Chicken Nostalgia

I dashed into the hardware store the other day, looking for niger seeds for my finches, and, this being Vermont and almost spring, I walked by a display of sugaring supplies. Next to them was a forty-pound bag of chicken feed, and the sight of that bag pierced me like a sword. 

It’s been six years now since I took my little flock to be killed, in preparation for our move to the retirement community where we now live. My hens were big, affable, butter-colored Buff Orpingtons, the golden retrievers of the chicken world. They were, as hens go, unflappable, and they made it through Vermont winters in their unheated chicken coop. They were not egg-laying machines, like those sad, nervous Leghorns favored by factory farmers. My hens’ egg production waxed and waned with the seasons, as God intended it to. 

On the other hand, they were composting machines, and my garden depended on them for its fertility. All year round, hunting for seeds, they scratched and shredded the layers of old hay that lined their coop, and deposited nitrogen-rich droppings into the mixture, which I periodically hauled to the garden to work its miracles. 

As thrifty as Depression-era housewives, my hens consumed every wormy apple and rotten tomato I threw into their yard. They even ate their own eggshells (after we’d eaten the eggs), thus recycling the calcium. I admired them for their usefulness, but I loved them for the eagerness with which they rushed out of the coop in the morning, for their cozy go-to-roost purrings in the evening, and because they knew and trusted me, and would let me sit with them in the sun while they pecked at the grass, and sometimes at my shoelaces. 

I have a long history with chickens, from the ones that my grandmother used let me feed when I was barely old enough to walk, to the live capons that she sent by train to Barcelona for our Christmas dinner, and the little lame chick that she sent to keep me company as I lay in bed recovering from measles. 

Now, as my autumn declines into winter, I would like nothing better than a couple of hens (you can’t have only one, because they get lonely) to comfort me. But as Vermontish and progressive as the community where I live is, chickens are not allowed. And so, whenever I run across a bag of feed in the hardware store, or drive past the “Chicks Are Here!” sign in front of the Tractor Supply every spring, I practice the art of letting go. I’ve read that this is important preparation for the ultimate divestiture, and makes it easier. 

I practice letting go of the idea of keeping hens, and of raising my own food, and of being who I was all those years ago. And in my mind I also practice letting go of Bisou, who is fine right now but who will be my last dog, and whom I’ll inevitably have to let go in another three or four years. 

On the other hand, carpe diem! we are told. Live in the moment! But how to do this while simultaneously practicing letting go is the emotional equivalent of rubbing one’s stomach while patting one’s head. The two things keep leaching into each other. No sooner do I enter fully into the joy of taking Bisou for a walk than I’m overwhelmed by the thought that someday we’ll be taking the last one. And I can only recapture the enjoyment of the walk if I firmly put out of my mind the inevitability of loss. 

It’s at moments like these that a couple of pasturing hens would come in handy, to turn my mind to dirt baths, grass, earthworms, compost, and the cycle of life.

My grandmother and I, feeding chickens

 

Chicken Shortage

This spring, hatcheries all across the United States have run out of inventory, and baby chicks are rarer than hens’ teeth. When I heard this news on a rainy afternoon two days ago it brought tears to my eyes. I wasn’t missing the sun, or the company of my fellow humans, or life as it used to be. I was missing my hens.

For years, they were the hub of my backyard ecology. Thanks to them, nothing ever went to waste. “Give it to the hens!” we said about everything from burned toast to apple cores, carrot tops, and curdled milk. And, magnanimously, persistently, the hens turned our refuse into eggs.

But they didn’t just give us eggs. Their nitrogen-rich droppings transformed the spoiled hay that I used for their bedding into the most exquisite of composts, which they turned and chopped and aerated all winter long as they scratched looking for seeds. In the spring, all I had to do was dump the stuff on the garden and (pretty much) watch the veggies grow.

Those hens were my friends. They were Buff Orpingtons--big, cream-colored birds with a placid disposition. They didn’t lay as abundantly as some of the more flighty breeds, but on the other hand they didn’t let Vermont winters get to them. They would rush to greet me when I entered their yard, peering up at me first with one eye and then the other, in that inimitable chicken way. And in the evening, when I went to collect the eggs and close the coop against the fox, the fisher, and the weasel, they would purr sleepily on their roosts. If I close my eyes, I can still feel the handle of the egg basket in my fingers, and hear the cluckings and feather fluffings as the girls settled for the night.

What impelled me, a city child, to keep hens and grow vegetables? I used to think that it had started with the 1974 oil embargo, when the price of everything, from gas to groceries, shot up overnight and it dawned on me that my loved ones and I were at the mercy of world events. I, who had never so much as watered a houseplant, bought a packet of tomato seeds and pushed them one by one into the packed dirt at the side of the house, right under the eaves where, at the first rainstorm, the few seedlings that had sprouted promptly drowned.

I went back to buying tomatoes in the supermarket, oblivious to the fact that the seeds of self-sufficiency had been planted in my head long before, by my mother’s stories.

“During the war [the Spanish Civil War, 1936-39],” she used to tell me, “before your father and I met, he and his family lived in Barcelona and almost died of starvation, because they couldn’t get food in the city. But we, [meaning she and her parents and siblings, who lived in one of those now-rare diversified farms] we  always had food. Even though we were near the front, and there were bombardments and many dangers from retreating soldiers, the chickens kept laying and the rabbits kept having litters. We even had a pig that we slaughtered in the fall. And the garden gave us cabbages and kale in the winter, and melons, eggplants, and tomatoes in the summer. And the trees made olives and almonds, and after a rain we children would go out to hunt for snails….”

This is the lesson I retained: depend on the supermarket for your groceries, and if something really bad happens you’ll go hungry. Grow your own food, and you’ll be o.k. During most of my adult life, therefore, whenever zoning regulations allowed it, I kept chickens.

So I understand where today’s would-be chicken keepers are coming from, but I hope they know what they’re getting into: hens need a coop to shelter in, and a securely-fenced yard in which to sun themselves, and they won’t produce if they’re fed on grass and kitchen waste alone. (Despite my self-sufficiency aspirations, I used to have to supplement my hens’ diet with commercial feed.) What hens don’t need in order to lay eggs is a rooster. In fact, given the male chicken’s libido, if he has fewer than at least fifteen wives to share the burden, he will stress them out with his amorous assaults.

