Parker County Homesteaders

  It's not often that more than a week goes by without someone asking me what to do with their broody hen. I don't mind it, because broody hens are amazing, yet vile, yet still amazing creatures that I love, but I figured I'd put the gist of my knowledge here for reference.       First of all, to make sure we're all on the same page, a broody hen is a hen in the midst of a hormonal surge that causes her to have an undeterrable urge to incubate eggs until they hatch and then to raise the babies. Her body also halts egg laying during this phase. Not every hen goes broody, and many breeds have had this trait literally bred out of them by industrial hatcheries. In a natural setting, if a hen doesn't go broody, she won't hatch eggs and (likely, I'll get to that) won't pass on her non-broodiness genes so that's the end of the line for her.  But because man-made incubators hatch indescriminently, and because non-broody hens lay more eggs than broody hens do...

  Parker County Homesteaders is a Facebook community page, a place for people who are interested in or actively participating in the growing of their own food and maintaining and sharing the somewhat lost skills of generations past to gather, seek out and share advice, make connections, and show off  triumphs and share failures with people who understand the true magnitude of what it means to finally get your lavender plant to flower or to lose a meat chicken to a predator.   That's what the page is. But   who  are the Parker County Homesteaders, really? Spearheaded by a former stay at home mom who has perhaps too much free time and is known to go into long diatribes about things as inconsequential as dried beans and who often oversaturates the color of her photos, PCH is simply a group of friends and neighbors. Literally.    One of the elements of the group that sets it apart from other homestead pages is that it is centralized around one geographical...