Oh ducks, wonderful ducks!

Meet Naomi and Glen, a pair of Khaki Campbell ducks. As we can't tell them apart yet, you may read the names left-to-right or right-to-left, your choice. Right now they're exploring the bailey and trying to figure out where their duck buddies are. (They were raised in a backyard with both ducks and chickens.) They weren't too thrilled with being moved here and have been making very piteous baby-peeps since their arrival. Which is driving the cats insane with not-so-latent desires. The ducks are oblivious; they're trying to figure out why the chickens won't have anything to do with them.

**update**

Neighbor: Say...did you get your ducks yet?
Us: Yes!
Neighbor: I think they're in my driveway...

Two successful if short-lived escapes followed by a pitious first night in the chateau crying themselves to sleep. They're a little happier today though still bummed that the Wyandotte sisters do not like them. At all.

Oh, and we got better names for them.

Benny and Carlin.

Chickens in the garden

We're still figuring this chicken thing out. It's not like books are much help, as they're invaribly geared toward small-scale farmers—or backyard enthusiasts who want to make money. And making money with chickens means doing...things. Things that don't go hand in hand with humane treatment.

So we're winging it. Ha. For instance, the few books we did read all said, NO FRUIT! Well, we gave Marilyn and Pearl some apple cores and grapes and they went nuts for them. Problems? Not so far.

Except that the chickens have decided that they don't want to stay in the bailey. They've been hopping the fence and wandering in the yard. Not that they're causing any trouble (so far), but...they're much safer in the bailey.

We could completely redo the gate into the bailey...nah. We're not engineers. Greg strung some Mexican prayer flags over the gate to discourage them hopping up there, but yesterday they were again in the bad garden. So we went to look for some sparkly Mylar ribbon. Because everybody knows that chickens hate sparkly Mylar tape.

Results are pending. But it does look nicer than the prayer flags.

Consequences

Sigh. Wildfires dotting three counties (Humboldt, Trinity, Mendocino) are a consequence of last week's lovely lightening show.

A consequence of me using rubbish to build the chicken's pen is that they jump over their gate. We keep going into the yard to see them standing outside our back door, waiting. For what? No one knows; they're chickens. We just shoo them into their bailey.

I don't think Vivani realizes she's a shrimp. She certainly never lost her pick-of-the-litter mentality. As a consequence, I got to call the vet again tonight to report another fight-related injury that's starting to stink. She'll probably dodge the fur-shaving bullet for a third time as this one's on her face, but I am getting tired of writing large checks to the ever-cheerful Dr. Green.

And no, that is not a Humboldt County euphemism.

Let's end on a positive note:


Strawberries are coming in!

Shitastic

Happy Solstice

The day, which started out foggy, turned out to be quite lovely, with a bright blue sky filled with white fleecy sheep clouds. As soon as I got home I gathered the cats and husband and we went out into the bad garden.



During his lunch break, my step-son brought a treat home from the Co-op: a New York Times. I grabbed it and read it, sitting in my pooped-on blue chair while the cats tore around on the straw and the chickens picked through my meager afternoon offerings.

We ate a delicious dinner of fresh garden greens garnished with the world's best canned tuna and a surprise Sjaak's chocolate bar. Then my step-son came through with a bag full of fresh bananas and berries and spray-on whipped cream. Yes! I started cutting up stawberries when I heard...thunder? Yes! G-man and I went outside to scan the skies but we saw no rain or lightning.

Then our neighbors came home with Hank, their new (rescue) dog. And while we were petting Hank and fussing over Dinah (their huffy, 14-year-old dog), my neighbor handed me back the bowl I'd given her filled with fresh eggs—only now it was filled with homemade elote tamales and pico de gallo. Then big fat drops started falling out of the sky and I sat down to a second dinner of fresh tamales and fruit and listened to the thunder and watched the lightening in the darkening sky of summer.

Pantitas

We all have word quirks. Well, I hope we do and I'm not alone in this.