If kept safe and satisfied, a hen will lay eggs for as long as five years, but she will eventually go through menopause. Do these new chick buyers have an exit plan for their aged birds? And when they first bring home those cheeping balls of fluff, do they realize that, absent a mother hen, day-old chicks need a heat lamp to keep them alive and lively? That you have to teach them to drink by dipping their beaks in water? And that they will dive in and promptly drown if that water is more than an inch deep?

If you are one of the lucky souls able to get chickens to cheer you and feed you in this depressing time, I applaud your impulse toward self-sufficiency. I wish you happy birds, overflowing egg baskets, and the illusion of security afforded by the knowledge that, if worst comes to worst, you can always make an omelette. May you and your flock rejoice in each other for years to come. And if you want any advice on poultry, I’ll be glad to oblige.

Last Egg

In chicken years, they were about my age.  No conventional egg farmer would have let them live so long past their laying prime, but time kept getting away from me, and they did do their best to lay an occasional egg, so I ended up coddling them through this brutal winter, buying them special grain  treats and filling their water dish with hot water laced with organic cider vinegar.

But although the retirement community to which we're moving is as green and granola as they come, they don't allow chickens.  Not wanting to postpone the inevitable, last night, in the dark, I plucked my hens one by one gently from the roost, and covering their heads with my hand to keep them calm, deposited them in the big dog crate, over which I then draped a dark cloth.

Today, in the clear, sub-zero dawn, we loaded the crate into the truck.  It was surprisingly light--old ladies don't weigh much--and my husband drove them to their final destination.

Except it wasn't exactly final, because nothing ever is.  Right now the hens are lying in state inside our freezer.  In a few days I will take them out and put them in the big stock pot with onions, celery and carrots, and let it all simmer for a day and a night.  Off the bones, the stringy meat will gladden the hearts of Wolfie and Bisou, and the rich broth will nourish my husband and me.  Thus, our six hens will literally become a part of us, until we in turn become nourishment for other forms of life.  Nothing is ever lost in this remarkably thrifty universe.

After my husband left with the crate, I went into the silent chicken coop.  I unplugged the heated water dish.  I looked at the frozen pile of droppings under the roosts and decided to wait until the spring thaw before hauling them to the compost pile.  Then I glanced into the nest and there was an egg, big and beige and frozen solid, one last gift from my last hens.

When the Days Begin to Lengthen...

"When the days begin to lengthen, the cold begins to strengthen," Laura Ingalls' Pa used to say, and this year is proving him right.  We're having the kind of winter that I moved to Vermont to experience--a no-nonsense season of deep snow, sub-zero days, and clear light glinting off red barns.

Every year, the day after the solstice I insist that I can already tell a difference--the days are getting longer.  Spring is just around the corner.  The holidays are past, the Christmas flu is but a fading memory, and peace descends upon the earth.  The garden is asleep under its white frozen duvet.  The freezer is full of veggies that I planted and weeded and watered and harvested all summer long.  The dogs, when it's below zero and the wind is blowing, are content with just a short walk.

There's really not that much to do, other than talk to the houseplants as I mist them and refill their humidifier, and work on the long-neglected piece of needlepoint that I bought a year ago.  The snow plow cleared our driveway before dawn today, but the north wind has playfully drifted the snow back onto it, so the long-postponed trip to the dump will have to be re-postponed.  And shoveling the front walk can wait until the temperature climbs into the 20s.  In the chilly sun porch the goldfish are in semi-hibernation, and take their own sweet time coming to the surface at feeding time.

It's a lovely, slow, empty time of year.  The hens, who feel about the solstice the way I do, have started laying again.  But if I wait until the evening to collect the eggs, I find them cracked and frozen in the nest.  Eggs are wondrous things, however, with amazing powers of survival.  After I bring them into the warm house, the cracks seal themselves again somehow, and disappear without a trace.

Winter Comforts

It's getting seriously cold and snowy here, so I spent part of the day yesterday making sure the animals and plants were comfy.

The hens got special attention, since my geriatric flock is now down to six.  One disappeared mysteriously before we left for my mother's funeral, and another, who'd been looking poorly for over a year, perished when the weather turned frigid while we were gone.  (In case you're wondering, when one of our chickens dies we take the corpse out to the woods to provide some wild critter's dinner.  It's always gone by morning.)

I gave the hens some extra wood shavings for bedding, and a "poultry hot-cake"--a cylinder of high-protein food that I hang from a string so they can peck at it and be both nourished and entertained.  And, for the biggest treat of all, I defrosted some "drone brood" for them.

Drone brood, given to me by a bee-keeping friend, consists of bits of honeycomb filled with drone (hence, undesirable) larvae. The hens had never seen it before, and they exclaimed appreciatively at this sudden appearance of insects in the middle of winter.  I'm saving the rest of the brood for Christmas morning.

The four apple trees and the espaliered apricot got their winter "socks"--spirals of white plastic that I wrap around the trunk to keep the rabbits from girdling the bark.  And I wrapped the potted fig tree  in a double thickness of burlap.  The tree is supposed to withstand temperatures of -10F, but I'm not taking any chances.

Then I went to work on Wolfie and Bisou, whose needs were purely cosmetic.  I was clipping their nails, as I do every couple of weeks and, for the first time ever, I nicked the quick on one of Wolfie's. But instead of having hysterics, splattering the room with blood, and never letting me near him with the clippers again, this most tolerant of dogs merely muttered something that sounded like "wow" and let me finish the job.

When the clipping and brushing were done I rewarded the dogs with a walk in the field to eat frozen deer poop.  Speaking of deer, I really should wrap the Leyland cypresses in the backyard in burlap, to keep the deer from eating them.  But they don't actually kill them, and I know the deer have to be terribly hungry to come that close to the house, so I may just leave the Leylands to tough it out.

The wood is stacked on the porch.  The chickens are cozy.  The dogs are groomed.  My only worry now is the black cat that hunts far from the house, at the bottom of the field.  I don't think he has a home.  How is he going to make it through the winter?  There's no way I can lure him to the house, with the dogs around.  I'd leave some food out for him, but I don't know where to put it so he'll know it's there.

Any ideas?

