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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!

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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.

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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 | | #

It’s too rainy.

I started turning soil over back in Mid March before the torrential rains set in.  I managed to carve out 6 sections in a different layout than last year.  This is so that I can “rotate” crops without really thinking about it too much.  I am also trying to account for a big walnut tree that will leaf out sometime in May and start to create too much shade for most seeds to germinate.

I have such a little tiny space to garden in, but I jealously guard every inch of it.  I laugh about this space too.  In my mind, the first year I gardened here was to be the last, as I intended to have a new garden shed in this spot “within the year”.  Three years later I am still turning the soil, with no shed nor even possible shed in sight.

The kids have high hopes for what they will plant.  Zephyr wants carrots (hard!), beets (easy!), and bless his soul, brussel sprouts.  I  hope those don’t get demolished by aphids.  I had better put in my order for beneficial nematodes right now!

Francis wants lettuce, lemon cucumbers and sugar snap peas.  The peas are in on the trellis you see on the back.  The boat owner is not so sure of me fencing him in, but his kid likes the sweet peas as much as mine do, so I figured it would be okay.

I’m growing all the stuff that the rest of the family SHOULD eat, but maybe no one would actually choose to eat: kale, spinach, swiss chard, and various squash family things.  Yes, I am going to pack it all in there.  Just watch me.  And then when it is finally sunny out, I will poke tomatoes in too.  Ha!

I am grateful that the kids are excited about the garden.  I am SOOOOO grateful that they actually eat vegetables.  My parents have this amazing thing called a TV, (that’s short for television), and it projects stories, like in moving pictures!  And there is sound too!  Anyway, while I was out visiting, I watched this program called “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution” and there was this super depressing part where he visited a 1st grade classroom and showed kids various vegetables and they didn’t know the names to ANY of them.  It was the saddest thing I have ever seen.  I was so depressed after that, even though I know that my own children, even the proto-lingual one, know the names to most all of their vegetables, maybe except the kohlorabi.

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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.

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No, I’m kidding.  I actually applied for a license to keep more than 3 chickens within city limits and I got inspected today.  Being a sort of nervous, want-to-do-good-paranoid-about-getting-in-trouble sort of person, my heart just about went through the roof when I saw the pickup (with lights–but not on of course) pull up in front of our house.  And of COURSE the chicken door was open because Francis did the chores this morning and the kids can’t seem to go in the door without letting chickens get out.  That is a no-no in the city.  If you have chickens wandering around your yard, you are suppose to be with them, which I obviously wasn’t as I answered the door for the inspections guy.  We didn’t have time to put them in again because we were super late for school.  Luckily for us, it is cold as hell around here and even with the door to the fenced area open, the chickens were huddled together in the coop.  I hurriedly confessed that we let them out accidentally this morning and that I knew I wasn’t suppose to.  ”No problem,” Mr. Super Nice Inspector said.  ”We are pretty laid back as long as we can’t hear or smell them when approaching the property”.

The inspection was great though.  The guy was completely nice, not upset that I had EIGHT chickens (by the way, did I mention that I now have EIGHT chickens?!  That is for another post.), and quite complimentary about my coop.  He said that I obviously had room for more and I should just let them know if I want to get more.  No thanks, I said.  Even I know when enough is enough.  He also said that he could tell that I take care of them, that the area is clean and looks free of stink or rats, and that he is glad that I have names for all of them.  That is a sign that I care for my chickens well.  So, all in all, a really good experience, and I should get my license within the week.

It is interesting to me that the City of Portland is fine with chickens, and my hometown of Sheridan is not.  I have my theories that people in Sheridan, being country people, are only familiar with TONS of chickens so they have no real idea of the miniscule sound and smell present with less than 10 chickens.  When they think “chickens”, they think of fifty chickens, or one hundred and fifty chickens.  The Sheridan Sun recently quoted a city counselor as saying that a neighborhood with chickens would be “unlivable”, which is about the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard, especially as I live on a block with more chickens than people.

Did I mention that I love Portland, Oregon?

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I know it has been a long time.  Believe it or not, I am nearly done with ONE of my two classes.  Right on target.  I was going to give myself all of October and here we are with a week to spare!

