Natural Perspectives:

Keeping hens is a lot easier and more fun than Vic and I thought it would be.

We’re now in our 10th week of life with our three “girls,” so it’s time to bring you up to date on our adventures in urban chicken-keeping.

The good news is that the hens are neither as noisy nor as smelly as we had feared. They do greet the dawn, and they announce the fact that they’ve laid an egg. But those vocalizations are brief and not especially loud.

The reason that the hens aren’t noticeably smelly is because I clean the coop and run on a regular basis. I use a poop-scoop that I bought at a pet store. Farm life is not glamorous.

The droppings and used bedding go into our two compost bins, which are filling up a lot faster. In fact, our whole composting operation has changed.

We used to have lots of vegetable and fruit peelings that went into the compost. But now most of those go to the chickens. In a way, they are still going into the compost bin, but only after passing through the chickens.

Did I mention that farming lacks glamour?

The water for the compost bins comes from our rain barrels, which are still providing the bulk of the water for our various yard uses.

The water for the chickens also comes from the rain barrels, not the tap.

Our hens are great disposers of kitchen green waste, and they enjoy eating any extra greens that I grow in my garden. Vic and I like to have kale and collards on occasion, but those occasions don’t come around very often on my menu schedule.

That means that I’m growing a lot more kale and collards than we need, as well as other greens such as cilantro, parsley and sorrel. The chickens have come to expect such treats a couple of times a day, along with nasturtium leaves.

Consumption of greens by the hens not only boosts the healthy Omega-3 content of the eggs, but also reduces the amount of store-bought food they need.

The hens eat two types of store-bought feed: laying pellets and scratch. I have been pleasantly surprised to find that a $15 sack of laying pellets lasts a bit longer than two months.

In addition to laying pellets, the hens also get scratch, which is a mix of cracked corn and various seeds. One bag costs about $10.

They also get an occasional handful of crushed oyster shell and ground limestone to boost their calcium. The hens put a lot of calcium into eggshells and need to have it replaced. I don’t want to feed them crushed eggshells, because they can get into the bad habit of eating eggs.

The girls are amazing us with their egg productivity. In the nine weeks that they’ve been with us, they’ve laid 140 eggs.

That’s an average of five eggs per week per chicken. A dozen eggs used to last us two or three weeks. Not anymore.

We find ourselves eating a lot more eggs, yet we still have eggs to give away. I try not to have more than a dozen eggs on hand at any time.

As soon as the surplus builds, I give away six at a time, mostly to our nice neighbors who tolerate the dawn-greeting vocalizations very patiently.

Everyone who sees the eggs from our hens is amazed at how high the yolks stand in the skillet and how little the whites spread out. Those are signs of really fresh eggs. The yolks from our hens’ eggs are a deep, rich yellow. And the taste is phenomenal. Store-bought eggs are pale and insipid compared to the color and taste of the eggs that our girls provide.

We were invited to a Seder dinner at Mark and Marlene Singer’s house Saturday and needed to bring a half dozen boiled eggs. I had just given away some eggs, counting on the hens laying on a regular basis.

Of course, they picked the week when I needed eggs for a specific purpose to go on strike.

One day I got no eggs. Zero, zilch, zip. I was worried. But the girls pulled through for me and laid three eggs Friday and another three Saturday, so we had enough for Seder.

Because our hens lay brown eggs, we didn’t offer to color any boiled eggs for Easter for our granddaughters.

Our chickens are fun in surprising ways. They jump up and down in excitement like dogs when I come out into the yard.

They act so much like dogs that I got a small dog harness and leash for the tamest of the three hens so I can take her for an occasional walk.

We go into the front yard, where she can scratch for bugs and search for weeds without breaking the city ordinance that says chickens can’t run through the neighborhood. It’s such a classic image, like a boy and his dog. Only in my case, it’s an old lady and her chicken.

VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and environmentalists. They can be reached at LMurrayPhD@gmail.com.