Faberge Eggs

It's four in the afternoon, and practically dark outside.  In a minute I'll go to the chicken house and turn on the light, something I do at this time of the year in the hopes of encouraging the girls to lay.

When they hear me coming they make their way clucking up the little ramp and into the shed, one by one.  While they're settling in for the night I check the nests for eggs.  On good days there are two--one brown speckled with maroon dots, one a barely-there pink--but often there are none.

It's not like this all the time.  Last summer my eight hens averaged three or four eggs a day.  But now the days are short, the weather is cold, and the hens are moulting, shedding their old feathers and growing new ones, a process which puts extra demands on their bodies and causes them to temporarily stop laying.

But the main reason that they lay so few eggs is that my hens are four years old.  In chicken years, this means that they are perimenopausal.  It does not, however, mean that they are near death.  Chickens in stress-free environments, and my hens lead extremely serene and peaceful lives, can live a very long time.

During their non-productive years hens still consume--in addition to grass and bugs and garden waste in season--laying pellets ($16.99 a bag) and something called "scratch" ($6.99 a bag).  In winter, when there is snow on the ground and they get bored staying in their shed all day, I buy them the occasional fresh cabbage or squash ($2 a pound) to peck at, and a kind of poultry cake with extra protein which costs $7.99.  Hens do well in "deep litter," a thick layer of hay that keeps them warm in winter and later becomes the compost that keeps my garden growing, so I buy five or six bales of mulch hay a year, at $2 a bale.

 (Gu

est illustration by my granddaughter, VWT)

You can see where this is going, and I'm not even counting the cost of building the shed, the gallons of barn-red paint to make it match the house, the electricity to keep their water from freezing or the gas for the endless trips to the feed store.  I am not an accountant--accountants probably know better than to  keep chickens--but even I can tell that every one of those eggs I bring into the house rivals in extravagance the eggs that Carl Faberge made to amuse the Czarina at Easter (one sold a few years ago for $18.5 million).

Serious egg producers do not waste resources on perimenopausal hens.  Industrial egg farms slaughter their hens before their second birthday--a blessing for the birds, who are kept practically motionless in cages during their productive life.

I am hardly serious, or I would have gotten rid of my hens years ago.  But I know that I cannot just keep adding new chickens to my flock year after year.  I know that I cannot keep my eight hens forever.

I have it all figured out.  In the spring I will go to the feed store and buy half a dozen day-old pullets (at $2.50 each), which I will keep in the basement under a heat lamp and check on and cluck over every couple of hours for weeks.  The pullets will prosper under my watchful eye and begin to lay in the early fall.  At that time, I will make an appointment with the "chicken processor," and he will in less than half an hour transform my bright-eyed, friendly old hens into featherless, headless carcasses identical to the ones in the supermarket.

I will bring them home in the cooler and put them in the freezer, and for a while I won't want to think about them at all.  But eventually I will take them out a couple at a time, put them in the big pot along with some carrots, celery and onions and turn them into fabulous, life-sustaining chicken stock.  The meat, tasty but extremely tough, will go to the dogs.  And another chicken cycle will have begun.

(Guest illustration by my grandson, RFT)

Japanese Beetles

I remember with total clarity my first sight of a Japanese beetle in my first garden, back in Maryland a thousand years ago.  "Come look at this beautiful insect!" I shouted to my daughters, and we all stared at what, with its iridescent copper wings and emerald head and thorax, looked like a scarab out of a pharao's tomb.

Of course, I have since learned to hate Japanese beetles.  I have trapped, drowned, squished and cursed whole generations of them.  When we left sub-tropical Maryland for Vermont, one of the many blessings of the move appeared to be the relative absence of Japanese beetles.

There were always a few hanging around the roses in mid-summer, and the top leaves of the Harry Lauder Walking Stick (you can take a look at this weird-looking shrub:  http://www.missouribotanicalgarden.org/gardens-gardening/your-garden/plant-finder/plant-details/kc/c360/corylus-avellana-contorta.aspx) always got that lacy look that tells you the beetles have been at their orgies.  But as a semi-buddhist gardener, I believe in leaving bugs alone unless they are actually killing my plants.

This hellishly hot, wet summer, however, the beetles have arrived en masse.   They have reduced the leaves of the Harry Lauder and of the ornamental plum tree to brown filigree.  I don't eat either the bush or the tree, so I wasn't too concerned.  But when I saw that the top branches of the apple trees were turning brown, and the blueberries I picked had chunks chewed out of them, I got mad.

I went out in the early morning with a pail of soapy water and started shaking beetles out of the trees.  But they were up at the very top of the branches to catch the early sun,and this meant that when I shook the branches most of the beetles fell on me instead of into the bucket.  This caused an involuntary jumping reaction on my part, which dropped even more beetles on the ground.

I got even madder.  I had set out meaning to drown every single beetle in the garden, and I was not even coming close to my goal.  But because being in the garden often calms me down, I eventually decided that catching some beetles was better than catching none, that perfection is the enemy of action, that it is impossible to control Nature, etc.

I persevered, and when I had a goodish mass of drowned beetles in the bucket I went to the hen yard, called the hens, and poured the contents of the bucket on the ground.  To a hen, a Japanese beetle is as a truffle is to you and me.  Here are the girls, gorging on my harvest of iridescent scarabs:

My time was well spent.  In fifteen minutes I managed to decimate a garden pest and give my hens a nutritious delicacy.  My eventual recompense will be a clutch of protein-rich eggs with bright orange yolks free of the slightest trace of iridescence.

If there is a more rewarding job than hunting Japanese beetles, I don't know what it is.

Chicken Fence

Those of you who follow the complications of my simple life may recall that several years ago I tried to disguise the ugly wire fence around my hen yard.  My idea was to thread sticks through the spaces in the wire net so as to hide the wire and achieve the rustic look of a wattle fence:  http://mygreenvermont.blogspot.com/search?q=wattle+fence

The wattle fence was a dramatic failure, because after the first winter the sticks started to disintegrate, and also because Wolfie discovered the pleasure of pulling out the remaining ones and carrying them around the yard.  Worst of all, the weight of the sticks pulled the wire out of shape, so that it sagged and looked even worse than it had in its pre-wattle stage.

