February 10th, 2011
Quintessential Chicken On Fence
I am currently entering into negotiations with the decal people on this one.
December 12th, 2010
New Kids in the Flock
Ha!
Sorry.
We are chicken-sitting around here. We took in two chickens for some school friends who are traveling in Guatemala for a month. These girls are pretty, but not really earning their keep, so they are joining the rest of our girls “on the dole”. A combination of molting, youth and old age are making egg efforts sort of meager. Out of our nine chickens, it seems like only one is actually laying. Geeze Louise! They’ll be back at it in another month or so.
My friend’s chickens are not laying either, although the younger one should be laying by now. I kind of think she might be a bit overweight, which can certainly happen in small flocks where one hen is dominant and there isn’t much competition for feed. In my mind I started calling her “FattyCakes”. (I’m sorry Pam!). I know it is mean, but it just rolls off the tongue so nicely!
I’m actually glad that FattyCakes brought in some extra heft because I think it is helping her stand her ground around here. I had been worried about bringing new chickens into our flock because our hens are such ass-kickers. They aren’t very nice to new-comers. I figured that I understood more about flock dynamics this time around and could maybe make the transition smoother. I kept the hens separated for a few days but visible to each other. FattyCakes got pecked through the wire, but everyone seemed okay with each other by the end of day two.
The biggest challenge has been getting everyone to roost on the roosts. The teenagers (chicks) have this obnoxious habit of crapping up the nesting boxes. Now mind you, no one is USING them, but I still hate to see poop in them. When the miracle eggs do start to show up again, I want them to have a lovely clean place to be deposited. I hung cloths, I nailed boxes shut, I put stuff in them at night….nothing worked. Nothing short of tromping out there in the dark and dragging the poulets out of the box screaming seemed to work. Once they gave up the box, they started roosting on the top of a door frame, way up high above my head. FattyCakes joined them one night. I didn’t even realize that an 8 pound hen could get up that high.
In other news, before it started raining (and raining, and raining) last week, I finished hauling the leaves from hither and yon and piled them on my garden a few feet deep. I put down a layer or two of chicken manure, wood shavings, compost and other good stuff. There you are blueberries. Do NOT die this winter. Goodnight garden. See you in spring.
These cold but dry Autumn days make me happy. When I have the time to do repetitive outdoor tasks, I find my breath just slowing down and my mind just peacefully wandering. I have so little time to be in my own head, quiet with my own thoughts. An hour or so scraping shit off roosts really leaves me feeling like a new and better person! At these times I have to laugh recognizing that I actually love to work. Cleaning out my henhouse makes me happy. Raking leaves and hauling stuff makes me happy. Looking at my compost makes me happy.
And my beauty berry—that the painters stepped on, and I thought they killed it but it came back—in fruit makes me happy.
Here’s to chickens, compost and beauty berries! I wish you many small moments of happiness as we approach Christmas.
October 5th, 2010
Thou Art Welcome
It’s fun to be in Gospel Choir. Apart from the normal benefits, (fit lungs, comradery, spiritual expression), gospel choir songs offer a host of possibly lyrical applications. The songs have very simple, interchangeable lyrics. You can change a word and sing them in all sorts of different settings. For example, instead of “I call you holy! Your name is holy, you are so holy to me!” you can sing, “I find you whiney! You are so whiney! You are so whiney to me!”. We have a song called “Holy Spirit, Thou Art Welcome”, and I could not get it out of my head when I saw this:
I didn’t plant it, but I certainly welcome it. ”Lemon cu-cumber! Thou-Art-Welcome! And I embrace your presence! And I lift high your name!”
The whole garden is slowing down, but little surprises are always tucked in there anyway.
We’ve had such a lame summer (in terms of warmth and sun), so I really appreciate these lovely fall days–sunny, but with a chill.
Someone isn’t so thrilled that it is getting colder. Agnes is going through a rough molt right now, dropping feathers right and left and looking like an unstuffed ragdoll. Why do chickens lose their feathers right when it seems they might need them? Poor baby.
