Poultry Peeple

The other day one of my egg customers asked me, "So how many chickens do you have?"

And I didn't know! I used to keep track of all that, but lately, not so much. Chickens come, chickens go. They get sick and die. They get dragged off in the night by raccoons. Sometimes they just drop dead, and when I go out to do my afternoon chicken chores I'll see somebody's little corpse lying in the coop while the other chickens step around (or over) her as they go about their business. It's all very New York City, life in the coop.

So yesterday I popped open Google Docs and started cataloging who's still out there. Amazingly, that includes Pearl, my Gold-laced Wyandotte (an old American meat-n-eggs breed) who will be 10 years old if she makes it through the winter. Ten! We expect nothing of her these days except to enjoy the sun and look pretty.

There's Cleo, the Copper Maran hen who's a crappy layer of eggs but an excellent brood hen...Gary Seven the Leghorn who is the first to awake, the last to go to bed, and lays eggs like a maniac, even though she's gotta be pushing 5. Lurch the Jersey Giant, I almost never see her in the nest box. Oh, well. Amondine the Rhode Island Red who is top chicken and her mellow breedmate, Mushroom Mike with the crooked comb. Hefty Brosis, so large that everyone initially though she was a rooster. Jasmine, Patrice, and Marina, the Cochins (fluffballs, good layers). Bodhi, Dharma, and Cinnamon Girl the Ameraucanas, plus Ama and Owley, more Ameraucanas (green eggs, pretty feathers, good layers). Zoppe, the Barred Rock that we got last week when our neighbors said, "Say, there's a chicken in the tree down by the circus; is it one of yours?" No, but she is now.

Pearl, the amazing 10-year old hen. See, isn't she pretty?

And so on. The thing is, many of our birds are older if not ancient, and if I don't add some pullets or chicks soon I'm not going to have very many eggs next summer. But of course, no one has chicks now! Plenty of people giving away older birds, but that I don't need. So when I saw that A&L Feed had gotten a box of chicks Friday--they come through the Arcata post office--I said "Hot rats! Let's get us some chicks!"

Because I'm not a breeder, and for fun, I like to have a mix of birds in the coop. It's certainly easier to tell who's who. But the entire box of chicks at A&L was Ameraucana chicks--the one breed I have a lot of. What to do? I could wait for a future box (they're getting a couple more before the season ends) and hope I have a broody hen when they do, but...Marina, Cleo, and Jasmine have already been broody and given up so I can't count on them raising the babies. Live Free or Die, our sole New Hampshire Red, is in the next box now, hunkered down as though through sheer willpower she can make the infertile eggs she takes from the other hens and shoves under her body hatch. It's a fierce concentration.

The only hens still with us are Pearl and the black one on the far right: that's Cleo. The others? Gone.

So we grabbed an empty box and drove to McKinleyville, coming back with four Ameraucana chicks. In the past I have brooded them in my dining room, but I've got somebody living in there right now, so that ain't gonna work. Plus, I am tired of chick dust getting onto everything. Two of the cool things about chickens, is that once the sun goes down they turn off, and they really have no long-term memory, or not much, anyway. Whatever they do have they do not clog with useless facts like, Yesterday the humans slaughtered our brothers the roosters!, or Yesterday these were just eggs! Now I have babies!

So once Live Free or Die shut down for the night, I took the box of chicks out to the coop, opened the nest box, took out the eggs she was sitting on and put the babies under her. Once I heard the happy peeping, I shut the nest box and went to bed.

When I went to let them out this morning, Live Free or Die had lost that look of fierce concentration and now had the look of ultimate vigilance: I have babies!


The variety pack.

Hopefully she'll be as good a mom as Cleo is. But I can already see some pretty green cartons of eggs next year. I gotta mix this thing up!

A(nother) New Year of Gardening

Happy New Year, all! We celebrated Humboldt-style by spending the day outside; in this case, in the Bad Garden:

Ladies a'gleaning, January 2013.

After all the clearing and prepping of 2011, it's a real shame that I spent almost no time gardening in 2012. By August or September—usually prime harvesting months—I threw my hands in the air and opened the garden up to the chickens, who immediately took it down to the dirt.