My next attempt at disguise was to plant four Leyland cypresses in front of the side of the fence that is visible from the patio.  But last fall was a bad season for wild apples in Vermont, with the result that hungry deer came much closer to people's houses than they normally do.  Our deer came all the way into the yard and chewed those little cypresses almost to extinction.

My urge to improve the look of the fence was complicated by my wish to avoid a suburban look--as with the pre-made fences at Home Depot and Lowe's--as well as the industrial farm look offered by the manufacturers of serious livestock fencing.  I wanted a custom-made fence--nothing fancy, just sturdy and functional and non-sagging.

But good fence builders don't grow on trees, and it took me the better part of five years to find mine, via a friend whose sheep he shears.

A fence builder who shears sheep?  Yes, and who farms his family's land and keeps cows, chickens, sheep and meat goats.  And who, with his wife, home-schools their passel of kids.  You need to have more than one string to your bow if you want to farm in Vermont.

The fence builder showed up at the appointed hour, backing his truck and big trailer all the way up our perilous driveway.  He was accompanied by one of his kids, who helped get rid of the last sticks still clinging to the old wattle fence.  He came again the next morning, with two kids, worked some more, and left behind this marvel of a fence:

 

Now whenever I look outside I rejoice at the perpendicularity of the posts, the tautness of the wire, and the overall neatness--even the elegance--of my hen yard fence.  The fence runs all the way around the back of the shed, so you cannot see its full glory.  But you get the idea.

And just look at the girls, pecking at the dirt, safe from ermines, weasels, fisher cats, raccoons, foxes, feral dogs, coydogs,  wolf-dog hybrids, coyotes, bears and mountain lions. They are as happy as I am.

Some Things I Know About Eggs

Fresh-laid eggs are best. They're fine for scrambling, frying, or baking.  But here's what I always say when I bring a carton of eggs as a hostess gift:  if you're planning to hard-boil them, or whip the whites for a souffle, you need to age them a bit.  Leaving them on the counter overnight should do it.

The color of the shell indicates nothing other than the breed of the bird.  A pure-white shell may come from a happily pastured hen, and a brown or blue or green one from a hen kept in a cage.

If you break open an egg and the yolk is a shockingly bright orange, congratulations!  It means the hen has been out on grass, which has transmitted its gift of carotene to the bird, and now to you.

If you break open an egg and find a slight red spot in the yolk, don't freak.  It is NOT an embryo. It just means that a tiny blood vessel ruptured as the egg traveled down the oviduct.  It will vanish without a trace in cooking.

According to Temple Grandin, laying hens are the most abused of all farm animals http://www.grandin.com/inc/animals.make.us.human.ch7.html.  If you find it in your heart to care about the welfare of chickens, spend an extra few cents and buy eggs from cage-free hens.

Hens are bright, warm-hearted creatures, not mere egg-making machines.   Let us try to see beyond the egg on our plate to the living, questing being that laid it.

Spring Babies

Every year at this time I am overwhelmed with desire for animal babies.  I miss the goat kids that used to make the place come alive with their hopping and jumping and general delight at having landed on this amazing planet.  I long for a little donkey, one with big eyes and long soft ears and tiny hooves that I could take on walks and perhaps, when it was grown, even ride side-saddle like the little old black-clad women I used to see on the roads near my grandparents' farm in Catalonia.

Failing a donkey, I would love a couple of geese.  I am perilously close to getting a couple of goslings, the kind that would grow low-slung, bulldog-like bodies with gray backs, white bellies and bright orange beaks.  To me, a goose waddling and honking in the yard is the very essence of country living.  What holds me back?  The lack of a pond and of adequate fencing, and the mountains of poop that a pair of geese would produce.

Short of a goose, I could get more hens.  I was at the feed store picking up grain last week and there they were, the year's shipment of day-old chicks, cheeping and running around under the heat lamps.  What kept me from scooping up a half dozen and taking them home?  Only my near fanatical belief that a peaceful, healthy flock is a small flock, and that I owe it to my hens to keep their numbers low.

So I've become resigned to the thought of no new babies at the place this year.  But that's not quite right. There is new life here after all. 

As if to reward me for my restraint the potted lemon tree has just presented me with eight little  lemons.  This is the tree that, as you may recall, I had so much trouble shaping and acclimating           ( http://mygreenvermont.blogspot.com/2013/02/shape.html).  I was surprised and grateful when it suddenly covered itself in blooms, then dismayed when most of them dropped off.  But I became a dedicated pollinator (I was going to write "husband") to the remaining few.

Every morning after breakfast I would pick up an old watercolor brush and tickle the innards of each flower, hoping that I was doing it right.  The petals eventually dried and fell off, and I kept peering at the base of the pistils, looking for the slightest swelling that would tell me that I had succeeded as a bee.

After days of looking in vain, I decided to enjoy my lemon tree for its foliage and abandon all thoughts of a crop.  Then suddenly yesterday there they were: deep green and less than a quarter-inch long, but definitely lemons, my own little lemons in whose procreation I had played an active part. 

I feel such a fatherly kind of pride in every one of them, that I'm not sure I'll ever bring myself to make them into lemonade.

Dogged By Dog Guilt

I know I'm not the only one suffering from this, but sometimes it feels that way.  Are there really other people out there who, watching their canine companion snoring peacefully on the rug, wonder whether the dog is sleeping because, a) she is tired or, b) she is in despair at the hopeless monotony of her days?

There is no end to the emotional and mental states that I attribute to my dogs:  frustrated ambition, a sense of unrealized potential, loneliness, boredom, and existential despair.   Don't think I haven't noticed that some of these preoccupations also occupy my mind.  But it's hard to keep from projecting when my dogs are at my feet (Wolfie) or under my elbow (Bisou) practically 24/7.

I feel that I am perpetually disappointing them.  Every time I close my laptop or put on a sweater they catapult to the back door in the mad hope that something magical is about to happen--but alas, it's just me going to fire up the wood stove or spritz the plants.  It's that all-forgiving but never-ending hope in their eyes that does me in.