September 27th, 2010
Chicken Work and Trauma
I spent this last Friday working solidly for a few hours on improving our chicken enclosure. The hens (one in particular, Rita), had been throwing themselves against the door when we came out in the yard. They are pretty eager to get out in the yard or to see what kinds of treats we might be bringing them. Whatever the reason, Rita had pulled the mesh wire away from the door frame and it was getting impossible to repair. In my amazing efficiency, I recycled the last of the chicken wire around here. (Note to self: You MUST always have at least a little bit of chicken wire around. I know that it sucks to store, it gets caught on itself and anything else in vicinity in storage, but you WILL need it eventually.) Anyway, I was flummoxed as to how to repair this door without just finding a whole new screen. Enter chunks of aluminum siding. And metal shears. Why do I have those things lying around but not a simple chunk of chicken wire? Dunno.
I painstakingly cut out a piece the size of the door—it was a painful, slow process. You have to cut about a centimeter, then attempt to bend the metal out of the way in order to progress forward. You can’t do it with bare hands, obviously or you won’t even have hands by the time you finish. It is hard on your hands, hard on your grip, and hard on your spirit as it seems you are going NOWHERE for a long, long time. Two hours later, I had a nice piece the size of the bottom of the door. Pounding the metal onto the door was easy, and it used up this whole pile of stupid nails that I bought accidentally and then was pissed seeing all the time all over the floor in the shed (as they were never the right size, always there when I was reaching for a useful size nail, and constantly reminding me that there were 100 more just like them). Satisfying. Using up something that seemed useless. Ahhhh. I love that.
After fixing the door, I moved the baby chicks into a larger brooder. They are big enough to be out with the older hens all day, but the older hens’ roost is too large for their feet still. The chicks are ending up in nesting boxes for the night where they poop and make a mess. Their chick food is also irresistibly delicious to the older hens, so I had to find a place where the babies could eat without being cleaned out by the big hens. Essentially, I switched the straw storage and miscellaneous storage to give the chicks more space. I chopped up a broken kid chair so that they could practice perching on the rungs, and viola! Lovely new space for the chicks.
This is why I love our new coop— it is so versatile.
I cleaned out the whole coop and had a mini epiphany— I like cleaning out the coop…. a lot. I guess technically it is work, but I sure enjoy it. I like mucking out the coop, moving poop to compost, rhubarb patch, etc. I don’t know what that means, but it is peaceful to me.
Anyway, the point of this post is that despite the nice new things that I did this last week to ensure on-going health and happiness in my flock, today I went out to check on the birds and one was dead on the floor. Nothing apparent happened to her. There wasn’t any sign of predators. She looked like she just fell off the roost.
We lost Frankie, who was sort of a difficult personality of a chicken. She wasn’t a super strong bird. She was small, pretty low (if not the bottom) of the pecking order. She probably didn’t have a robust immune system either. She was also relatively young.
The kids are a little sad, as am I, as Frankie was the only chicken in our flock of 10 to spend her entire life in our yard. We hatched her from an egg last summer. If you remember, our broody chicken experiment was largely unsuccessful, but Agnes did get two chicks out of the batch of 10 eggs. One chicken turned out to be a rooster, Helmut, and he went to live with friends in Sheridan.
Bye bye rooster!
Frankie was always a funny looking chick. She had the misfortune of getting her tail feathers completely stuck in the broken, rotten, stickiness of another egg in the clutch. Then that stickiness adhered her to her mother’s undersides. I “lost” her for awhile until I realized she was stuck to her mother. Detaching her was hard and she lost some tail feathers in the process. If you have ever lost tail feathers, you know that these things don’t just grow in again right away. It takes a certain amount of time for the next cycle of feathers to come on through.
Bare butt Frankie and mom Agnes
We’re going to have a funeral and wake for Frankie tonight (with cookies and tea if you want to come). I’ll be interested to see what Francis comes up with to read for her eulogy. She is going to work on it during writing time today. Maybe I’ll post it tomorrow.
Rest in Peace Frankie.
Why can't I keep a barred rock on this farm?
August 26th, 2010
Chicken Days of Summer
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.
August 19th, 2010
Here We Go Again
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
July 26th, 2010
2010 Tour de Coops
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:
- How many chickens do you have?
- What breed is that one there?
- What about that one there?
- 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!
July 23rd, 2010
Getting Ready for Tour de Coops
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.
July 9th, 2010
Intense Crazy Gardeners
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!