Chickens Unite!

This weekend the weather was beautiful and we wanted some outdoor time with the kids, so we went to Hilltop Hanover Farm, a lovely farm owned by Westchester County. Yes, Westchester County owns a farm - who knew? We drove up and met some friends there, and it just couldn't be prettier. It's amazing to find something like this so close to the area where we live, where people build houses practically on top of each other. So nice to see fields and open land.

The kids picked carrots and sugar snap peas (The Professor's FAVORITE). You could also pick leeks, scallions, and chard, but our refrigerator is rather full at the moment, so we stopped with what we had. The people who run the place were fabulous, and walked the kids through how to do the picking. They also had some cute activities for the kids like weaving and potato stamping (if I could figure out why my pictures won't correctly rotate, I would have some on here, but sadly they are all upside down and refuse to cooperate...).

We saw baby ducks and baby chickens:









After picking our vegetables and enjoying the cuteness of baby animals, we decided to sit at a lovely, shaded picnic table and have some lunch. Apparently baby chickens are acceptable, but adult chickens posed something of a problem.

As soon as we sat down at the table, the chickens (who must be used to receiving tasty morsels dropped or thrown by lunchers) immediately swarmed up to the table. Miss Serious was beside herself, and immediately slapped her feet onto the picnic bench (which posed rather a problem, as she had just been trodding in chicken poo). I thought, in a somewhat misguided way, that if I threw some crusts of bread far away from the table they would let us be, but of course this only encouraged them. Chickens have a surprising amount of attitude, and I was afraid Miss Serious was going to have a full-blown anxiety attack right at the table, so we wrapped up the lunch leftovers, scraped the chicken poo off the bench, and vamoosed.


The kids had just had chicken two nights in a row, and you know what they say about payback.....