Personally, puppy is about the happiest word you can say in English. Nothing negative, sounds good, rhymes well. Puh. Pee. Easy to spell.

Not like dais at all.

Another word I've never gotten along with is panties. Why the diminutive, is it because they're little pants? Why don't we call men's underwear panties then? But try calling them that and see how far you get.

Underwear's okay, but underpants or drawers are more fun to say. But those aren't new words...let's add -ito, the Spanish dimunitive, to underpants and come up with pantitos (for men) and pantitas (for the ladies). Que buena! A horrible Spanglish Frankenstein of a word.

I like it.

Remains

For a moonless night in the middle of goddam nowhere it sure was bright. Brent leaned his head against the cold window, squinted his eyes against the streetlights.
"Tom."
"Yeah."
Brent swiveled his head on the glass, looked at Tom staring straight ahead.
"Why do they call you Mohawk? Did they call you that 'cause you used to have a Mohawk in your hair?"
Brent watched the light from passing cars slide off Tom's profile. Without taking his eyes off the road ahead of him, he fished a pack out of his pocket, flicked out a cigarette, and lit up. He cracked the window, said, "We had a DI who kept calling me 'last of the Mohawks' and it stuck."
Talk filled the space in Brent's brain and now that he finally had Tom talking he kept up the volley of questions.
"Did he see the movie?"
"What?"
"Did the, the DI, did he see the movie?"
Blowing smoke. "No man, he never saw it."
"The guys we going to see, do they call you Mohawk?"
"First ones to. They gimme that name."
Brent saw a flash of yellow and red, swung his head around to look out the windshield. "Hey, can we stop real quick and get something to eat?"
Tom crept the car through the drive-thru, told Brent, "No drinks. We won't make time if we have to keep stopping for you to piss."
"But it comes with the value meal."
"No drinks." A whine started across Brent's lips but Tom cut him off. "Don't make me explain to your mama why you're sitting on the highway all by yourself in Bakersfield at 1:00am. And keep that shit off the box." Tom set his hand on the box on the seat between them. "Respect it."
"Okayyy." Brent reached into the McDonald's bag. "Tom, what's 'cremains'?"
"It's what's left after you burn a body."
"Why don't they just call it ashes then?"
The window was still cracked, but Tom was exhaling over the steering wheel.
"It's not ashes. It's like sand with bits of bone in it."
"Can I see?"
"No." Another cigarette. "It's just a box of bones."
"You said it was cremains."
"Eat your fucking hamburger, kid."
"How much longer til we're there?"
"We're about half way."
"Half way! But we left before it was dark!"
"It's a big state."
Another burger. "Did you know the guy in the box?"
"Yes. Yes, I did."

...

Brent woke up, cramped and cold. It was truly dark now, no streetlights, no other cars. He realized Tom had cracked the window again for another smoke, filling the car with the frigid night air. It smelled green and dusty at the same time.
"Where are we?" He stretched, crammed his hands in his armpits.
"Just past Boron."
"Wake me up when we get there." He pulled his jacket over him, scrunched down on the seat.

...