I'm lucky to be a member of an unofficial dog-guilt support group.  I have dog-loving friends whose dogs by any standard lead enviable lives.  They have good food and soft beds.  They have received the benefits of training.  They enjoy the company of their own species and are hardly ever out of sight of their owners.   And yet when we humans get together, one of our perennial topics of conversation is the guilt that dogs us.  We each assure the other that her dogs couldn't possibly be depressed or sad or bored in any way.  This makes us feel better for as long as it takes to finish a glass of wine.  But the moment we get home and are greeted by our patient dogs ("Not that I hold it against you, but why were you gone so long?"), the guilt returns.

Many years ago, I felt guilty about my first dog, who lived in the back yard--now that was something to feel guilty about.  But all our subsequent dogs have lived in the house, slept in our bedroom, been trained and groomed and walked and cooked for.  And the guilt has, if anything, only gotten worse.

Lately the guilt has expanded to include my fish, my little Betta splendens that I got for aesthetic reasons but who, it turns out, has emotional needs like everybody else in this house.  Every time I go by--he lives in a large flower vase on the kitchen counter--he rushes towards me, waving his tiny fins.  If it weren't for the glass between us, he'd jump onto my shoulder.  He doesn't want food.  He wants to be petted.

So I do.  Every morning, after I let the dogs out, I stand at the counter and stick my index finger in the water and pet the fish.  I try to remember to pet him once or twice while I'm fixing dinner, and again before retiring.  I don't want him to feel ignored--my interactions with him are probably the highlight of his day. 

For some reason, though, I am delightfully free from chicken-related guilt.  I take good care of my hens, but although they come running whenever they see me, they don't have that ever-hopeful-yet-forgiving look in their eyes that the dogs have.  Besides, there are nine of them.  They are their own little tribe.  They depend on me for food and shelter, but not, thank heavens, for mental stimulation or emotional sustenance.  I find them blessedly restful to be around.

Chickens And Bullies

One of my hens was being bullied last week, and I had to take action.  She was showing all the outward signs of hen misery, standing hunched with her feathers fluffed in a corner of the shed.  I kept an eye on her for a couple of days and then realized that the other hens were pecking at her.

Now I want to make it very clear that my hen house is a Peck-Free Zone.  That doesn't mean that there isn't a pecking order, in which the top hen delivers mostly symbolic pecks in the direction of lesser hens who are showing too much interest in a certain worm or apple core.  But because I keep just a few hens in a large space my flock is not prey to the stresses that cause bullying.

Bullying among chickens (and here the delicately nurtured might wish to skip the next couple of sentences) can be a serious problem.  Once a bird gets hurt or appears weak the others will peck at it, plucking off not just feathers but bits of flesh, until it dies, at which point they will eat it.  Chicken bullying is such a horrible thing that every spring when the batches of fluffy, super-adorable baby chicks arrive in the feed store, the thought of the dangers of overcrowding prevents me from swooping up half a dozen of the little darlings and adding them to my flock.

Given the near-idyllic environment that my hens live in, I couldn't figure out what had prompted the abuse until I picked up the victim and saw that she had a partially frostbitten comb (this sometimes happens to chickens in winter) and somehow it had bled a drop or two, and the scent of blood had turned her sisters into ravening wolves.

I fenced off a corner of the shed and put her in it, along with food, some warm water laced with apple cider vinegar, and a heat lamp.  I had to prop a piece of cardboard against the fence because her bloodthirsty sisters were reaching in to peck her, and she was too stunned to move away.  But the warmth and the isolation and the vinegar all did their work, and in less than 48 hours she was healed and eager to rejoin the flock, who welcomed her back with open arms (hens have short memories).

There is no question that without intervention my bullied hen would have slowly succumbed to the attacks.  Likewise, it is a good thing that parents and schools have become aware of the effects of bullying on its victims, and are paying attention and taking action where necessary.  But sometimes I wonder if the definition of bullying has become so broad that it covers unpleasant but essentially harmless, sporadic interactions among children.  I worry that if well-intentioned parents overreact their actions may result in making the child feel even more vulnerable and helpless.

When I was in second grade, I had to wear an eye patch for a year to combat "lazy eye."  This ultimately saved my eyesight, but its short-term side effects were unfortunate.  One of the most popular girls in my class, a red-headed tomboy with a talent for making trouble, announced in the playground that the patch meant I had a contagious disease, and people should stay away from me. 

To say that I found this upsetting is to put it mildly.  I wept and wailed and railed at my parents and said that I never ever wanted to set foot in that school again.  Today, many people would classify this episode as bullying and would feel justified in speaking to the teacher or principal about it.  My parents, on the other hand, while they commiserated  and assured me that my nemesis was wrong in what she had done, did not interfere.  They must have figured that an occasional lesson in the school of hard knocks would not damage me, would in fact help me to acquire a thicker skin and enlarge my knowledge of human nature.

As it happened, the episode had a happy ending.  The errant girl mentioned what she had done to her father, who happened to be a doctor and who instructed her to apologize to me and to tell the other girls that my condition was not contagious. Shortly afterwards the redhead and I became friends.

I don't mean to minimize the damage that can be caused by prolonged, serious bullying.  In these cases, intervention is the responsible, the only thing to do.  But I do worry that sometimes we overprotect children--from germs, from falls, from unfair grades and unpleasant people.  But the world, unfortunately, is full of germs, falls, unfairness and unpleasantness.  And reasonable amounts of exposure to these evils is a kind of vaccination of which I would not want my own child to be  deprived.

Hens Below Zero

I've been trying hard not to write about the weather, but the nights have been below zero for a week now and my frontal lobes, which is where I mostly write from, have been taken over by the state of the thermometer.

The farmers around here have been busy keeping their livestock from turning into deadstock.  Driving past big dairy farms I notice that the veal calves, who are kept in individual plastic igloos away from the rest of the herd, are wearing snug little coats.  I'm sure the coats help some, though they can't compare to the warmth and comfort they would get from their mothers' bodies.

I have my own livestock concerns.  How do you keep nine hens comfortable in such frigid temperatures?  I've read that using heat lamps weakens chickens' immune systems and makes them less resistant to bad weather.  So I'm limited to simpler techniques, such as delivering bucketfuls of warm  drinking water laced with cider vinegar, and bowls of hot powdered milk thickened with laying mash.  Also extra "scratch"--chopped grains that you throw on the ground so the hens can scratch for them, an activity which gives meaning to their lives. On sunny days I open wide the shed door so they can at least stand on the top step, the rest being snow covered, and get some vitamin D.