But in November my neighbors Steve and Sheba, knowing that they were moving soon, gave us their recycled glass-window greenhouse. Score! They even disassembled it and hauled it down the street to our driveway and I dragged it piece by piece into the back yard. Steve said I'd have no problem figuring out how it all went together...uh-huh.

I am not good with carpentry. I couldn't even tell what piece was the floor, though I did eventually figure out that the piece made from an old door was in fact the door. Point for me!

I also had to figure out where it was going to go. If I took the lazy way out and put it somewhere already flat, it would, at 10-feet-by-five-feet, seriously be in the way, and I would end up doing a lot more work rerouting paths around the greenhouse than I would ever spend by just leveling out a random patch of the Bad Garden.

Well, yesterday, New Year's Day, turned out to be one of those beautiful California winter days, with a clear, blue sky and no wind, just sunny and (for us, anyway) warm at 53 degrees. Shirt-sleeve weather! So once the frost had melted I went outside and surveyed my little farm and chose a spot.

Yes, we do collect a lot of scrap-crap in the Bad Garden.

It's not level. And, there's a berm of strawberry-covered dirt in the way. But otherwise it's perfect. So I started shoveling while the ladies milled around, gleaning.

And, as is typical of me, as I was piling up rescued strawberry plants I thought what a shame it was that I was shoveling all this dirt that I would only end up re-shoveling into a raised bed later...As if I have not done just that, shoveled and re- and re-re-shoveled dirt these last five years. But soon I had scrounged up bits of lumber from odd corners of the yard and started adding a raised bed off the one successful bed I have so far managed to build and plant. Needless to say, my site-leveling work stopped.

Assorted scrap-crap laid out.

Then I shoveled some dirt into it, which is I suppose working on site-leveling, too, but...then I looked at the Long Bed and decided to rearrange some of the plants in there.

Upper left corner are the hardier-than-I-would-have-guessed chives, lower left is a sage that never thrived in its original spot in the Long Bed, and in the center is a pile of dug-up strawberry plants waiting for a new spot.

And still having lumber left I decided to encapsulate the old straw bales marking the edge of the hopefully future patio, but I couldn't find an end-piece and the blade on my pull-saw finally gave up the ghost after 12 years or so.

So, progress on the green house was limited to site selection (and staking!) but I did get one bed and one partial bed in. And did I mention it was sunny?

Review: Urban Farm magazine

I went out this morning to feed the porch cat and saw that somebody had left a copy of Urban Farm magazine on top of his little house for us. So after making a cup of coffee and breezing through the Times-Standard I picked up and took a look.

Five years ago when we moved to the Mighty Small Farm and got our first pair of chickens, I was struck by how few resources were available for the very small-scale farmer or animal husbander. The books and magazines I did see treated 5- or 10-acre plots as small, and a backyard flock of poultry was 25 or 50. And the tone was definitely for-profit industrial, not cottage scale.

Well, that was five years ago, and the interest in cottage-scale farming—permaculture, sustainable agriculture, urban farming—has surged. Same with heirloom varieties and heritage breeds. Good timing on our part!

Yet...yet. Well, let's look at Urban Farm. The Nov/Dec issue's features are fermentation, homemade kombucha, homegrown sprouts, goats, practical backyard design, urban wineries, and a Portland, Oregon, urban farm road trip. Columns are winterizing your beehive, egg-laying in winter, heritage turkeys, and a grab-bag column called Green Thumb.

The magazine starts strong with a touching piece by the editor on Christmas oranges, and a time when winter fruit was a special treat. Very nice.

And I enjoyed Kristina Urquhart's "Wintering Your Hive" column even though we don't yet keep bees on the Mighty Small Farm.

Ditto the features on fermentation, though I'll come right out and say how glad I am that Elizabeth Millard did not pursue her hints about fermented meat. Cheese and rice!

But "Sustainability and the City," about Stones Barn Center for Food and Agriculture in Pocantino Hills, New York, isn't, at 30 acres of cultivated land and another 40 acres of woodlands, exactly urban. The last feature in Urban Farm, the Portland travelog, talks about Zenger Farm, but doesn't go into much detail as to location or acreage, and it's the last bit of the article, behind curbside recycling and a music festival.

