My friend Jan Brett

My good friend Jan Brett was in the Boston Globe Magazine section this week. She is one of my key mentors. I have visited her on several occasions at her magnificent house, which has a spectacular coop and aviary for her ducks. Honestly I was quite jealous of her set-up. I used it as inspiration for how I'd like my birds to live. She always uses very deep bedding for her hens, now I do too. She feeds her birds a nice handful of mealworms everyday, I do too. But most importantly she just really truly cares for her animals and I really admire her because of it.

Whenever I go to visit Jan I take her a big bin of fresh red wiggly worms for her grassbins. She has these amazing shelves, where she grows grass for her hens. The hens also like to dig about for red worms. I have a worm farm, so we trade advice about hens with the crawly critters.

My glorious hen Stella came from Jan Brett. I had just lost a wonderful polish black polish hen and was quite sad about it. So I called Jan, she made me feel a lot better about it, but she also said, "You should come visit me and pick out a bird from my new pullet batch". Amazing. So we did go visit her and she put about 6 hens into a little pen out on the grass. I just sat with all the birds trying to get to know them all. I honestly would have been incredibly grateful to have any of her birds, but she let me chose. I chose Stella. She later told me that Stella was in fact one of her best pullets with tons of potential. I am so lucky to have Stella at our barn and even more lucky to know Jan. Thank you Jan.