It's a kind of miracle that they have all survived so far.  Just before Christmas the black hen developed an impacted crop.  I won't go into detail, but the standard treatment for this condition involves getting the chicken to vomit.  I did this several times but it didn't help much, and I was sure she wouldn't make it through the late December cold spell.  But she is still alive, even though I suspect that her problem has not gone away completely.

A couple of red hens have chosen this particular time to molt.  Chickens molt every year, usually in the fall, and they temporarily stop laying.  My two molting hens are a pathetic sight:  their long  tail feathers are gone, and their heads are almost bald.  Their backs and bellies are sparsely covered in the downy feathers that normally constitute a chicken's underwear.  How would you like to go out in this weather in just your long johns?

This is not a young flock.  Three of the hens are three years old, and the rest are two.  In an industrial egg farm they would be slaughtered.  But despite advanced age, impacted crops and inopportune molts, I'm getting five eggs a day from this hardy bunch.  True, I turn on a light for them for several hours in the evening, which helps to keep them laying, but it shows remarkable enterprise on their part that they're laying at all.

Last night when I brought in the eggs, one had frozen in the nest.  The expansion of the contents had made a long crack in the shell, through which I could see the intact inner membrane.  I left the the egg in a bowl on the counter to defrost, thinking I would save it for the dogs.

This morning when I picked picked it up, mirabile dictu! the crack had disappeared.  The contents had shrunk as they defrosted and the edges of the break had mended so perfectly that there was not a sign of the crack.

For all their apparent fragility, eggs are tough, and so are chickens.

The Lazy Gardener's Guide To World-Class Compost

Here's what you do:  forget those instructions about gathering your various compost ingredients, layering them carefully, wetting them down and turning them frequently.  Instead, get two or three hens--or six, if you are ambitious--and put them in a shed.  If they have access to the outdoors, and they should, an 8'x8' space will accommodate six layers luxuriously.  You want your hens to be able to go outside:  the air and grass and bugs are good for their bodies and their souls.

You get a couple of bales of hay that is too old to be fed to cows, technically known as "mulch hay," and spread some of it on the floor of the shed.  The hens will rejoice in this, pecking at the hay seeds and scratching around until even the longest stems are nicely shredded.  This is the beginning of your compost pile.

As the hay in your chicken shed--the term of art is "bedding," or "litter"--becomes soiled, just sprinkle some more hay over it.  This will keep the surface clean and free of smell, and the hens don't care what's underneath.  Even better, as the bottom layers of hay start to decompose with the help of the chicken poop, they will help to keep your hens' feet warm in the cold weather.

But hay is not all you add to your bedding-cum-compost.  All your garden waste--your overgrown zucchini, your spent broccoli plants, your Halloween pumpkins--goes into the hen house.  So do your kitchen leftovers, including eggshells, which the hens eat to recycle their calcium.  You can throw in coffee grounds and tea leaves, too.  Although the hens will not eat them, they make great fertilizer.  Your birds will love bits of meat and fat, but bones will attract rodents, so put them into your (now greatly diminished) trash.

Then in the fall, when the garden is finished, you shovel the soiled bedding into your garden cart and dump it on the garden.  You will notice that the hay has been shredded, the poop has mostly vanished, and there is a good bit of fine dust:  this is the organic fertilizer that your hens have made for you out of the kindness of their hearts, the super-nutritious manna that will give your young plants a terrific start in life next spring.

Since chicken manure is very rich in nitrogen, it needs to age before it comes in contact with plants.  I let mine sit and ripen in the empty garden, absorbing rain and sleet and snow, from October to March.  If you are in a climate that allows year-round gardening, you will have to pile the soiled bedding somewhere and let it age for several months before using it.
When you've finished dumping the litter on the garden, go back and spread a clean layer of hay on the shed floor.  Give the hens a couple of apples, sit and talk with them a while.  They have fertilized, turned and shredded your compost for you.  Backyard alchemists, they have transmuted your kitchen waste into golden-yolked eggs.  They deserve a bit of thanks.

Requiem For Three Hens

Last Monday I did my least favorite farm chore, one that I dislike even more than cleaning the chicken house:  I took my three oldest layers to be slaughtered.

They hadn't done anything wrong.  They'd just grown old--perimenopausal, to be exact.  They still laid an egg every once in a while, but not often enough to warrant feeding them through the cold months, at which time their laying would decrease even more.  I had anticipated this back in the spring, when I bought eight day-old pullets whom I expected to begin laying in the fall.  This has now happened, and these teenage hens are laying like a house on fire.

The perimenopausal hens were only three years old--time passes quickly if you're a chicken.  They were Buff Orpingtons, big-boned, blond and plump like Walkyries, with calm dispositions seldom found in the operatic world.  Orpingtons are a "heritage" breed.  This means that they don't lay as early or as long or as consistently as modern hybrid hens.  They also exhibit a strong tendency to become broody, to sit on eggs for weeks at a time in the hopes that something will hatch.  They don't care that there's no rooster in sight, and the eggs are therefore infertile.  All they care about is sitting with Buddha-like concentration on the nest, keeping all the other hens at bay.  This results in broken eggs and in eggs laid in odd corners of the coop by desperate hens.  And while a hen is broody, she doesn't lay eggs.

I hope I have convinced you by now that slaughtering the three Buff Orpingtons was the rational and sensible thing to do.

In our many years together, my husband and I have occasionally slaughtered a chicken or two.  The slaughtering part we do beautifully, choreographing each step so the chicken is hardly aware of anything (I keep my hand over her eyes the whole time).  The plucking and gutting and cleaning, however, are a mess.  I know that this is something that our grandmothers did routinely every Sunday, in the interval between church and dinner, but the reason they did it so efficiently is that for them, unlike for us, it was routine.  When we did it, it was hard, sweaty, smelly, uncertain work ("What is this thing on the liver?  Don't nick it, it might be the gall bladder!").

Slaughtering our chickens at home, I believe, is the humane thing to do.  The chicken dies in familiar surroundings, by familiar hands--as happy a death as a chicken can hope for.  So in opting to take my hens to be slaughtered elsewhere, I was thinking not of them, but of myself.  My comfort and convenience, because I am human, overrode the chicken's quality of death, because she was a bird. This was not a decision I felt good about, though I made it anyway.

