Our scheme for next summer is procure some chickens and keep them in the pen behind the garage. For fun and for eggs.

The garage is not actually a garage, but an old carriage house with a hayloft on top and a concrete-bottomed enclosure right behind it. It was originally built for chicken husbandry, we think. We’ll return it to its original use.

By “we” I mean my son John Dollar and me. He has wanted to have chickens for a long time. Since he lived at home, which was years ago. I wouldn’t accommodate him back then because we used the pen for dogs. But the current wave of dogs barks too much when penned outside, so we might as well convert it to a chicken palace. Chickens couldn’t be as loud as Jimi the dog, who can bark for several hours without stopping when penned outside. John will come out and help with the chicken project.

I don’t know anything about raising chickens. I grew up in a subdivision. We bought our eggs at Albertsons.

John has done a fair amount of chicken research, but our chicken scheme still has to start by learning a lot more about how to do it.

I went on Amazon and ordered this book from a used bookstore. I love that about Amazon – you can get out-of-print books with a couple of keystrokes.

When I ordered this book I didn’t really know what to expect.

What a cool surprise! Minnie Rose Lovegreen’s Recipe for Raising Chickens is short book filled with sweet advice:

“Sometimes a hen will only have about 3 or 4 chicks, and you’ll say, well, I’m not going to let her waste her time on these 3 or 4 chicks. I’ll give them all to the other one. Well, you can’t do that, unless you make the room dark and give the chicks a good chance to get acquainted with the new mother’s voice. And put the first mother far enough away where the chicks can’t hear her voice. Because if they can hear, they would remember. It’s remarkable the memory that they have.”

And:

“The main thing is to keep them happy.”

Also Recipe for Raising Chickens is entirely hand-rendered. That’s maybe the best part. The illustrations are brush-and-ink, and the text is either brush-and-ink or pen-and-ink. Some examples:

The copy I bought has this inscription:

Good luck to us, too!

BTW, Nancy Rekow and Claire Frost edited Minnie Rose Lovegreen’s Recipe for Raising Chickens and Nancy Rekow also did all the hand lettering. Elizabeth Hutchinson did the lovely illustrations.