I won’t deny that on occasion I do enjoy getting all dressed up and going out somewhere fancy. Going out with friends is especially fun because you get to have some good company to make you laugh. When you farm, you often end up with a different sort of unplanned nights out with friends that end up being a lot of fun. While the circumstances behind our impromptu double date weren’t very happy, we sure had one heck of a Thursday night.
There is a father of a friend (we’ll call our friend Toby to protect his privacy) who was recently diagnosed with Pancreatic cancer, the same horrible disease we lost my uncle to in February. This particular form of cancer can become very severe very quickly. As a result, Toby’s family needed to get rid of the man’s 59 chickens; and fast. When we heard about their situation we called our good friends Josh and Tessa at Lautzenheiser Farms and planned a trip to go take as many was we could.
This brought us to Thursday night. Jonathan, Tessa (who are both very tolerant of some of my more insane schemes) and myself headed out to pick out some chickens. When we got there, we realized that we may have had a slightly more challenging job ahead of us than we originally planned. There were about 20 chickens that had somehow managed to take up residence in the rafters of the garage.
After failing pretty hard at trying to catch some of the birds (think birds flying everywhere except where we wanted them and us chasing them around like madmen), the next step was to text Josh with the address and ask him to get there ASAP with some supplies. He is a really good sport. We then ventured out into their other chicken houses and picked out a couple nice looking ladies to add to our flock. Once Josh arrived he instantly became a chicken catching machine. It was like watching magic happen. He would get on a ladder up next to the birds and BOOM, chicken in his hands. We started a chain of passing chickens off and taking them out to the chicken house. It was chaotic, messy and overall hilarious.
I think between us we only kept 4 or 5 birds out of the garage, but we made sure that we moved any we didn’t take to the chicken house so that they wouldn’t be making a mess of the garage anymore. I think Toby was relieved to have all of the birds back where they belonged.
We didn’t head out there Thursday night with the intention of having a really cool date night but, several hours of laughter and chickens later, we had turned what we had thought would be a quick trip into a full on adventure. More importantly, we felt very fortunate that we were able to help out Toby and his family in their time of need in our own farm-related way.
Angel Farms Homestead 