The Coop Scoop

Sometimes I laugh to think about what must have gone through my Buff Orphington–Lily’s–head the first time she decided to lay in the mop bucket.

My memories of raising chickens are happy ones. My parents would bring us three siblings to the feed store, where they would sell chicks each spring in a long row of boxes, one for each breed. They stuck a picture of each full grown chicken on the box so we could see...

We had a chicken funeral once, which was most memorable because my little brother almost burned out my eye with a stick of incense.  Our dad was trying to teach us a Chinese tradition that he had learned as a kid: At a funeral you light incense, hold it between...

During World War II, in the early 1940s, I was just a little girl. My dad was in the Navy, stationed in the South Pacific, and my mom, grandmother, brother and I lived in San Diego. Everyone I knew had “Victory Gardens,” to grow a lot of our own food, since so much...

We had a hen we called House Chicken. She thought she belonged in the house! She would walk right into the house with the dogs and lie down, just like them. Sometimes she walked under the dogs as they came in, trying not to be noticed.  Trying to get her to go...

We had a white rooster named Elvis, who would lie in wait, then run out and knock down our neighbor’s 1-year-old daughter. Elvis would not attack unless he could do it on the sly. It was like playing Red Light, Green Light: Red Light, if we looked at him, he would...