The Minnesota Farm Woman

Benjamin Franklin once said that guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days. Old Ben must not have been a farmer or he would have certainly added chickens to his list of smelly things. Mama chicken gave up sitting on her nest of eggs, so the only way to get new baby chicks around here is to purchase them. Every spring I have to become a surrogate mother of sorts, and the cute fluffy-bottomed little things were given a temporary home in a cage in my laundry room. Baby chickens are sweet and helpless and will drown themselves in their own drinking water if you don’t watch them carefully. They constantly fight over their food and spill it all over the bottom of the cage, then poop in it. I clean the cage twice a day, giving fresh food and water as well as change the paper at the bottom. They squawk loudly and scurry away from the hand that feeds them, scattering water and feed everywhere. Miraculously, the chicks survived despite themselves. After the second week, the babies, although still cute, were wearing out their welcome, especially to HIM, who doesn’t have the same motherly instinct that I do and believes that all farm animals belong in a barn. He started to drop a few not-so-subtle hints such as “It stinks in here!” and “Are they STILL here?” Since the temperatures were still dipping below freezing every night, I wasn’t quite ready for my babies to fly the coop, so to speak. A week ago, they started instinctively scratching, just as chickens are supposed to do. With 10 chickens scratching, they have somehow managed to have a constant shower of the food/poop mixture out of the cage and all over the floor. I sent up a silent prayer for warmer nighttime temperatures and that no unexpected company would drop by and notice how we really live. Only half of my prayer was answered, as a friend offered to drop off some fresh-caught walleye fillets. I don’t know anyone in this world who would turn down fresh-caught walleye fillets, even if they have to swallow their pride and bribe the fisherman to silence with the promise of a Key Lime pie. In a case like this, there will be extra whipped cream on top, too. As of yesterday, the baby chicks are now in the coop with a heat lamp and in a larger cage. It will be a couple of weeks before they will be big enough to join the rest of the chickens. HE will get a Key Lime pie, too, just for being such a good sport. I’ll be sure to make it right before I bring home the baby turkeys…..