Unlike the hair on our head, which falls out and grows back in day in and day out, your chickens’ feathers have to last all year. By the time late summer rolls around, their feathers are rough-edged and worn out. Sometimes the tail feathers are the only ones that look ragged.

Sometimes the tail feathers are gone.

Your hens won’t molt at the same time. In my flock, Florence remains broody, and the Rhode Island Reds and Amber continue to lay.

But, Onyx is fully into the molt.

As is Pearl, the cochin. What a mess. The larger feathers are all akimbo.

Neck feathers are sparse.

The old feathers on her back have fallen out, and new feather shafts are pushing their way out. If you notice a change in your hen’s behavior, this could be why. Ow.

To see an animation of how feathers unfurl and grow, go here – and then read everything else at this wonderful spot created by the Cornell Lab.

For more information about the molt in chickens (including what to feed) read my FAQ.

At the most basic level, chickens need good food and water. A secure shelter, places to roost and to lay eggs. They need fresh air and sunshine. They need to be able to scratch the ground and take dirt baths. They need enough space so that they’re not stressed by crowding. These things will keep your flock healthy and content enough.

However, to make them happy, chickens need more than a large, clean pen. The need variation – even hens get bored in a blank enclosure with just pellets to eat and nothing new to see and explore.. Yes, happy is a human term that might not exactly fit with what the animal is experiencing. But it’s close enough.

If you want to see a flock of totally delighted hens, rake your run, then add clean, loose sand (I use all-purpose builders sand.) How can I tell that this makes the girls happy? The chickens will dig deep holes and loll about in them. Listen and you’ll hear gleeful chortling.

Dirt will fly.

Don’t be alarmed by the contortions of your dust-bathing hens.

The rabbit (if you have one) will get into the act.

So much happiness for so little effort and expense on my part.

What makes your hens happy?

(For more ideas on how to keep your hens busy and happy, read this post.)

Twiggy is a classic White Leghorn. She’s energetic and restless, and she lays eggs day in and day out. Her huge floppy comb is like a bulls eye for the other hens – when she gets too close, they peck at it, but she’s been too fast and wary to get caught.

That changed recently. I noticed that she was keeping apart from the flock.

There’s always chasing and resource guarding in a group of hens. That’s the pecking order. What shouldn’t happen is aggressive behavior that causes injury. Twiggy has fit in fine for three years. Last week that all changed. Both Black Star hens, Beulah and Nancy Drew, went after her. I’d seen the skittering around and thought it would settle down. It didn’t. A couple of days into this heightened banning of Twiggy from their space, they went after her. The Black Stars pinned Twiggy to the ground and pecked at her comb. They meant to kill. Luckily for Twiggy, I was outside, saw this happen, and intervened.

Behavior never “happens out of the blue.” There’s always an antecedent and a trigger, however in this case I had no idea of what it was. Twiggy looked the same to me, but chickens see tiny details that I can’t. I isolated Twiggy in this rabbit hutch, in the Big Barn, both to keep her safe and to observe her.

Her manure alternated between runny and normal, which might have been due to stress and heat, or could indicate and underlying issue. She did lay an egg, which let me know that some of her systems were still working properly. However, she hasn’t laid an egg in several days since then. I’m hopeful that Twiggy is finally going into a molt and will take a break from laying. Maybe that’s what the Ladies noticed different about her.

For two days, Twiggy slept in the hutch and spent the days in the goat paddock. I monitored her input and outputs. All looked normal enough. Whatever the Black Stars Death Stars noticed about Twiggy, I couldn’t see it. Perhaps the Gems In the Big Barn wouldn’t either.

I let the Gems out on the lawn, and put Twiggy into their enclosure to explore and learn where the food, water and roosts are. This is the procedure that I use whenever I introduce a new hen to a flock (see my FAQ.)

Then out Twiggy went to free-range with the Gems. Most of the hens ignored Twiggy. Amber stayed companionably nearby. This was good!

As I had expected, the only hen to object to Twiggy’s presence was Misty, who was sent to live with the Gems last year when she proved too aggressive to live peacefully with the Ladies (the flock in the Little Barn.)

But, Misty chased, she didn’t jump on Twiggy’s back and pummel her like the Black Stars had. I thought that it would settle out, and it has. There are two areas of outside roosts, and Twiggy has used both of them. Soon enough, the other hens were up there with her.

Also, the compost bin is circular, so when a hen chases after another they go around and around but can’t catch each other. Twiggy did some laps around that bin, but within a day, she was also inside of it, scratching the ground with her new flock.

Not everything is perfect. That big red comb of Twiggy’s is like a red flag to a bull, and it’s easy to grab with an outstretched beak. It was bloody this morning. Someone, likely Misty, had gotten a chunk of it. But by the time I saw it, Twiggy was acting normally and the hens were spread out. No one seemed perturbed. It’s better for Twiggy to be out with a flock than confined, alone. Twiggy has joined the Gems.

