The Chicken Garden Party on Saturday was an excuse for me to pull out some of the vintage items from my collection. What I have is charming and quirky, but not particularly valuable, so I have no qualms about using it even when there are children and dogs about.

I’ll likely never find more of these 1970s napkins, but I was happy to see people wipe their fingers with them.

I purchased the napkins off eBay along with a matching plastic tray, which you can just see here under the Rosemary Molasses Cookies.

I have a set of these tin canisters. This one was just right for holding a bouquet of just-picked flowers from the meadow.

Yes, all we did was talk about chickens!

Guests showed off photos of their own flocks. Liz brought show-and-tell. One of her hens laid this huge egg. We hypothesized whether there was a second egg inside of the there. We weighed it (4.5 ounces!) I pulled out my Blas-Fix egg blower and emptied it out. There wasn’t an extra shell, but there were three yolks. Liz took the blown-out egg home as a souvenir. She’ll be keeping an eye on that hen.

Scooter got some loving and butt-scratching. He was a happy little dog.

Everyone payed homage to The Beast.

It was a very nice afternoon.

It takes about 26 hours for the hen to form one egg. In a perfectly operating reproductive tract, a yolk is released from the ovary (this, by the way, is the full-sized yolk that you see when you crack the egg). It proceeds down the tube, where the whites, the membrane and the shell are laid on, successively, and in that order. At the end of the process, if the egg is to be brown, dye is spritzed onto the shell. The egg is then coated with bloom (sort of like a protective shellac) and then the egg is ready to be laid. This is a complicated process. Much can go wrong. Amazingly, though, it usually goes smoothly. Depending on your hen, she will lay an egg every day or so. What she can’t do is lay two eggs a day, because only one at a time proceeds down that conveyor belt of the reproductive tract.

That is, she can’t lay two eggs a day unless she is Twiggy.

Twiggy is my over-achiever. The other hens lay an egg a day for maybe two or three days, and then take a break. Twiggy lays daily, sometimes six days a week. She recently outdid herself and laid both of these eggs on the same day!

Granted, one is small. However, unlike wind eggs•, this one has all of the requisite components – yolk and white – and is perfect, albeit petite.

I’ve told Twiggy that she has my permission to slow down and take a summer vacation. She says that she’d rather not.

*Wind eggs are tiny eggs that don’t have yolks. They are usually laid by pullets whose reproductive tracts haven’t quite gotten into sync yet.

A chicken can’t chew. She doesn’t have teeth. She does have a pointed, hard beak that pecks. Sometimes she breaks food into smaller bits with it, but often she takes in as large a chunk as she can swallow. She has a triangular tongue that fits perfectly inside of that beak. The tongue helps to push the food to the back and into the esophagus. Muscles help her to then move the food further down the digestive tract.

Chickens are designed to eat small amounts, constantly. That’s why feeding big handfuls of treats is a bad idea – hens need to be active and work for their food. Their systems aren’t made for eating a few distinct meals a day. But, sometimes what a hen swallows is big. I once saw Lulu slurp a baby snake down whole, like a strand of spaghetti. Sometimes hens find a bonanza of bugs in the garden and gorge themselves all in the course of a few minutes.

The first stop for all of this food in the digestive process is the crop – which is a pouch in the hen’s neck. Physically breaking down the food happens later, in the gizzard, which is a very powerful muscular sack, inside of which are tiny pebbles (grit) that the hen has swallowed on purpose. The gizzard effectively acts as a millstone to grind up food as coarse and hard as corn. The crop isn’t like the gizzard at all – it’s mostly just a holding area. Watch your hens over the course of the day, and you’ll see the crop change shape. This can be worrisome for a new chicken owner. A hen that looks like this:

will sport a huge and solid bulge like this:

It’s normal!

What isn’t normal is when that mass becomes impacted. This can happen when the hen eats long strands of grass, or too many sunflower seeds with the shells still on, or other such foods that get tangled up and hardened in the crop. If that happens, your hen will show signs of distress. She’ll stretch her neck. She’ll become listless. She might look panicked (as one of my hens did when she got a long, tough leek stuck in her.)

If your hen is impacted (and not just a glutton, as Veronica in the above photos – she’d just come in after a glorious afternoon of free-ranging), then there are a few things that you can do. You can massage the crop to try to break up the mass and move things along. You can also feed her olive oil, either by soaking some food with it, (if she’s still eating) or by carefully dosing her. (See my YouTube video.) Crop impaction is serious. I’ve done a necropsy on a hen that died from impaction. It was a friend’s bird and what I found out was that she had gorged on long grasses and leftover garbanzo bean curry (fed to the hens with the kitchen scraps.) What the hen didn’t have in her crop were laying hen pellets. That’s why I like to see my hens eat easy to digest pellets before going free-ranging. I think that it reduces the risk that they’ll gorge on the wrong stuff.

In any event, impactions are rare. What is normal is a healthy, happy hen with a ridiculously bulging crop. Don’t worry about her.

The first tomato is almost ripe. I’ve had to use every ounce of self-control to wait to pick it until it is truly red. Today. For sure.

On the opposite end of the spectrum are the herbs.I always plant more than I can use. I’ve been snipping and snipping, but even the basil blooms and bolts. Last night, mint, Vietnamese basil, parsley and lovage topped a peanut noodle salad.  I plant some varieties simply because I like to look at them. How pretty is this combination of chamomile and lavender?

This patch of herbs is a feast for bees and butterflies, but I’m sure that they could spare me some.  Later this week, I’ll be picking a small handful of lavender which will be baked into cookies for the garden party on Saturday.  I’ve never dried and stored the chamomile – any suggestions?

Totally unrelated to this gardening post is this photo of Tonka:

Yesterday was one of those pitch-perfect New England summer days. There were blue skies, a strong breeze to keep the biting flies away, it wasn’t too hot, and it was a day after a rain storm, so the woods smelled piney and the scent of milkweed drifted in from the edges of the fields. A friend asked if we’d like to join her for a ride at a state park. Her good boy, Nelson, is a 20-year old Morgan. Tonka was happy to explore new trails with him.  As a reward, he got carrots that I’d thinned from my patch. There – I managed to tie this into the gardening post!)

There’s still time to signup for the Chicken Garden Party here at Little Pond Farm. It’s this coming Saturday, July 12 at 1 pm. I’ll talk  a bit about gardening with chickens, and then we’ll mingle and stroll. We’ll talk poultry, you can share photos of your own flocks. There will be food and good conversation about our favorite topic – hens!

Rain or shine. Children welcome. Register on my Events page.