Kelly Wood's "Egg-laying in Winter" does a good job explaining why the ladies don't lay in the dark months of the year, and how to change that if so desired by adding artificial light to your chicken coop. What she doesn't discuss is breed selection for winter layers or broodiness, which also affects egg production. Since she's been raising birds on her 1/2-acre farm (yes!) for over 8 years, maybe it was an editorial choice to keep the focus general and light.

Which leads me to "Urban Feast: Let's Talk Turkey." Yes, let's! What I as an urban farmer would like to know is, which breeds for the table? How compatible will a turkey be (or turkeys? do I need to raise them in a group, or is one okay?) with my chickens, the mini goats you told me about a few pages back, cats, or children? Is processing my turkey for the table much different than killing and plucking a chicken? Do people raise turkeys for eggs? How much room does a turkey need? Bedding, coop, feed, what do they need?

But what I got was four pages on buying a turkey at the store, recipes—like I need another gravy recipe—and...oh, wait. That was it. Total bust.

So was the insipid "Practical Backyard Design." My favorite practical backyard design tip was to make time for contemplative practices such as yoga in order to "catch personal energetic resources and store them up for another time." That sound you hear is me gagging.

So, I don't know if you remember the old Organic Gardening magazine; it was full of articles on digging, and making compost and bins, and weekend projects like sheds and potting stands, and selecting the best wheelbarrow. Then they redesigned it to be more...woman-friendly? I don't know. But all of a sudden Organic Gardening was filled with recipes and articles on selecting flowers (but not how to construct a raised bed or lay out a flowering border) and there went a good magazine right down the drain.

So while I'm happy my neighbors love me enough to drop magazines (and egg cartons!) off at random times, I can't see myself ever subscribing to or purchasing an issue of Urban Farm. Too many photos of pretty landscapes and plants, not enough dirty hands or really, advice on dealing with a big issue on any urban farm: waste. Where does the poop go? You bought your mini-goats, who's going to deal with their manure? When I think of my chickens in the winter months, yes, the drop in egg production is indeed on my mind but so is the issue of odor control—well, that one's always on my mind; I have neighbors—and pest control. Those are really the issues: how to be productive on the little space you have, how to use what you grow and to recycle, how to be a good neighbor without those 40 acres of buffering woodlands, how to set a good example.

Now I must get up from this computer and go make myself an omelet with some home-laid eggs and local goat cheese before putting my work clothes on and getting my hands dirty. And maybe a little poopy.

Quite the Cheeple Puzzle

Okay, this puzzle of what breed the Cheeples are is driving me nuts. I am back to being sure of only Buttercup, the Buttercup pullet. And the Polish chicks, of course. Any ideas on what these little guys and gals are?

Mostly black with some red feathers, red ears, single comb, dark, clean shanks...Barnevelder? Java? Orpington? Chantecler? Buckeye?

Another mostly-black, with some white on her head, yellow shanks, red ears and a small comb...I have no idea.

Huh, yellow legs, single comb, white-tipped feathers...

Another shot of the hen with the sprinkling of white on her head; that other, similar chick is in the background.

Barred feathers, red ear, pink legs which are outside-feathered...I thought "Brahma," maybe a sport. And I thought I had two, but dig this: this one's got 5 toes! How could I have missed that? So now I really don't know.

Okay, this barred chick has yellow, outside-feathered legs, single comb, red ears, and only 4 toes. Both this chick and the 5-toed chick have cool, yellow eyes.

Whatever this one is, we only have one of it. Thoughts? Leghorn?

That white tipping again; same pullet or a different one, you tell me—my head's spinning.

See? Five toes.

I thought this was a Cubalaya, but they have white ears, and this guy's are clearly red. Single comb, dark, outside-feathered shanks...Langshan?

Hey, it's white-mottled head with white-tipped feathers. Does this help?

Can you guess what I am?

Well, clean, yellow legs, red ears, single comb and a pretty brown color. A hefty chick, too...

