How I Got Into Raising Chickens

Before chicken keeping became a craze, and the oddball is now the person who doesn’t have chickens, people often asked me how I got into raising chickens. The major influence was my maternal grandmother, who kept a flock of Rhode Island Reds and tended a huge garden. Not having a freezer — in fact, when I was a kid she had an ice box before she got a refrigerator — she preserved a lot of her produce by canning. I always wanted to be like her.

But my parents had other ideas. My mother couldn’t get away from the country, and especially chickens, fast enough. My father was a photographer, so living in town was good for business. All I could do was wait until I “got big enough.”

When I was ten years old I thought I would finally realize my chicken-keeping dream when I ran across a department store Easter Bunny handing out small cartons, each containing a single chick. (Happily that inhumane practice is no longer acceptable, but at the time I was estatic with my single little chick.)

However, our family was then moving cross-country in a travel trailer, and sharing the cramped space with a chick living in a cardboard box did not sit well with my parents. And so the little chick went the way of most Easter chicks in those days, which is to say I have no idea what happened to it. My mother told me it went to a farmer who had chickens. Yeah, right.

When I finished school and was ready to buy my first house, the most important criterion was that it be located where chickens were allowed. As luck would have it, I found a house that came complete with chickens, ducks, a garden, and an orchard.

That was nearly five decades ago, and I’ve been raising poultry and keeping a garden every since. Over the years I have raised many different breeds of bantams and large chickens, as well as guinea fowl, pheasants, peafowl, ducks, geese, and swans.

Today I live on a farm in Tennessee, which we call Rocky Acres because, well, what we have most of here is rocks. Along with my husband I keep a variety of poultry and Nubian dairy goats, as well as tend a sizable garden and maintain a small orchard and a large woodlot.

I enjoy sharing my experiences and the knowledge I have acquired over many years of poultry keeping, gardening, home canning, and everything else that goes with attempting to live a life of independence and sustainability by growing and preserving much of what we eat and feed our various livestock. Each day brings fresh experiences and new opportunities for learning.