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.

We decided to go berry picking on Sunday.  I had been out there earlier in the week and had affirmed that there were still berries to be found.  I was sure that there would be even more by the weekend as all the red marionberries would have ripened up.  Wrong.  We got out there and the fields were picked clean.  I had never really contemplated the phrase “slim pickings”, but that is what we found row after row after row.

You had to keep moving to find the smallest marionberry.  You also had to look all the difficult places—underneath, behind big thorns, down low on the ground.  In short, it sucked.

But still it was beautiful.  The farm was empty.  The island (Sauvie) was quiet.  The sun was preparing to tip over the edge of the earth, the birds were swooping through the air, and there was a sweet and light breeze making everything young and fresh.  Not many berries, but it sure was great being out there.

The kids got tired of picking fairly quickly so I sent them off down a row to a field beyond.  Inez toddled after them for all she was worth.  They found a barkdust pile and some ripe blueberries and were happy.  Brad and I could pick and chat quietly and we were happy.

This is of course when disaster struck.  Now that I think about it, it looks like the first stages of disaster are captured in this photo!  Inez decided to take off her diaper which was dirty.  Not being able to remove her overalls properly in order to escape the diaper, she manages to wrap clothing and diaper and sandal up in a horrible net of shit.  And then she stepped in it.  It is what our family likes to call a “shitastrophe”.  The older kids started screaming.  I come running (although slowly, I admit).  We didn’t bring any diapers with us as we like to live on the edge.

I try to extract the child from her excrement and then try to wash her up by dumping full water bottles over her backside.  Unfortunately for her they were ice water.  (That’ll teach her to excrete!).  I put her shirt back on her, wash up my hands over and over again, and get back to berry picking.  The kids amuse themselves throwing barkdust and flowers at us.  We tolerate it reasonably well.

After we quit tolerating it and both yell at them for throwing bark in the berries, they run off out of view to the next field and Brad and I consider chucking it in.  We have a pants-less baby, a nasty diaper, poor picking conditions, and questionably clean hands.  I call for the older kids.  No kids.  I call again.  Nope.  I decide that I need to go find them.  After wandering across a field of blueberries, I see a side field that looks promising.  Francis and Zephyr are standing in it, shoveling handfuls of thornless blackberries into their mouths.  The field is SO AMAZINGLY FULL OF BERRIES.  There are tons.  I send Francis back to fetch Brad and in the next 20 minutes we pick more than we had picked in the previous hour.  We fill bucket after bucket after bucket.  It is awesome.

Back at the farm stand, we pay for our berries, use soap and hot water on our hands, and improvise a diaper out of a sunhat and a clean onesie.  (Luckily we do find a clean diaper wrap in the car, and when you have one of those, you can shove just about anything in it and make it work.  Once at a movie, I removed my camisole from under my sweater and crammed that into a diaper wrap to get the kid through the next hour.)

Sometimes the world is great.  We’re dirty, we’re tired, but we have plenty berries, plenty joy.

Here is my conclusion:

• I am spending my time fixing something that shouldn’t need to be fixed.  Tape pulled up paint on a floor?
• I am spending my time fixing something with a product that didn’t work in the first place.  Tape pulled up paint on a floor?  Certainly don’t use the same paint the next time!
• I am spending my time fixing something that I didn’t love the first time around.  Really, shouldn’t I do something better the next time?  Oh no.  That would take too much time.  Instead I’m sure I will just have to repaint more of the floor next year.
• I’m going to go buy a gallon of something to fix a tiny space where a pint might do.  Now I will have another spare gallon to use up in the future… even though I don’t even like this color.

=  I suck.

After two days of worry and trying to shake my residual fright, I decided to face my fear.  Even though there wasn’t time in the day at all, I dragged the two youngest kids out to Sauvie Island to see for myself.  (Francis is in bike camp this week).  We picked for an hour or so, but it was obvious that the berries will be in the field for another week or maybe even two.  Ahhh.  Sweet reprieve.  I am going to make it.  Midnight berry picking will not be necessary.  Life is kind sometimes.

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!

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.