Canodling with chickens

By Jolene Renfro

e current price of eggs (in some places now more expensive than beef) has caused city folks to go country by installing a small ock of chickens in their yard. is is some helpful advice for them.

According to an article in the Boston Globe, “Kissing Chickens is Bad for Your Health.” Why would this be? I wondered — do you catch chicken pox? End up with “fowl” breath? Suffer from “cooping” cough?

No, close contact with your chickens may result in a case of salmonella poisoning. Of course, the article did not say what the chickens might catch from you (I have o en read that the human mouth is lled with all kinds of germs). So how do folks get salmonella from chickens?

It seems that many people love their chickens so much that they are bringing them inside to live. is results in bacteria normally found on chickens that live outdoors being transferred indoors to the beds, furniture, car- pet, kitchen, and bathrooms. Consequently, humans are being inoculated with these noxious bacteria that can make you sick and in extreme cases, kill you.

Here at the farm, we have a small ock of chickens that occasionally give us eggs (when they are in the mood), and they certainly keep us entertained with their chicken antics. More like pets than livestock, our favorite hen is the oldest, a Bu Orpington named Marilyn Monroe by the grandchildren for her blonde good looks. She is about four years old and has gone through “henopause.” But despite the lack of egg production, we cannot bring ourselves to relegate her to the frying pan because she has such a sweet personality.

Part of the reason the chickens ock to Jim (pun intended) is that he brings them apple slices. They love that treat more than the cracked corn and occasional dried mealworm snacks supplementing their laying mash. You may be able to catch more flies with honey, but you can certainly entice more hens with apple slices. e Egg Cart’n is a chicken tractor that can house up to 10 hens, and can easily be moved from spot to spot in the yard, providing the girls with fresh grass to scratch and bugs to catch. is movable pen is made by a Mennonite family in Kansas and shipped down to Texas. It has every conceivable hen luxury, including a chicken ladder to climb from the ground to the second story, nesting boxes, and hardware wire sides to allow the breezes to blow through in the warm summer. It also has insulated sides that slide in place when winter winds blow to make it nice and cozy in cold weather. What did this predator-protection chicken condo cost us? A measly $1,200. at makes each egg we have gathered for the last four years worth about $30 each. Have you ever had a $30 egg? Delicious! Yes, it is evident that we love our chickens, but bring them into the house? Absolutely not! I don’t enter their domain, and they are not allowed to enter mine either.

Besides being well-fed, the hens live in a poultry palace. A er losing so many of our original group of chickens to predators (everything in the country loves chicken — snakes, hawks, owls, raccoons, coyotes, foxes, bobcats, skunks, and stray dogs), I made the decision that if we were going to have chickens that survive, they need to have a safe place to live — hence the purchase of the Egg Cart’n (which is a size bigger than the Yolks Wagon).

Familiarity may breed contempt, but it also breeds salmonella. What does all this have to do with gardening? Nothing, it is just a friendly reminder not to kiss your chickens.