the vet, two Sunset staffers took her in. The vet who saw her said that the mass in her crop seems to be starting to ferment, so surgery is her best option.

She'll be under anesthesia, which is very risky for a chicken. She very well might die.

I'll post more when we hear back from the vet.

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

First things first: Ophelia is doing okay.

This all started on Monday. Today is Thursday. Her crop still feels enlarged, but it's not nearly so hard as it was before her treatment at the vet. Now it feels more like one of those gel-filled stress balls. Full, but squishy.

You can see her still-enlarged crop in this photo. Ophelia's on the right, while her normal-cropped fellow Ameraucana Alana is on the left.

She's eating and drinking, and yesterday, she laid an egg. Laying an egg is a very good sign, because it means that she's digesting food and drinking water.

When Margo took her to the vet, the vet recommended massaging her crop.

Yes, massage.

For a chicken.

So every couple of hours, I've been going out to the coop to massage Ophelia's swollen crop. At first she resisted. Now, she seems resigned to it, making little adorable clucking noises sometimes.

It definitely feels like there's still food — or maybe just stuff — hanging out in her crop, but it doesn't seem like it's getting infected or anything.

How would I know this, you ask?

Why, I've been smelling her breath, of course.

(My job is seeming weirder and weirder.)

If your chicken with a swollen crop has bad breath, sour or foul-smelling, it means that either bacteria or fungi have seized the opportunity to multiply in a vulnerable crop.

So as I've been massaging Ophelia, I've been taking furtive sniffs toward her beak. She smells like nothing, unless she's been walking around in chicken droppings, in which case she smells like manure. (These are the less bucolic massage sessions.)

Today, I gave her some bread soaked in lots of olive oil in an attempt to get the stuff in her crop moving again.

She's not getting worse, she's just not getting better.

Patience and massage are the next steps. Also, saying hello to Honey when she hops up, demanding her massage. (Her crop feels fine.)

by Margo True, Sunset food editor

Alas, poor Ophelia! Why didst Team Chicken burden thee with the name of a tragic Shakespearean heroine? For thy fate seems gloomy indeed.

Okay, it was all my fault—I LOVE Shakespeare and insisted on the name. So 'twas I who took Ophelia, suddenly afflicted with a potentially deadly impacted crop, off to the Adobe Animal Hospital in Los Altos.

Here she is, in her transport carton:

She settled right down and didn't utter a single sound on the drive to the vet's. It was actually worrisome,  but sure made the drive easy—I had visions of her bursting out of the box and flapping around the car, banging her poor swollen crop against the windows. Nada. She was an angel.

At Adobe, the receptionist immediately got on the intercom and barked, "Check check on a chicken. Check check. Chicken check check on a chicken." I felt as though I'd just ordered a sandwich in a drive-through. Then she very sweetly asked, "And what is Ophelia's last name?"  Last name?! Er—Sunset? (Ophelia Sunset: Hey drag queens—looking for a cool stage name?)

We had a bit of a wait, during which time we observed tragedy and comedy. The cute Airedale with a limp, still chipper enough to play with the kids and mom who brought him. The little orange cat, carried in motionless and wrapped in a towel, whose owner choked on her tears when asked his name. "Hobie," she whispered. The lizard, off in an unseen operating room; a technician told us that the doctor was just finishing up with him and would see Ophelia next. "He had a prolapsed rectum," she added. Who knew a lizard could have such a problem?

Dr. Nicolette Zarday, blonde and with an unusually kind and sympathetic face, examined Ophelia. "I've never dealt with a chicken before," she said. "But she seems to have crop stasis [another term for impacted crop], which we see in other birds too." 

Dr. Zarday examines the stoic Ophelia.

To loosen the mass, Dr. Zarday suggested running a tube down Ophelia's esophagus to fill her crop with a solution of warm water and mineral oil. "You can watch if you like." Er, no thanks.

Through this door, Ophelia is being intubated.

I retired to the waiting room and saw Hobie's owner rush out the front door. "Hobie didn't make it," said another technician, when I asked. Poor Hobie! Rest in peace, little kitty.

Things turned out much better for Ophelia, who emerged from her procedure looking exactly the same as she had going in—i.e. totally calm—but with a slightly looser crop. It felt more bean-bag-ish and less like modeling clay. "We hope she'll regurgitate," said Dr. Zarday. Well, good thing the box is heavily lined with newspaper.

No regurgitating on the way home, just a silent chicken. But she seemed to perk up when I set her down back in the coop, to welcome squawks from her coop-mates.

Maybe we should change her name to Olivia...

Oh, and in case you're interested, the fee for chicken intubation is $60, which we calculated would buy at least three decent chicken dinners. Then again, Ophelia has laid delicious eggs faithfully on a near-daily basis since January; we figure she's paid for her bill. Plus, she is a very sweet chicken.

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

We'd been really lucky.

A lot of things can go wrong when you get a flock of chickens: Chicks can catch colds. Flocks are attacked by wily raccoons. The pecking order can get so crazy that you end up with a fatality.

None of this had happened to us. Our chickens had grown up like champs. Just like chickens should. Healthy, hearty, squawking.

And then I went out to visit the girls yesterday morning. I picked up Ophelia, who was our first girl to lay.

Her chest felt puffy. Confusingly puffy. Had our chickens always felt this way?

I put Ophelia down and picked up Alana, our other Ameraucana. Her chest felt like it should: Slight and bony.

I grabbed Ophelia again. The puffiness was definitely not normal. It was definitely not muscle. It felt hard — just barely pliable. It was round, and about the size of a tennis ball.

Also, she was making a peculiar stiff-necked side-to-side motion with her head. I swear, it looked like she was trying to clear her throat.