One more shot. Now, the chick in the background I know is a Gold-laced Wyandotte, 'cause I got them at the feed store. The chick in front...Let the guessing begin!

There are other chicks out there, but I got overwhelmed. Any help, Internet?

Another Cheeple Identification!

Now that the Cheeples have gotten down with sleeping outside (in their plastic tote shelter) without my red bike light as a guide, we've been working on foraging in the larger pen—still separated from the big girls—and perching:

A good shot of the blue splash Polish on the left, lower rung. On the top rung, second from the right and facing the camera, that's Dodo, the suspected Red-breasted Black Cubalaya cockerel.

Orange Gina assures me she is just looking.

Okay, that's Buttercup the Buttercup pullet on the top rung, left side. The mottled black-and-white chick, top rung center (just in front of Orange Gina)? I spent some time after feeding them and cleaning the coop just standing and admiring them today, and I noticed that both mottled chicks (there are two of them) have feathers on their legs. Hmm. To the Internet! I'm reasonably sure they're Brahmas, which is good news for Lurch, our Jersey Giant.

The Mystery Cracks Open

After brunch today my step-daughter and I were looking at the Cheeples playing in their outside pen. Out of the roughly two dozen chicks, just one has green legs. It could be an Ameraucana sport, and sports are certainly possible with the Mystery Assortment. Or it could be a Buttercup. I checked the Internet.

Buttercup chicks. Our little green-legged chick has racing stripes like these do...We have three or four light-colored chicks with racing stripes, but only one with green legs. (Photo by Marilyn Rhea Cheeseman, courtesy of feathersite.com)

If she's a Buttercup, this is what she'll look like when she's bigger, although her coloring is already coming in. Quite pretty! Too bad they're described a "flighty." While we've had pretty good luck with the Garys, our Leghorns, memories of the Lakenvelders lingers. (Photo by Bill and Sue Tivol, courtesy of feathersite.com)

The clincher was when I picked up the chick and saw she had the double comb—identity confirmed! (Photo by Lisa Feitshans, courtesy of feathersite.com)

We shall call her Buttercup.

Now, I also know I have a bunch of Polish chicks, black, white-crested black, white, and blue/blue-splash. I still don't know yet which will be roosters and which will be hens.

 (Photo by Ethan Logue, courtesy of feathersite.com)

 I am positive about one being a rooster, the great big chick we call Dodo. I'm starting to think that Dodo is the Red-breasted Cubalaya listed on the packing sheet. If that's so, this is what he should look like when gets bigger.

 If he gets bigger.

Cheeple Freedom Day

...or, the Day I Got My Dining Room Back.

The buff Polish chick on the left conveyed her anger by biting me.

 The chick on the right with the big red comb is the biggest chick, whom we call Dodo.

I'm pretty sure the weighty chick on the right is a Brahma—and we have two of them!

We've since identified the chick on the right as a Buttercup pullet.

The last two. I've got pine shavings all over my shirt because the chick on the right was very, very clever about avoiding capture. It was the only one who took advantage of all three dimensions by flying UP and over my hand.

Poo-free hands at last!

Again with the Cheeples

Yes, I again have a dining room full of chicks. Why?

1) They are insanely cute;

 2) I am down to six productive hens!

How'd we get down to six? Well, depredations last year reduced our numbers, as did the ladies' crazed jealousy of the Cochin duo's beautiful white fluffiness. And now one of the two Ameraucanas isn't laying—at all. Just up and quit. If she doesn't get going soon it's gonna sound a lot like "Chicken Run" back there. Cleo the Maran is broody. Again. And Pearl Wyandotte and Rhode Island Red Sonja are both old, so I don't expect them to lay much anymore. That leave six out of the ten working full-time.

Day One

Our box of 25 chicks arrived from the hatchery. One was DOA. The list that came with them said 10 were Black-crested Blue Polish, one is a Black-breasted Red Cubalaya—that one won't stay here long!—and 16 were "filler chicks." That's what you get when you order the Mystery Assortment!