The night before the slaughtering, in the dark, I went into the chicken house and plucked the three hens, one by one, from the roost and put them in a roomy, ventilated box without waking them.  First thing the next day my husband put the box in the car and we drove a few miles to the farm where they were to be killed.

The friendly chicken-slaughterer offered to do them right away, while we waited, so we handed him the box and went to sit in the car.  We listened on Morning Edition to news of other slaughters all over the globe, and eventually the man emerged with our hens in plastic bags, pre-cooled and looking just like supermarket chickens.  We handed him $9 and took the hens home and put them in the freezer.

It will be a while before I can look at them again.  But one day I will put them in a pot with onions, celery and carrots and simmer them for twenty-four hours.  Then I will strain the broth and freeze it, and bone the carcases and save the meat for the dogs.  And our three friendly hens will become part of our bodies.

But I'm not there yet.  Right now, left to my own devices I would become not just a vegetarian (because milk and eggs imply the slaughter of bull calves and rooster chicks), but a vegan.  And I would steer clear of all the writings that prove that plants too are sentient, want to avoid pain, and want to live and prosper.

News Of Fin And Feather

There is pathetically little to say on the fin front.  About ten days ago, I bought two shubunkin (a kind of multicolored Japanese gold fish that looks like a small koi).  I let them float in their plastic bags on the surface of my pond for an hour, to get them used to the water temperature.  Then I cut open the bags and they swam out and disappeared into the murk.  I have seen neither fin nor scale of them since.  I don't think they've been eaten by a bird, since anything that would go fishing would be pretty big, and the dogs would have noticed.  And if they'd died, they would have floated to the surface.  So I can only conclude that they're lurking in the depths, indifferent to the fact that I bought them so I could rejoice in their flash and sparkle.

The feather news is more exciting.  A couple of days ago, worried that their mental development was being stifled by their close quarters, I moved the chicks out of their metal tub in the basement and into the chicken house.  Not, however, in the same space with the hens, who would have pecked them to death in two minutes. 

Fortunately the shed has three separate rooms, one where I store feed and tools, and two which are occupied by the chickens.  I moved the hens to the end room, where they have access to the outside, and carried the chick paraphernalia into the middle room, shutting all the doors.  I set up the mother hen/heat lamp, filled the chick waterer and feeder, and sprinkled clean wood shavings on top of the hay bedding.  Then I  gently decanted the chicks into their new home.

There was much bewildered cheeping at first.  And no wonder--how would you feel if you'd been living all your life in a studio apartment with seven other people and were suddenly dropped into the middle of the Astrodome?   A couple of the chicks went to sleep right away, they were so overwhelmed.  Pretty soon, however, they all started moving around, finding the waterer, pecking at the feeder.  Although during their tub days they had only seen my head and shoulders, they seemed to take the rest of me in stride, and the boldest one came over and gave my shoe a tentative peck.

Two days later, they are masters of their domain.  They roam all over, and every now and then they take off running and flapping their tiny wings, just for fun.  Their feathers are coming in fast, so in the middle of the day I have started turning off the heat lamp.  They look a little scruffy, with their mix of down and feathers, kind of like second graders who are losing their baby teeth and growing big ones.

When the chicks are fully feathered, I will retire the heat lamp and open the wooden doors so they can get plenty of air and natural light.  But before they can go outside, we'll have to undergo a lengthy process of chicken acculturation.  For each wooden door there is also a door made of livestock wire, which I will keep closed but which will allow the chicks to see and be seen by the hens.  After about a week, I will open these doors...and hope for the best.

On the wilder side of things, yesterday my husband saw, from the kitchen window, not one, not two, but three pileated woodpeckers making a big racket at the edge of the woods.

Blessings At Evening

Coming back from dinner with friends, I went straight to the chicken house to shut the hens in for the night.  As I changed from my dressy clogs (in Vermont this is not an oxymoron) into my barn clogs, my heart was full of dread.

This is a dangerous season for chickens.  Foxes, raccoons, coyotes, hawks and fisher cats are all looking for chicken dinners to take home to their growing families .  And a roosterless flock such as mine is especially vulnerable (I have never lost a chicken during the times that I've had a rooster).

All day long the red-tailed hawks had been wheeling overhead, giving their mating whistles.  I noticed that the hens were not tempted by the emerald expanse of grass inside the moveable fence, but were sticking close to their house.  In the afternoon, I went to give them a spotty apple and they came running--all but one of the New Hampshire Reds.  I called and called, squatted and peered under the shed, looked for feathers on the grass...nothing.
I gathered the eggs and went into the house.  I knew that if the missing hen didn't come to roost at sundown, I'd never see her again.  If she hadn't been eaten during the day, there was no way she would survive a night in the woods.

Imagine my delight, then, when I went to shut the hen house door after dinner and there she was, on the roost with her sisters.  I stood at the door for a moment while Biblical parables of lost lambs returned to the fold ran through my mind and then, at the edge of the woods, a thrush began to sing.  It was answered by one farther in, then another.  The three of them went on and on, piping their otherworldly tunes as the light dimmed, and I thought "In all the world, this is the place I'd rather be, at the threshold of the shed, with the hens safe inside, and thrushes singing in the woods."

On the way back to the house I saw that the porcupine has been chewing on our garage post through the hardware mesh that my husband nailed up.

Chicks!

Came back from Rutland with what looked like a Happy Meals box containing eight hen chicks, all of them small enough to fit inside an egg carton.

Like everything else these days, the choice of chicks was fraught with environmental repercussions.  The super-green, ultra-local way would have been to have them fathered by my very own rooster and hatched by one of my very own hens, but my vow of chicken celibacy made that impossible.  The next holiest option would have been to buy the chicks at one of the "swaps" held by the Vermont Bird Fanciers Club.  These chicks are locally hatched by chicken aficionados, and the money you pay for them stays right here, where it's needed.  But we were away when the most recent swap was held, and I didn't want to wait for the next one.

So I took the least holy, most convenient option (though it's still somewhat purer than buying supermarket eggs):  I bought my chicks at a chain farm-supply store, which buys them by the hundreds from hatcheries in Iowa and then sells them to the public, sort of the way Home Depot imports lettuce seedlings from Alabama.

