Do you have chickens?

Happy spring! Temperatures today reached into the mid 70's and it was fantastic. I think all of Seattle was in a good mood. Winter has finally lifted, the days are long, and there are blooms everywhere. That's all fabulous, but the most exciting thing to happen this spring for me, has been our new chickens! They are such sweet birds, and their eggs are incredibly rich.

Poor Marilyn got caught and had to pose for a picture with me.
I gave her a shrimp as a thank you present!

Do you have chickens? If so, how many? What do you feed them? How old are they?

We purchased one-year-old birds, so as to go directly to the laying phase of their lives, and to avoid the difficulty of chicks. We got them from a teenage boy in Lynwood who has clearly turned a hobby into a small business. I love the idea of supporting a young entrepreneur. We named the girls after talented women who died before their prime: Billie, Marilyn, Janis, and Whitney. Originally we had Amy too, but she died. We're not sure why, but we understand that that happens sometimes. It was sad and disappointing, but we're not too upset about it.

The cool thing is that we are sharing the hens with our next door neighbors. It's totally fun and easy to have another couple to share the responsibility with. Plus, we've gotten to know our neighbors much better through this experience. I really love it. We've discovered that four hens is probably the minimum we'd want to share between four adults, so we're looking into getting a few more. Any suggestions for what to name them?

Of course we've been eating eggs like crazy these days. Here are some eats from this weekend:

Look at how tall that yolk stands up. 

Saturday morning's breakfast was rice and beans, and sautéed radish greens, with a fried egg on top. Yumm!

Later in the weekend we made these baguette sandwiches: hard boiled eggs, charred asparagus, pickled shallots, mustard & olive oil, and fresh spring herbs. Dill would have been nice, but I don't have it growing, so I used chives, parsley, and mint.

Do you raise chickens, or ducks, or other "livestock" in the city? We have bees at our Alleycat Acres Beacon Hill site, but someone else takes care of them (Bob Redmond of urban bee company).
What is your experience? I'd love to know. I'm very curious about raising livestock for meat. Have you done it?