ingrid

I like the phrase “dog days of summer”.  I realize that it is talking about the dog star being visible in the night sky and has little to do with actual dogs, but it still makes me think of dogs, lying under a tree in the shade panting.  It makes me think of my childhood and this obnoxious but lovable dog we had named Bilbo.

We have chicken days of summer around here.  I tired of stinky chicks in the house after a whole week.  That might be a world record actually.  The baby girls were banished to the henhouse last night.  I felt pretty proud of myself in this respect.  I rigged up a nice little place where the chicks can “hang with the big girls” without being pecked or smashed to death by the big girls.  You have to introduce any new members to the flock with care and consideration; that goes double for the little ones.  I had read enough horror stories on on-line chicken blogs, (yes, it is not just me), about baby chicks being killed by adult hens.  Other blogs suggested that new members could be introduced by the “seen but not touched” method.  Usually this would be by putting the new birds in caged off area where the established hens can get used to seeing the new birds for a while.  I think I may have accomplished this with the chicks by fencing them in above the nesting boxes in my storage place.

The babies still need warmth at night, so I ran a light out to the henhouse using my NEW outdoor plug.  I know that most people probably have one at their house and TAKE IT FOR GRANTED, but I do not.  We have not had anywhere to plug anything in to for the last 5 years.  Finally with the bathroom remodel I had them stick a plug through to the outside and now I have all this freedom to plug shit in!  How should I waste electricity first?  The possibilities are endless!  (I am thinking bouncy house!)

Unfortunately this is going to be a source of worry for me.  I wish I weren’t like this, but I imagine it will be a few nights before I can sleep without worrying about burning the henhouse down.  When I first got a running fountain outside I worried about raccoons getting in it for two nights.  What would they do there and why did that matter?  I don’t know, but I worried about it.

Besides chicken matters, little is going on these days.  After a summer jam-packed with fun and running around, my children seem to want to go nowhere and do nothing.  For the second day in a row I offered fun options, including requisite bribery.  They didn’t take it…. even for a pastry at the Italian bakery, even for a trip to the fountain downtown, even for a stop at the library.  What do they want to do?  Stay home.  Play with legos.  Dress up their animals (and sister) and pretend they are going to a wedding.

I’ve been vaguely frustrated with this because I am go-go-go!  I want to get out to Ikea and buy a new bookshelf for Francis’ room, hop down to Powell’s and pick up Suzanne Collin’s Mockingjay, (can’t wait to read that one!), get the right sized screws to finish mounting hardware in the bathroom, and we are all out of milk so we need to grocery shop.

But I am trying to go with the flow, and the flow seems to be a trickle, so I need to be hip to that.  I am trying to not push it so much, stay quiet and enjoy this lovely time of peaceful play.

2 Comments | In: Current musings, My super freakin' cute kids, chickens, family | | #

I swear it is like a sickness.  I can’t get enough.  This time the county might need to step in to stop me… My legal limit is 10.  I told them I would never need that many, but now with the 7 “old” girls and 3 babies, here we are.  Oh God, I am crazy.

Can this fully capture the sweetness? (from l to r), Moonshine, Lyra, & Starlight

6 Comments | In: chickens | | #

Holy Shit.  Can I say that here?  Tour de Coops was freaking crazy.  Never have I had such an assortment of very nice, very INQUISITIVE people in my own backyard.  How interesting.  How exhausting.

Bright and early on Saturday morning I was up and bustling about trying to get last minute things ready for the tour.  In particular, I wanted to water thoroughly so that the garden and flower beds didn’t look wilted or parched.  I wanted to make sure all the chicken shit was off the lawn.  I wanted to check for any last minute faux pas like dirty water in the coop or chicken feed thrown all over (the chickens do that, not me).  In general I was feeling pretty calm and happy thanks to Espoir and his brother doing all that weeding the day before, Devra making some nice strong coffee, and Brad making a really lovely breakfast of puffed oven pancake.  (It is good that Brad made such a huge breakfast as I never really got lunch that day.)  I felt like my peeps were watching out for me.  What can be better?

Before the hordes started arriving, I took these pictures:

Front of the house from the street

Walking back to the coop by the garden (and kids' lemonade stand)

And the little capitalists taste-testing their product

Where I REALLY thought I would sit all day relaxing during the tour...