The second environmental issue at stake was which breed of chick to purchase.  The chicken world is divided between "heritage breeds" and "sex-linked hybrids."  The latter are the fairly recent result of hybridization.  They are called "sex-linked" because males and females can be distinguished at birth by the color of their down, and the hens when they reach puberty will lay a big brown egg a day through cold and heat and all kinds of chicken stress.  The "heritage breeds" spring from the backyard flocks of yore that were the farm wife's pride.  They are charming and picturesque and offer genetic diversity.  They will lay some eggs, too, if conditions are right.

My present flock is composed entirely of heritage chickens:  three Buff Orpingtons (the color and shape of a well-risen souffle), one Barred Rock (white and black stripes, bright red comb), and two New Hampshire Reds (red).  But my chicken history also includes experience with sex-linked hybrids, and I'm sorry to say that their laying talents far outstrip those of their heritage sisters.

So as I stood over the vats filled with dozens of what looked like peeping eggs on legs, I had a choice to make:  charm and genetic diversity, or sheer egg-laying power? 

In the end, I compromised:  two Rhode Island Reds for charm, then three Red-Star hybrids and three Black-Star hybrids for those big brown eggs.

At the moment they're in the basement, in a galvanized metal tub with a mattress of wood shavings, a waterer filled with sugar water (for the first day only), a feeder full of tiny feed for their tiny beaks, and a mother-surrogate heat lamp.  They figured out about the food and drink right away, and they're not cheeping loudly, which is good, because cheeping is a sign of distress.  They still have that disconcerting newborn habit of falling asleep and collapsing in mid-stride, which used to send me into a panic when I was a novice chick handler.

I've been talking to them quietly, letting them eat out of my hand.  Like dogs, they like having their chest scratched.  And it's hard to stop touching that heavenly fluff--lighter than velvet, more substantial than dandelion down--as I try and fail to imagine how on earth an egg yolk turned into that.

Suddenly It's Summer

I blinked and the season changed from deep winter to 84F in the north side of the house.  Sweat was pouring into my eyes as I planted peas this morning--these are not optimal conditions for peas, who can deal with frost but hate the heat as much as I do. 

The garden is almost all in.  The southern transplants that I put in during the gale are looking great, thanks to the non-stop downpours.  The spinach I planted in two feet of snow last month is up, but if this weather keeps up it'll bolt before we can eat it.  Ditto for the lettuce.

In ornamental news, the plants that wintered indoors--zonal and scented geraniums, and a fairly sizable rosemary bush--are now outside.  I could practically hear the rosemary sigh as it fluffed itself out in the sun.  Some pulsatillas by the back door have put out their purple crocus-like flowers.  Other than that, nothing is blooming yet, unless you count the algae in the pond, which are putting on a magnificent show.

I guess what the old timers say about snow--that it's good for plants--is true.  Despite this long, cold winter, the third snowiest on record, I don't think I've lost a single plant.  The lilacs, including the one that was gnawed almost to death by our rabbit, are loaded with buds.  The lavender bushes, the climbing roses (also decimated by the rabbit), the giant hostas all prospered under that snowy duvet.

We're going shopping to the big city of Rutland (pop. 17,292) tomorrow, and I'm excited.  Here is my list:

16 broccoli transplants
8 big bags of mulch
dog food
laying pellets (for the hens)
a Havahart trap for the porcupine that's been eating our house (literally).  (Not sure what we'll do if we catch him.)
6--or maybe 8?--baby chicks!

Spring List

It might have been too much for our winter-wizened systems, after two days in a row of warmth and sun.  So today we're back to clouds and chill, and I stayed indoors and walked from window to window, and made a list of the tasks awaiting me, such as weeding. 

This is the best time of year for weeding.  The weather is cool, the weeds are small, the dirt is soft, and you are aching to be outside anyway.  And for every weed you pull in March, you save pulling six in July (in the heat, and when you've got a full-grown garden to deal with).  So I should weed the back garden and the front beds and the front walk as soon as possible.

I should also get rid of the hay mulch around the lavenders and the roses, and figure out what to do with that perfectly good hay--maybe pile it on the rhubarb bed.  I should cut down the stems of the apple mint and the lemon balm, and put them somewhere.  I should clean out the fish pond, but first I need to find out how to do this without disturbing the hibernating frogs (if I wait too long those frogs will be spawning, so time is of the essence here).

The biggest job will be to finish filling the raised beds in the vegetable garden.  It is really heavy work, carting dirt in a tub across the yard, and I'd like to hire a guy with a front-end loader to do it in a couple of hours.  But guys with front-end loaders work according to mysterious and unpredictable schedules, and the job needs to be done as soon as the piles of dirt defrost, or I'll miss planting time for the spring crops.  I'd hate to make a deal with a guy, and then have him not show up at the critical moment, so I'm dithering about that decision.

After the beds are filled, I'll need to empty the compost bins and pour their contents into the beds.  And once the bins are empty it will be time to clean out the chicken house and put the old bedding in the bins, in preparation for next fall. 

Speaking of chickens, my three Buff Orpingtons, though only two years old, are hardly laying.  One of them, in fact, lays soft-shelled eggs that break in the nest and make a mess (yes, my hens have access to calcium supplementation).  Fond as I am of them, it really makes sense to have the three Buffies slaughtered and replace them with chicks that will start laying next fall.

This brings me to the dilemma of what breed of chicken to choose.  The "heritage" breeds I have right now--Buff Orpingtons, Rhode Island Reds, and a single Barred Rock--are calm, friendly and picturesque.  But as layers they don't hold a candle to the "sex-link" hybrids.  These are modern genetic inventions that yield white roosters and red hens.  And the hens are veritable laying machines, producing giant brown eggs, unperturbed by winter blizzards and summer droughts.

Only real chicken aficionados raise the heritage breeds.  Those more interested in production and efficiency go for the sex-links.  I need to decide where I stand in the world of poultry.

Needless to say, the dog poop cleanup will take several more days, until the snow is entirely gone.  The ersatz wattle fence I put up last year needs some major maintenance.  A couple of long-neglected ornamental trees need pruning, and the beds in front of the house will need their annual application of mulch.

At this point in my spring list, I start envying the woodchuck, who can shut his eyes to the coming avalanche, and burrow back into the earth for another nap.