For the love of chickens

Welcome to Cozy Week! Through Friday, we’re bringing you dispatches for rainy days, literally and spiritually. So sit back and get comfortable with a beverage or three, pull a blanket over your lap, and enjoy.

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Tove Danovich on how chickens help us, and our gardens, grow.

When we moved into our house we inherited a patch of ivy so thick I continue to be impressed by what hid in it: odd bricks, chunks of mosaic tile, plates, a teacup, bottles buried long enough I dreamed of treasure. I spent a lot of time weeding. First, I waged war against the ivy, pulling gnarled roots from the mud or dry summer soil. Then, when the ivy was gone, bindweed sprung up like a kingdom freed from a sleeping curse. There were the spiky thistles, the brambles, the garden of dandelions. Just when I thought I’d tamed the yard, a rain would come through and a new patch of weeds sprang up. It would have seemed magical if it weren’t so annoying.

There were, in fact, other things I liked to do besides weeding. I know that the myth of Sisyphus had him rolling a rock endlessly up a hill but if they’d made him weed a field the story would have been equally compelling. It’s thankless, dirty work that hurts my back and breaks my nails. Sometimes I badger my husband into giving the little help he can. His brain turns off when it’s time to identify plants in the same way mine does when anyone explains math, no matter how much I want to listen. He asks me to tell him what is a weed and what is not a weed. To me this is obvious. The weeds are the weed-like ones; the plants—the ones I paid for and lovingly planted and pull binding vines from—are not. My husband does not find this explanation helpful.

For years, podcasts were my only company while weeding: Ologies, 99 Percent Invisible, This American Life. Then the chickens arrived.

I did not factor chickens into my gardening plans. People who are precious about their gardens are often driven crazy by a hen’s love of scratching up earth and eating petals off particularly beautiful flowers. But people who love chickens often plot gardens specifically for their flock’s enjoyment. (Free-Range Chicken Gardens, Gardening with Chickens, and Gardening with Free-Range Chickens for Dummies are all unrelated books available for purchase.) I did neither. I found that the chickens enjoyed some parts of the yard more than others. Luckily, our half acre lot was large enough that fewer than a dozen hens could roam and not cause too much damage.

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