If you’ve considered raising your own backyard chickens (I highly recommend it, they make great pets, eat your snails, and make fantastic eggs!), then head on over to Garden Rant to read local writer Amy Stewart’s Chicken Chronicles.

She starts out at Week One and brings you through her journey of raising chicks from cheeping balls of floof to members of the family who produce excellent food (if you’re looking for terrible puns such as eggs-cellent, you are looking at the wrong website. I love my Dad dearly but if I have to hear another bad egg pun I will drown myself – sorry Dad! I’m leavin’ the egg puns to you.)

The latest is Week Five, where Amy introduces the babies to the grownups, to great suspicion on both ends.

All ya’ll know I adore Amy and her wonderful garden writing (her novel, set in Humboldt County, has some of the best garden descriptions I’ve ever read, and her latest, Wicked Plants, just won book of the year from the American Horticultural Society, so you know it’s good too!), so go on over and read about her chicken adventures. Heck, even if you’re not into raising your own flock, her writing cracks me up and her chicken pictures are adorable…

(Photo by Amy Stewart, from Garden Rant)