First Things First
Welcome to the blog. I decided to start one up to chronicle the life of our chickens, which we purchased on June 4, 2011.
First off, the name. Bar-K Chickens. Living out in the country will do two things to you. One, it will make you never want to dust again because it doesn’t even matter and you’ll never have more than 12 hours of being dust-free anyway. Two, it will make you feel left out if you don’t have a name for your homestead.
Or maybe those are just me. Anyway.
There are a lot of places out here with cattle brands and ranch names. Flying X, River Ranch, etc. Before we got married, my husband had a name thought out for his ten acres, “Diamond C”. Diamond being the name of his Akita dog that he had owned, and C for his last initial.
A short time after I moved in, he suggested the name of Pawpad Ranch, because of my email address, “pawpad”. Obviously I liked it because it was my email after all, but it just didn’t have that country vibe to it.
I hadn’t thought about it for a while until one day I was reading up on cattle brands for the fun of it (am I cool or what?). The symbols are read top to bottom, and so if you have a short line over a letter or symbol, it is read as “bar-” and then whatever is underneath it. Then it hit me. If you have the letter K with a bar over it, it’s read as Bar-K. BarK. Bark. BRILLIANT.
If you knew me, you’d know that I am somewhat interested in totally obsessed with dogs. Bar-K was country sounding and a subtle dog reference; it was perfect. Thankfully my husband agreed to the name and maybe some day when we have our ten hill-country acres filled with farm animals, we will officially have our Bar-K Ranch.
But for now, we’ll have to stick with chickens (and our two dogs, of course).
These are our original chickens. We purchased them from the feed store on June 4, 2011. They are one Black Sex-Link, one Ameraucana, one Production Red, two Polish, and one Brahma.
I say original, because three days after we got them, a rat snake found them, and unfortunately for the rat snake, the boys found him first.
The beautiful Brahma on the right was the one that was eaten. I hope she was tasty, at least. My husband said, “The snake owed me $3.”
And then we had five.