The back corner of the yard with the featured coop

So there I was, bright and early, pleased with how things looked and imagining a really relaxing day chatting with a few people about chickens and visiting with my friends.   Within fifteen minutes of the start time for the tour, my yard looked like this:

And that continued all day long.

I am not really complaining.  We were a super popular stop on the tour, even though our house was placed on the map of Portland coops wrong.  (Many people, even Portlanders, put us in north east rather than north.  On the tour map, our house was a star at NE 17th and Skidmore.  Whooops!)  It was fun answering questions and chatting with people.  The tour-goers were some of the nicest folks ever conglomerated in one place.  They also had a lot of questions.  Top ones I remember were:

1. How many chickens do you have?
2. What breed is that one there?
3. What about that one there?
4. Have you had any problems with predators?

Question 2 and 3 made me realize that you should not do this tour if you don’t know exactly what your chickens are.  I only have one mystery chicken, but without fail, everyone wanted to know what she was.  After a while, I just made crap up.  (“She’s a marans-australorpe cross.”) I was a little worried about what Brad was doing when faced with this question.  As much as he loves the chickens, he doesn’t really know what breeds they are.  If he doesn’t know what a chicken is, he calls it a barred rock.  That means we have 7 barred rocks.

The tour wasn’t just a success for the adults around here.  Look closely in the picture above and you will see MOST of the people with lemonade glasses in their hands.  Oh yes, Francis made BANK.  The kids had $35 in their till at the end of the day.  We projected that about 100-150 people came through our yard…just imagine what that number would have been if the map had been correct!

Tour de Coops 2010 è finita!  Woot woot!

6 Comments | In: chickens, projects, urban farming | | #

Yup, we’re getting ready around here.  Tomorrow at 11am, 200-500 people descend on us wondering about all the workings of our urban chicken coop.  After a morning of scrubbing, spraying and weeding, I feel pretty much ready for whatever may come.  I feel doubly calm as I hired out the boring work so that I could do the stuff I like: spreading compost, mucking out the coop, and repairing stuff with tools.  I am a great believer in paying people to do things that I don’t have time to do, and as it seems that 75% of the population seems in more desperate straights than I right now, it seems logical that I should give people work rather than making myself miserable and overwhelmed.  I consider Ronald Reagan and his trickle-down economy theory at times like this, but I want to subvert his idea and make it legit by asking, “Who can I overpay to get them to do things that I don’t want to do?”.  My friends Espoir and Barack were more than willing to be hired to pull weeds.  And they did an awesome job.  And, did I mention?  I don’t have to do it!  Ahhhhh!  This is living!

So things look good.  I scrubbed down the coop.  I rinsed it out with bleach and water.  I am going to put a bouquet in there (oh yes I am!).   The garden and surrounding beds are all weeded.  All we need to do is set up Francis’ lemonade stand and let the eager chicken freaks come and gawk.  Can’t wait!

If you are in Portland, tour booklets go on sale at 10am July 24th, in the parking lot at Westminster Presbyterian Church at 1624 NE Hancock.  Read more about Growing Gardens and the good work they do fighting hunger here.

3 Comments | In: chickens, projects, urban farming | | #

I went to the informational meeting for the coop hosts for the Tour de Coops and oh-my-holy-Jesus, these people are intense!  I had considered getting the chicken coop all prettied up for the tour, but it hadn’t occurred to me that really these people are gardeners—intense, crazy gardeners.  They are going to care about things like my invasive species and such, and my wilted and dying basil, and my patch that was suppose to be cauliflower but is actually some crazy chrysanthemum that seems to spread wildly all over my yard.  And what with my trip to Ashland next week (poor me!), I only have 9 days to get the entire yard totally whipped into shape and ready to be oooed and ahhhed at.  I’m a bit stressed out about this.

The tour is going to be fun though.  The organizers said that we should expect between 300 and 500 people to come visit our yard.  With that many feet, maybe I should make a path right through the invasive ivy.  They could trample it to death, right?  The previous owners of this house were great believers in plants that spread, so most of my work these days is ripping out, not putting in.  I picked up an invasive weed pamphlet up on the Wildwood trail and saw not one but five weeds that are in residence in my yard (blackberry, ivy, pokeweed, morning glory, and old man’s beard or clematis).  That isn’t even counting spearmint, which perhaps is not invasive but still makes me do battle yearly pushing it back so that I don’t have an entire yard of cocktail garnish.