A quick lesson on chicken anatomy: Their esophagus runs down the front of their chest, and then widens into a little sac called the crop. That's where food is stored and moistened until it continues its way inside the chicken to its two stomachs. (Extra credit: The two stomachs are the proventriculus, which contains gastric juices and acid, and the gizzard, where seeds and other hard things are mechanically broken down by strong muscles.)

Anyway, the organ in question here is the crop. Ophelia's was big and firm. Also, she didn't seem to be eating. (She would politely take a pellet of food from my hand, but then drop it without consuming.)

It was obviously time to do two things:
Ask our copy chief, Erika Ehmsen, to call her husband, Steve (a vet), for consultation, and pore over the archives of the BackyardChickens.com forum.

Pretty soon I realized that what had happened to Ophelia sounded an awful lot like an impacted crop. What this means is that either a tangle of grasses or hay has formed a knotty ball in her crop, and it can't empty itself.

Judging from anecdotes on the Internet, there are typically four outcomes:
1) The problem magically resolves itself.
2) The chicken dies, often unexpectedly.
3) The chicken goes to the vet.
4) Home remedies are administered.

Home remedies run the gamut. The most benign is massaging the crop while the chicken is upside down to try to make her vomit. (Didn't work. I learned later that this isn't a great idea because if something is so large that it's stuck there, it's too big to come up. Plus it stresses your chicken out.)

The next step: Feeding your chicken a syringeful of warm water and mineral oil and massaging the crop to help break up the contents. This isn't as mild as it sounds: If you accidentally squirt water or oil into the windpipe, you'll kill your chicken, sometimes instantly.

Then, home remedies go straight into shocking: performing chicken surgery. Yes, seriously. People on the Internet — nice, otherwise normal-seeming people — sometimes sterilize an X-acto knife or sewing scissors, and cut their chickens' chest open, remove the ick that's blocking them up, and glue the skin back together with superglue.

I like these chickens, but I wasn't ready for the home surgery route.

Then we heard from our vet consultant, Steve Randle. He's an excellent vet, but one who doesn't typically treat chickens. He listened to Ophelia's symptoms, and after doing a bit of research, he agreed that it sounded serious. He gave me names of a couple of vets who worked with chickens. Or at least birds.

I called Adobe Animal Hospital in Los Altos. Their one vet who would treat a chicken said that an impacted crop was an emergency and should be treated within 24 hours.

All this time, one question kept rattling around in my head: Why did we name her Ophelia? Didn't we realize that a tragic name was bad news for a chicken?

Our food editor Margo True took the ailing Ophelia to the vet.

Next time: Margo takes over the story. It's totally Chicken ER.

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

Thanks and hello to everyone who came by the chicken coop today! It was wonderful to meet so many Sunset readers who are excited about our lovely chickens, and who are thinking of starting their own backyard flocks.

Above, Hannah and Katrina Linn of Burlingame, Calif., meet the flock. The family has been reading the blog and decided to come see the coop for themselves with an eye toward getting their own. "It seems really doable," said dad Walt.

If you're in the area tomorrow, do come by and say hello. I'll be giving out six freshly laid eggs to the first visitor who mentions the blog!

A number of questions keep coming up over and over again, so I thought I'd toss them up on the blog for anyone who might be curious.

Q: How much space do they need?

At minimum, you want to have at least four square feet of chicken yard per laying hen. That's much less than you're imagining. Our chicken yard is 10- by 10-feet, which means that we have 100 square feet of yard for only 6 hens, giving them each a kingly 17 square feet each. This is way more than the recommended minimums. Personally, I would be comfortable adding four or so more hens to our flock in the same amount of space without worrying about the ratio of poop to square feet of straw, or worrying that their proximity would cause excess squabbling and pecking. But we don't really need more hens.

Q: What do they eat?

Mostly layer pellets and chicken scratch. We get ours from an organic supplier, Modesto Milling. That's the backbone of their diet. It's supplemented by scraps from the test kitchen (they love leafy greens, anything wilted, fennel and dill, arugula — their favorite, cilantro stems, chile seeds), weeds that we pick from the garden (especially anything in the dandelion family and wild grasses), apple cores, overripe strawberries and other fruit, and insects they find in the dirt. They also eat oyster shells (mixed into the scratch) to give them a calcium boost, which gives their eggs nice, thick shells. Chickens aren't naturally vegetarians, but we don't feed ours meat. Because we think it seems creepy.

Q: Which one is the rooster?

We don't have a rooster. We're not allowed to have roosters in Menlo Park, and they can be trouble — aggressive, loud, feisty. Some of our chickens have big red combs and wattles, but they're still not roosters. Whether or not they have big combs depends on their variety, not on their gender.

Also, while we're at it, chickens lay eggs with or without the presence of roosters. Since we don't have a rooster, the eggs are not fertilized, which means that they will never hatch into chicks. (This is just as well, because we're not really in the market for any more chickens.) If we did have a rooster, the eggs would be fertilized while they were, ahem, still in the hen; the rooster doesn't do anything to eggs once they've been laid.

Q: Why are the eggs different colors?

Different varieties of chickens lay different color eggs. Two of ours lay blue-green eggs; the other four lay brown eggs. White eggs come from varieties used in industrial agriculture; they lay two eggs a day. Our chickens lay one egg a day.

Q: What do you do with the eggs?

We give them to staff members. We originally thought we'd use them in our test kitchen, but they're different than supermarket eggs — a little smaller, with more tender whites and richer yolks — and so they'd throw our recipe testing off.

Q: They look really clean. Did you bathe your chickens?

Um, no.