Peaches are my favorite fruit. Possibly my favorite food. But they’re only good when they are ripe from the tree. If you’ve never had a homegrown peach, soft to the touch, so juicy that you have to eat it over the sink, it will be a revelation to you. About ten years ago I planted one peach tree, a Red Haven, which I chose because it is a free-stone (meaning the flesh comes away from the pit, making it easy to cut the fruit up for pies.) I also like that it is yellow on the inside, not white, which I like best.

Fruit trees are notoriously difficult to maintain. They require yearly pruning. Mice girdle the trunks. Pests eat the sap and worms destroy the fruit. Some years, due to a ill-timed frost, there is no fruit. My lone tree has had all of these issues. Most orchards rely heavily on chemicals. I use none. Three years ago, the peaches were so wormy that I gave all of them to the chickens. The next year the tree was bare. Last year, the peaches were small and hard, and most soft bits were claimed by worms.

I read up on the life-cycle of the plum curculio, the insect that causes the most damage to the fruit. The adults are beetles that overwinter in the soil under the tree. In the summer, eggs are laid in the fruit and then the developing larvae return to the ground via dropped peaches.

I have chickens that eat both beetles and larvae, and they love digging around in dirt. I put the girls to work. Last fall, I enticed the Gems over to the peach tree with some cracked corn. They soon found the other good things (the bugs!) under the soil.

This summer, the blossoms on the tree held, the sun shone, the rain was just right, and the peach tree filled with fruit, so much so that the weighed-down branches touch the ground.

Not only are the peaches large and juicy – they are worm-free!

I’ve been harvesting buckets. There are imperfections. I don’t mind. These peaches are astoundingly delicious.

They’re ripening at different rates, so each day I go out and collect some more.

I’m looking forward to pies this winter! I’ve been quartering the fruit, putting it on sheet pans, and freezing it solid. Then, the fruit is bagged using a vacuum sealer. It’s such an easy way to put aside the harvest for later.

I haven’t seen them yet, but I’m sure that the plum curculios are trying to return. Who could resist such peaches? And so I have brought back my orchard staff.

Amber is on the job.

(The sticky tape on the peach tree trunk prevents crawling insects from reaching the fruit. It’s surprisingly effective.)

Note: I planted this tree before I got goats. It was a test to see if the property was well-situated for fruit trees. It is, but, I haven’t gotten more trees because stone fruit trees (including cherries and plums) are a danger to Pip and Caper. During that brief few weeks in the fall when the leaves wilt, the greenery is toxic to goats. Fresh leaves are fine. Dried leaves are fine. They can eat the fruit. The toxicity happens in the fall as the leaves die. Every year I give the tree a pruning so that the goats, from their pen, can’t reach any of the leaves. This year it’s getting cut back by a third. In the fall, we rake and rake. I can keep the goat boys safe from this one tree, and the fruit is worth it, but I’m not going to put more stone fruit trees on the property.

It’s a sweltering day. The last thing that I want to do is to work in a hot kitchen over a steaming pot. But my tomatoes can’t wait.

Fresh tomatoes don’t store well. If put into the refrigerator they turn mealy and their flavor deteriorates. Right now I have a bag of garlic grown by a neighbor, oregano and basil bursting from pots, and a six sturdy tomato plants that are all producing record numbers of healthy fruit. I have to make sauce. Thank goodness for my slow cooker

Prep for this tomato sauce is super easy. All I have to do is cut off the cores and bad bits from the tomatoes (which I feed to the chickens, of course) and put the big pieces of tomato (or even simply whole, cored, tomatoes) into the slow cooker. (Crockpot is a trade name. Like “kleenex” and “tissues” the terms are interchangeable for all but the manufacturers.) I have two slow cookers. Neither are fancy. As long as it keeps the sauce simmering at a low temp, it’s the right appliance.

I add a bulb of garlic, peeled, and skinned and halved onions (also a gift from my neighbor, who happily went off to his vacation home with a carton of eggs.) I snip several branches of oregano and basil. If I have it, I’ll use parsley, too (but this year, the goats got to eat all of it as part of the frothy bloat remedy, which made it well worth not having parsley for the sauce!) I add a splash of olive oil and a good amount of coarse salt. Because I use a mixture of tomatoes, some of which are quite juicy, no additional liquid is required. In fact, if you want a thick sauce, use a good proportion of paste tomatoes. Otherwise, you might want to drain off some of the naturally occurring tomato water before the last step of milling.

The slow cooker then gets covered and ignored.

After six or more hours the tomatoes will have turned to a soft mush and it will all be simmering along nicely.

Turn off the pot and let it cool down so that you can work with it – and so that you don’t have to stand over steam – that’s the whole point of this method!

Note that I don’t worry about stems, peels or seeds. That’s because the next step uses a food mill. This tool pushes the sauce through a  sieve. (Once again, those inedible bits go to the chickens.)

After twenty years of using the same awkward and difficult to clean food mill, I bought a new one. What a difference! The right tool does matter.

This is the end product.

I ladled it into plastic containers, and put those into the freezer. This winter, my pizza will taste like summer.