Day Two

I saw that The Farm Store had Gold-laced Wyandotte chicks, and even though Marilyn and Pearl were just okay layers at best, people meeting the chickens for the first time almost always pointed them out and said, "Ooh, that one's so pretty!" Plus, I'm sentimental about the breed since they were our first-ever chickens. So we picked up two and added them to the group.

One of the little yellow fluffballs was deceased this morning when I went in to check on them, so starting on Day Three we are back at 25 chicks.

Greg is the egg man

...which, I suppose, makes me the walrus.

 The hubs knows an impressive number of our egg customers by name. Whenever I answer the door, they look surprised. Who is this woman? Where's Greg the Egg Man?

Our savvier customers know to ask for eggs even when the No Eggs Today sign is out. They have learned that chances are a dozen eggs are sitting on our counter waiting to have the gingrich washed off and be packaged.

"Hi! I know the sign says no eggs..."

 "Well, we haven't cleaned them yet..."

"That's okay! We had chickens when I was a kid. I'm used to dirty eggs."

 "Alright. Come on in."

 Who are our customers? Mostly people within about a half-mile of the house, whose routine includes walking/biking/driving down our street on their way to or from work or school or home, and who have seen the sign. Economically, our customers run the gamut from hoity-toity to street people. Most of them bring us empty cartons, so we have a good supply on hand. Jay, one of our customers, surprised us one day with a little something extra:

Goo-goo-ga-choo! I think we may have our new logo.

Did You Know...?

...that you can ship a swan through the mail, but not a canary?

...that the Co-op puts refried beans not with the whole beans but in the "International Foods" section?

...that I posted to my Canning Among Friends blog?

All true.

Pix like I said

Another afternoon spent in the dirt, and with it warm enough that I was in capris and a t-shirt:

We've been keeping chickens for about four years now, but this morning when I cracked open some eggs for breakfast (cake!), even I was surprised at how yellow and perky the yolks were.

Not a great picture, but here's the new chicken coop: it's a three-part job, with two yards flanking a central, pest-proof pen. The central pen has a roof and walls to the south and west, but is otherwise open. Doors lead inside, and into each of the yards.
What do you think, Coop de Ville?

 Again, not a great picture...I'm getting fed up with my camera. Maybe I should just accept the inevitable and get an iPod. Anyway, that's what a ton of hay looks like when you spread it out. They layout is something akin to what a spider hopped-up on cocaine would weave.

Another shot of the straw-bale beds. My "plan" is to plant on top of the bales, and have areas bordered by the bales to plant, with old wood beds and random plants tucked here and there. Like I said, compromised spider.

Getting Ready for Spring

Best just to rip the band-aid off quick: we've so far had a very mild and short winter. For those of you still experiencing winter, them's the breaks. That's not to say that we won't get more cold and dreary days before, uh, I was going to say summer but no, that's cold and dreary, too, so how about I just say September. I expect we'll have our April hail event, and maybe another hard frost or two, but the cherry and apple trees are starting to bloom, and I just bought lettuce and chard starts for the garden.

But before I can get those starts in, I have to finish prepping the beds, and there I am totally lagging. Most of the old wood beds fell apart, so I knew I'd have to replace them, but indecision on where to place them (so permanent!) and a serious lack of dollars to spend on 2x12s sent me in the direction of straw-bale beds. Lay 'em down, wet 'em thoroughly, inoculate them to compost, stick plants in them, and you're done. Twenty bales of straw, delivered, for only $168. That's about a ton. My arms still hurt from hauling that stuff all around the yard. But everything's done except the planting, which I did not get to today because I re-arranged the plants out of the broken beds and into their new homes, surrounded by straw. There's Raspberry Island, Potato Island, Strawberry Road, Onion Island.

The other springtime chore is mini-maxing the chicken flock as much as my softie heart can bear. We have a lot of lazy or just downright poor layers, so some folks've gotta go. The Cochins, those fluffy white ornaments, are at the top of that list. I'll keep one at the hub's request, but the other three got Craigslisted, as did our midget Jersey Giant. I would also re-home the remaining Maran, but she's an older hen now, and not laying so well, so, well, the softie says she can stay, as can Pearl Wyandotte, the oldest hen. That'll leave us with 11 hens...so it's back to eating in the living room for awhile!