To be fair, my yard is better every year.  Sometimes it is even pretty.  I’m thinking that if I can pace myself over the next couple weeks I can arrive at something lovely in time for the tour.  I’ll let you know!

2 Comments | In: Environment, chickens, projects, urban farming | | #

The coop is looking pretty nice.  The girls (chicken variety) and I are gearing up for a week or so of elementary school visits.  I sent a cute little flier to the teachers at a nearby school advertising our willingness to host students.  I figured that what with being walking distance from school, we were the perfect end-of-the-year field trip.  And chickens are a perfect study in social groups, sustainability, and compost, not to mention how pretty and funny they are.  I can think of  a million art and writing activities for chickens, (FOR kids, I mean, WITH chickens).  So far we have two classes slated to make the visit.  I only wish that it wasn’t so wet and dreary out.  Nothing like a rainy day to bring the gross elements out in a chicken run… I am talking about wet poop sitting in the mud of course.  Oh well.  I will just throw some straw around and hope that covers it a bit.

I didn’t do many art projects this week, but I did finish the board of glory— a ceramic chicken for each hen (and the one rooster) who has passed through our yard.  How many are up there?  11!  All of them have their names stamped on the side and an attempt at depicting their size and coloring.  This is a quickie project, so the results were sort of a mixed bag.  Some glazes were right on and others left something to be desired.  The important thing for me at this point is that I have caught up.  Now if no one dies or we don’t add any new hens, I can relax for awhile.

3 Comments | In: chickens, projects | | #

We were chosen!  We were chosen!  We were BAWCK BAK! chosen for the Tour de Coops July 26th, 2010!  Y’all come see us.  We intend to be the nicest stop on the 29 coop Portland tour.

Hugs & Pecks,

Rita

8 Comments | In: Awesome!, chickens | | #

The weather is better and MOST of our chickens are looking much healthier and happier… all except the dead one that is.  We lost a chicken last night.  Dear sweet Bella (white one in the middle) had been acting sort of strange during the day.  I noticed her standing in a weird spot in the run.  I have a hard time quantifying what was so weird about this “weird spot” because there isn’t anything truly odd about where she was standing, but it is just not a place that my chickens regularly choose to hang out.  Does that make sense?  Anyway, she was standing there sort of nodding off and I thought, “That’s odd…” but left her there as it was sort of nap time and I was tired myself.  (Did you know that chickens nap during the day?  They are tired just at the same time I am tired!  Another reason why I like them!) When I returned to put the chickens in before leaving for a dinner party, she was sprawled out on the ground, twisting her head around and frankly not looking good.  It was apparent to me that she was certainly going to die and there wasn’t much that I might do about it.  I took her inside the house and inspected her body, gave her some water, and put her in a box full of clean hay.  There was nothing wrong with her body besides the seeming paralysis, greeny poop and messy vent.  I thought for about a minute about running a finger up in there to check for an egg that she couldn’t pass, but I mistakenly thought that I had gathered an egg from her that very day, so I didn’t bother.  Today when I got another tiny white and pointy egg in the nestbox it became clear— I had been matching this egg with the wrong chicken.  Even with this information, it seems unlikely that she had egg-bind.  The twisting head part makes the illness seem more nervous system related…. which is sort of a problem.

Bella was dead in the box by the morning of course.  Meanwhile, I was worried about possible disease that might bring the whole flock down.  I have this chicken manual that is THE REFERENCE for poultry keepers everywhere.  Unfortunately, it is written more for a serious operation than for a layperson like myself.  Most of the diagnosis for disease is only evident with an autopsy, and although I did spend about 5 minutes thinking, “Now I would bet I could cut this girl open and check if white deposits are on her liver!”, I think that maybe this sort of real science is not me.  I don’t even have a scalpel in the house anyway.  And the last time I cut anything open was high school science class.

So instead of picking up the hacksaw, I decided to scrub out the henhouse with bleach and water, pressure wash the roosts and make sure any infected poop was out of there.  This done, I settled in to check out the rest of the flock and saw…..nothing.  Everyone seems fine, healthy even.  Rosey fat foot is looking better, nearly normal actually.  Everyone looks plump and shiny with nice red combs and wattles.  And they are laying like a  henhouse on fire.  We are getting about 6 eggs a day.