Even though I have not been writing here, it doesn’t mean I haven’t been doing anything.  That is, I am mostly working on my classes, but I have managed to squeeze in some fun little projects here and there.  Here is an update:

I canned.  A lot.

The kids love tomato soup, and as I felt sort of weird about the amount of soup boxes we go through and I grew a LOAD of tomatoes this year, I thought I would try canning it.  My mother in law hooked me up with a new pressure cooker and good directions and I kicked out these puppies.

I don’t want to be a braggart, but damn this stuff is good.  It really is awesome.  My complaint about tomato soup from the stores is always that it is too salty, even the reduced stuff.  Mine is perfectly tangy, tastes like real tomatoes and has these lovely little chunks in it.  Now if we don’t get botulism, all is well.

My friend Lindsey worked (like a galley slave) one Friday helping me make applesauce.  We made a ton of it.  It is pretty lovely too.

Here is the complete list of canned stuff this summer:

• 14 pints strawberry jam
• 6 pints raspberry jam
• 22 quarts applesauce
• 14 quarts pears
• 8 pints pear chutney
• 5 half pints pear plum chutney
• 24 pints tomato soup
• 7 pints blueberry syrup/jam

I had a funny experience with the blueberry syrup.  This whole canning thing is pretty new to me and I am just making whatever I can get my hands on for free or think we might use.  A few weekends ago, my mother in law, preserving goddess, serves us some blueberry syrup with our pancakes.  ”It didn’t turn out” she said.  She had tried to make blueberry jam.  She then said that she didn’t know why but her blueberry jam never turns out.  I loved the stuff just the runny way it was.  Of course, I go home and try to make blueberry syrup, but it sets up all firm… like jam.  Shoot.  Maybe she will trade with me?

And here are our tomatoes.  Yes, there are more of them.  Maybe I will have fresh tomatoes until December, but I am not convinced.  For now, we have to duck these in the kitchen, which is goofy.  It will make the room seem so big when they are gone!

I had a rough day with the kids today, and instead of my first instinct which was to put them in front of a movie, we pulled out the art supplies and made a royal mess.  It was exactly what I needed.  We made these fun skulls for Dia de los Muertos, and most thrilling to the kids, we got everything hung up and looking awesome by the time Brad got home from work.  He was suitably enthusiastic and the kids were super happy.  In addition to the skulls we made today there is

• pumpkin by Zephyr from preschool,
• candle holders from Mexico from Kendall
• mariachi skeletons in paper mache by Brad (!)
• precious paper skeletons from Italy that my parents carried back
• Virgen de Guadalupe candle
• Good Shepherd holy cards
• Sacred Heart metal pendant
• crucifix
• a picture of my cousin Maria who is dancing in heaven.  She liked Latin American culture, so I know she would like to be part of this scene.  And all my canning stuff was from her, so I have been thinking about her a lot lately.

And the front door:

Zephyr’s skulls are so funny!  HE did the one on top and the one on the lower right with blue eyes (it looks sort of like a decrepit lizard).  I took these pictures in the dark, and I know that was not a fantastic idea, but hey, the kids are asleep, so it IS dark.  I don’t see an alternative really.

I’ll post again soon.  Maybe I will include a picture of my chickens.  They are all molting and look awful.  I think they are cold as they are barely coming out of the henhouse!

Good thoughts!  Happy October!

6 Comments | In: Awesome!, food, projects, urban farming | | #

I felt accomplished this year that I had such a successful summer garden.  It is still sort of successful, if those 13 tomato plants ever decide to ripen.  They are ripening, just not all at once like I imagined.  It is somewhat inconvenient as I intended to can those tomatoes.  I’m not going to be able to can one at a time though.  Ripen, ripen, ripen!

The weather is weird around here.  The season is changing.  The mornings are cold, but then midway through the day, you are sweating in your wool socks.  I put on a sweater, take off the sweater, contemplate turning the furnace on but then see that it is still 67 degrees.  Fall is here, but it is sauntering in.  We’re having showers in the morning, heavy clouds and then bursts of sun.