Where Have I Been?

Christ on a cracker, has it really been since June since I've posted? Jeez. So here we go, with ungrateful thanks to my friend Wendy for kicking me in the can...I realized last year that Facebook was not only eating up a lot of my downtime but that it had also driven a stake into the heart of my blogging. So I killed my Facebook, and intended to start blogging again... but here we are, late January 2012, still with a seven-month blog drought. To clear the pipes I'm posting this one and the three draft posts sitting around. You may need some supplementary fiber for this much fun.

A quick recap of 2011:

The Post Office did not work me to death, but it took me half the year to recover from 2010, when the Post Office did. You know it's bad when you long for the return of the ten-hour days.

Still no sign of the flat-sorting machines they've been promising since, oh, when I started at the P.O. a little over four years ago. Which also means I am still a PTF. We occasionally hear their rumblings, though, so who knows. Maybe next year.

The Pendragon campaign I wanted to start in the spring finally got going in December when I acquiesced to reality and gave up on the Vortigern idea and just settled on Hampshire in 485 instead.

Our great plan to increase egg availability to the neighborhood by increasing our flock worked, kind of. Yes, we have more eggs. So more people stop by to buy them, so it's just as difficult to get them as before. And when we added more hens we quickly realized it's either the lawn or them, and that our current coop collection was inadequate to house that number of birds—I think we had 25 hens and pullets at one point! And, we got tired of having to be out in the yard at dawn and dusk every day to let them out and shut them in. So we made plans to build a new coop.

Now, the hubs and I are each capable of building a chicken coop, but if you know us...We finally hired a handyman neighbor to build it. During construction we moved the old coops out of the way, to the perimeter of the yard.

The funny thing about raccoons is, normally you hardly ever see them. But for sure they are watching you. I don't know how it is that function follows form in the case of the masked raccoon, but they are experts at casing your joint and robbing you when you goof. So one night, when one corner of the very heavy chicken coop door was unlatched, they very quietly pried up a corner, reached in a paw and grabbed the closest hen. Since the flock roosts by seniority, Marilyn Wyandotte had the plum spot furthest from the door...and right by the unlatched corner. We didn't hear a thing, so for her it was a quick death. But Frenchy Buff Orpington was second and evidently put up a fight, because we all woke up for that one. We got a call the next morning from our neighbor asking us to remove the carcass...Sigh.

The next night some of the poultry were understandably hesitant to enter the Coop of Death, and spent the night outside. Oh—part of the night. That woke us up, too. Ameraucana feathers everywhere.

So we evacuated the poultry to my step-daughter and son-in-law's coop in Northtown. One of the Jersey Giants made an escape attempt; maybe she got eaten, maybe she's living in someone else's yard now. But she's out of the flock.

The new coop is up and running, and while little paws have explored every inch of barrier, we have had no losses. And the sweet, sweet open-air design means no more dawn/dusk trips into Poo-land. Like I said, sweet!

Lots more happened around the Mighty Small Farm, but that's enough for now. Have some photos:

 

The day after the hubs left on his nearly-month-long sojourn to the Yukon, I fell off a horse. I was out of commission for about a week, and this paltry bruise is the most I have to show for it. Ripped off!

 Hubs at the Arctic Circle...They were gonna go for the Arctic Ocean, then realized the road depicted on the map is only passable in the winter, frozen. In summer it's a morass.

I tried to get him to go as a mail man, but our uniforms don't come with the stylin' mustache, so Mario won out.

Everybody loves the variety pack of colors that comes with an egg purchase from the Mighty Small Farm, but those Ameraucanas aren't the brightest bulbs in the hen house. But I'm totally sold on Rhode Island Reds.

 So I decided that moving large parcels and hampers of mail all day wasn't enough exercise, and joined Humboldt Roller Derby. This is my pal, Scrappy Scrappy Joy Joy, at her firsts scrimmage in Hayfork.

The Times-Standard continues to provide excellent amusement bang for the buck.

Souvenirs of Marilyn Wyandotte, an extremely bossy and handsome hen...Oh, and we got new furniture.