Brent woke up again, still cramped, and the air inside the Caprice was stuffy with heat. It was light, but the sun wasn't in the sky.
He looked around, didn't see anyone. He rolled down his window, tossed his jacket in the back and got out. He saw a motorcycle and a rusted-out van parked a little ways behind the car.
When he got to the motorcycle he could see the top of Tom's head, went over to investigate. The heat and the dryness surprised him, and that what looked flat and simple from the car turned out, once he stepped out of the car, to be full of folds and dips and wrinkles hiding who knows what.
He stopped when he could see all of Tom, sitting on a rock in the hard morning sun, smoking a cigarette. A guy Brent didn't know was standing next to Tom. He had one thumb hooked in his jeans, the other hand holding a cigarette, a pointy-toed boot resting on a helmet sitting in the dirt. A third guy was sitting cross-legged right on the dirt. He wasn't smoking, just crying. Little snuffly cries.
In the middle was a small pile of bleached-white cardboard boxes, some split open, their sandy contents mingling with the sandy dirt of the desert. On top of the old, brittle boxes sat the new box from the car seat.
Neither Tom nor the two men Brent didn't know were doing anything, just sitting (or standing) there. The guy on the dirt was still crying, then Brent noticed that all of them were crying. Brent had never seen Tom cry, not in the eight years he'd been with Brent's mom. Not when he ripped his thumb on the table saw, not when that guy at the bar broke a chair over his head that time, not when Reddy died and everybody else cried for days.
Brent went back to the Caprice, sat inside with the windows up, thought about Sausage McMuffins and coffee so hot it could win you a million dollars, about Kenny Chesney and Alyssa Milano's breasts and the new releases rack at VideoTime and his mom's promise of a cable modem and maybe getting Matt's brother's used Kawasaki and not about being old or married or working and having to pay bills or table saws or old episodes of M*A*S*H or "Hamburger Hill" or three gray-haired men crying in the desert.

Pollero

Aaron, our source for poultry here in Humboldt County, says in a couple of months he will go through his flock and decide who's he keeping as breeders. We hope to get a couple more chickens that don't make the cut when he does. w00t!

As part of our ongoing wordplay, G-man and I have been toying with what to call Aaron. Chicken wrangler, poultrist...we've been using pollero. Jury's still out, but I think I like it.

Slightly?!

The New Scientist ran an article June 4th on wasp/caterpilar parisitism:

Having partially developed inside caterpillars, the larvae of the wasps manipulate their hosts into watching over them as a mother or bodyguard might.

A team that has done extensive field studies with infected caterpillars say they have the first conclusive proof that the manipulative behaviour of some parasitoids increases their chance of survival.

The parasitoid wasp Glyptapanteles lays its eggs, about 80 at a time, in young geometrid caterpillars. The eggs hatch and the larvae feed on the caterpillar's body fluids. When they are fully developed, they eat through the caterpillar's skin, attach themselves to a nearby branch or leaf and wrap themselves up in a cocoon. ... At this point, something remarkable and slightly eerie happens.

The caterpillar, still alive, behaves as though controlled by the cocooned larvae. Instead of going about its usual daily business, it stands arched over the cocoons without moving away or feeding.

The caterpillar – now effectively a zombie – stays alive until the adult wasps hatch.

"We don't know exactly what kills the caterpillars, but it is fascinating that the moment of death seems to be tuned to the duration of the wasp's pupal stage," says Arne Janssen of the University of Amsterdam.

Read the full, horrifying, text here, where you can also watch a video of the zombie in action.

Eatin' veggies

It rained the other night, and some critter took advantage and went snail-hunting in the beds covered with the pea-vetch cover crop. When we went out the next morning to let the Wyandotte sisters out of the chateau des poules, snails were all over the yard, fleeing the scene of carnage in the raised beds.

So I've been pulling out the broken and trampled cover crops and getting the beds ready to plant. Not like I feel we need more planted beds! We currently have a variety of squash, beans, peas, corn, strawberries, tomatoes, collard and mustard greens, and lettuce growing back there. If we skip a day eating salad with or for dinner, we get behind and have to give away a bag to family or the neighbors. The greens are reaching the same stage. So two more boxes? Maybe I'll plant herbs and dry them in the fall; I don't know.

Blackberry eradication continues, and the straw mulch is really keeping the areas I've already dug up weed free. It also makes it easy to spot and dig up blackberry sprouts that I missed in my first (or second) pass.

But I just got another four 4x4 raised beds with a promise of three more. If by some miracle I get them all installed in time to plant this year, that will be eleven 4x4 beds and another two 2x8 beds! My friends, that is a lot of vegetables. I wish I had a pantry to store all the stuff I'll be putting up this fall.

It's a good hobby, this gardening. Keeps me busy, fed, and the girls (cat and hen) enjoy the activity.