In the garden, the snow peas and beets gave way to lettuce, chard, and cauliflower.  We’ll see what makes it.  The napa cabbage is looking troubled.  I see that maybe I do have slugs after all.  If you can believe it, I have seen very few slugs on our property here in Portland.  I don’t actually think that is a good thing.  I think the soil is just so dry and poor that it doesn’t support egg growth.  So even though I don’t miss the suckers, I do sort of mourn their absence.  I think our soil sucks so much that even the slugs don’t like it, but anywhere I put down chicken manure, straw, leaves and mulch there are now signs of tiny little slugs.  That’s okay.  There is enough to share for now.

And what is this?  Peeking around the side of a tomato plant, these buggers looked me in the eye.  Begone deadly nightshade!  I love that it has “deadly” in its name.  Makes you think, “Now wait, should I eat this?”.  I think I should have deadly in my name.

I had an ill-fated couple weeks for all things coffee and tea.  Just when the weather changed and I wanted more of both, I broke my coffee pot (knocked it on the sink), broke the spout of my teapot (dropped it while washing it), and suffered the loss of my milk frother (Zephyr swept it off the counter and then imbedded a piece in his foot for good measure).  Sigh.  Ill-fated.  This tea pot was so cute and useful.  Brad’s aunt gave it to me along with this excellent little tea cozy.  I couldn’t part with it,even though the spout is broken down the back in a quite irreparable way.  You can’t see the break from the front, especially with the plant in it.  I’m going to keep it on the front porch to announce my priorities to the world.  I planted a corsican mint in it.

Yes, at the big purple house, things are indeed growing well.

7 Comments | In: My super freakin' cute kids, food, projects, urban farming | | #

Friendless.  See, that’s a joke.  Get it?  Get it?

The other night the ladies of my gospel choir were discussing zucchini.  Specifically, they were comparing notes on how to best use it and trying to pawn some off on me.  I didn’t fall for it!  I HAVE my own one zucchini plant that produces about 5 lbs more zucchini than I need, thank you very much.

I did take some notes though.  Here are the top 4 uses of zucchini:

• Grate it up and sneak it into everything:  gumbo, lasagna, manicotti
• Grate it up and make sweet good stuff:  zucchini bread, muffins, chocolate zucchini cake (which everyone agrees is super good)
• Lightly saute it with olive oil and toss with pasta, basil, fresh tomatoes from the garden
• Beat grated zucchini in with potatoes and fry in a hash of sorts.  Mix with eggs and scramble.

Number One Clever Idea for Zucchini was something that I had done sort of before, but leaving out a key element. This smart woman suggested that extra zucchini be grated and frozen, but not just randomly.  She said to check the recipe that you always use for zucchini bread and freeze the grated, wrung out zucchini in that exact amount, so that you can easily make zucchini bread in the winter without defrosting more or less than you need.  Ye Gods!  How clever!

And what a great job for a 6 year old!  I cut the zucchini up into the right size and let ‘er rip with the food processor.  I also showed her how to measure 2 cups of fruit, pour off the excess liquid, and shake the whole lot into bags for freezing.  Good work, kitchen wench!

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Well the coop is only two years old, but some bright person (me) had this idea that making it completely of recycled materials would be a great idea.  It was a challenge that I latched on to, and perhaps admirable in intention, but not necessarily practical.  Completely recycled materials START old and don’t weather well, thus, my coop is in okay shape inside, but looking a bit shabby.

Now that I know that I want to stay in the chicken bizness, I am ready to build something beautiful.  I have this sneaking suspicion that many of my chicken problems of late (egg-eating, picking, etc) were because there isn’t enough space in that old kitchen cabinet that I made into a hen house.  And I am tired of my yard being ugly (as I might have mentioned before), so I am making something larger that they can stay fenced in year round.  So now I am building something beeeeeautiful… with the help of my dad.  Or is it the other way around?

The next two weekends I am going to be out in Sheridan banging out this Chalet Poulet.  Wish me luck y’all, and I will tell you when the coop de grace is done.  Maybe we will have a coop-warming party take two.

Dad had this huge pile of wood to cut up for the studs.

Hey! That's a floor!

I'm smiling big, but really I am terrified of the nail gun.

This makes Brad look helpful, but really this was the only thing he did. Sorry Brad! He kept the kids out of the way. Good job, man!

The guy who was really in charge around here....

That's the third wall. And I love this drill.

The team looking out the front door. Next week--- the roof and nesting boxes!

Yeah! Chickens!

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