The kids are sort of strangely unaffected.  They vacillate between being sad and asking if they can get another chicken… or maybe three!  Francis did have a 2 minute meltdown where she cried quite enthusiastically.  I don’t know how to respond to this sometimes as in these moments I feel the kids watching me, ready to follow my lead.  I don’t want to make a misstep in times like this.  Although I too am sad, I know that animals dying is just sort of part of life.  It is what happens when we choose this husbandry.  It is confusing in a different way from when people are sick.  You can’t ask the chicken what it needs, how it feels, if it wants a drink of water.  When I saw how Bella was acting, I knew that she would die.  There was nothing that I could do except make her comfortable and check back to see when the dying happened.  They live, they die.  We live, we die.  We are kind of powerless, aren’t we?

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If you are now singing, “But! – it’s poetry in motion
And when she turned her eyes to me” (Doo doo doo doo deweee! ), then I know that you are my kind of person, or at least my age.

Annnnnyway, I am getting all scientific around here.  I decided that I would keep track of my chickens’ egg laying habits, in order to answer that burning question–”How many eggs do you get?”.  Needless to say, no one is really asking for a week-by-week break down, and yet, isn’t this interesting?  And what exactly is going on Wednesdays?

For the month of March, our chickens laid 131 eggs.  That is 29 eggs a week.  Now I am wondering, where have they all gone?  We do eat a lot of eggs around here, and what with baking (Brad does that!), and the kids liking hard-boiled eggs, I suppose it is possible that we go through that many.  More likely is that we gave some away here and there and I just can’t quite remember it.  Anyway, many are the eggs in our household, and this being despite the rainy weather and despite my leaving the chickens in a lot lately.

The girls know that there is a lot of good stuff to eat out in the yard, so they tend to cluster near the door whenever they see someone approach.

If you too have a lot of eggs, here is what you do with them—make a puffed oven pancake.  You can easily find the recipe on-line.  There are a million variations, but the basic ingredients are eggs, milk, flour and butter plus a cast iron skillet.  I don’t believe in using sugar, dividing eggs or doing anything fancy.  Those basic ingredients make the most awesome breakfast.  I don’t think you can go wrong.

5 Comments | In: chickens, food, urban farming | | #

I don’t know what it has been lately, but I seem to have run into a rash of chicken health issues.  First, I find a gross chunky thing EMBEDDED in Rita’s waddle.  Truly, I couldn’t figure out if it was a dead tick, a pock of some sort, or a rock.  I had to remove it with tweezers, which was gross, gross, gross.  Even though I have good motor skills for small work and still hands, I could never quite be a surgeon because I am still sort of squeamish.  The yuck factor was high on this job.  It sort of looked like petrified chicken crap, but the skin had grown around it leaving a pinky sized hole when I removed the object.  I smeared bag balm all over the wound and let the poor terrified bird go.  (Hilariously, this is exactly how I treat wounds in my own children).

Next I thought I would inspect all the chickens to see if any others had weirdo growths.  That was when I noticed that Rosey’s left leg was swollen and gross looking.

The chicken health handbook was full of dire warnings of possible disease– e coli infections, infectious bird flu, skin scales that would never really go away, lameness that would bring certain death to the entire flock.  I couldn’t figure out which one of the awful things it could be, or if it is just an inflammation of the joint from an injury that will heal in time.  The Poultry Farmer book from my grandfather was no help.  That is aimed at an entire farm of poultry, so you can imagine what it has to say about anything involving injury—cull the bird!  (That is just a nice way of saying “kill her before you have to find out what is actually wrong”).  The chicken looked and acted fine, so there was to be no culling here.  I sat with her and soaked her leg in salt water.  It seemed dumb, but made me feel like I was doing something.  I also looked for signs of bumblefoot.  Didn’t see any, but I also couldn’t find anything that said if the chicken could have swelling with no outward signs of trauma.  (If you know, please comment).  My conclusion is that she has a swollen joint because of an injury.  We have somewhat high roosts and the silly girls barrel off those at high speed when they think we’re bringing snacks.  She could have gotten hurt jumping down.  We’ll be watching her to see if she worsens.

I hope everyone is well and free of gross disease in your world.

3 Comments | In: chickens | | #