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

 

Milestone

Google Blogger, which keeps track of such things, tells me that as of last week I have published one thousand posts on My Green Vermont. Other than breathing and sleeping and brushing my teeth, I can’t think of too many acts I’ve repeated a thousand times.

Back in 2008 the friend who got me started (thanks, Indigo!) had to explain to me what a blog was. Wanting to avoid unnecessary gaffes, I consulted a number of websites about the rules of successful blogging. And they all said the same thing: you must post frequently. Daily, if possible. Several times a day, if you’re really serious.

I took the advice to heart and gradually increased my output until by 2010 I was posting over four times a week. That was the most I could manage, given that I’d also taken it into my head to accompany each post with a drawing. None of the how-to-blog sites recommended this, but I did notice that most blogs featured photos, many of them beautiful, sensational, or both.  Apparently, online readers expected to be served pictures along with words.

I had a digital camera but its battery was unreliable, and rather than deal with that I decided that it would be simpler and more creative to illustrate my posts by hand. (Now, after all these years, I could paper a room with the originals of my little drawings.)

How did I come up with so much to write about? It turns out that blogging is like finding a loose thread in one of those factory-made hems—you give a little tug, and it just keeps coming. I would start a post about one of my pullets laying her first egg, and that led to memories of being in bed recovering from the measles, with my pet lame chick hobbling and cheeping on the blanket.

I wrote endlessly about chickens and goats and gardens and woodstoves and the wonder of having made it to Vermont, where I could finally live “close to the earth,” as I proclaimed on the blog’s banner. When it became apparent that I couldn’t sustain my homesteading way of life indefinitely, we moved to a retirement community, and for a while I wrote about the dramas of downsizing, and the necessity of letting go of beloved objects and remaining flexible in spirit if not in body.

And then, one day, there seemed to be nothing more to write about. Gone were the goats and the milking pail, the hens and the egg basket, the compost and the wheelbarrow. The woodstove gave way to an efficient gas fireplace and my garden was reduced to a couple of potted citrus trees in the sun room (I gamely squeezed out a post about those).

What was the meaning, if any, of my new life? What occupied my mind? There were my fellow residents, obviously, and the shock of living in a kind of village where the only people under sixty-five were the staff. Plenty of grist for the mill there, but what if a neighbor took it into her head to read my blog?

Between 2015 and 2018 I only managed a measly total of sixty posts. And, just as the advice websites had predicted, my readership all but disappeared, drawn no doubt to livelier, more committed bloggers who managed to post every day, or even twice a day.

Then this year, in the dark of winter, I was spending my days in a miasma of politically-induced despondency. I badly needed to shake myself out of that state. What if I started blogging again, maybe only once a week? I could pretend that it was a real job that required me to post every Wednesday, except in case of emergency. What did I have to lose?

And so I tricked myself back into writing, and once I gave that initial tug, the thread kept coming. Now my week has rhythm and shape.

With a feeling of dread approaching nausea (what if, this time, the thread has broken, the well run dry?) on Thursday morning I force myself to spew whatever is in my head onto the screen. On Friday I piously gather any crumbs worth preserving and ditch the rest. I spend the weekend adding more crumbs and worrying about how I’m going to wrap the thing up.

On Monday I ditch some more and, if I’m lucky, come up with an ending. Tuesday is for drawing and for fighting the improvements that Canon insists on making to my scanner. On Wednesday, just before I hit “Publish,” I ditch some more (how could I have let this ridiculous sentence almost make it into the finished piece?). For the rest of the day I bask in the relief-- reminiscent of the way I once felt after my daily run--of having written.

And because I fret daily about meeting my self-imposed deadline, other worries, such as about the fate of the nation, not to mention the planet, are temporarily forced to take a back seat. It’s going to be a long, angst-filled political campaign. The way things are going, I may have to start posting daily, just to keep my sanity.

Culling

Despite the supposed scarcity of honey bees, the majority of blooms on my two little apple trees managed to get fertilized. When the petals fell off, each former flower cluster turned into a cluster of baby apples, five or six to a cluster.

If left to their own devices, a lot of these infant fruits would wither and drop from the branch, but even if only a couple remained per cluster there would still be too many clusters and too many apples for the tree to nourish, resulting in an undersized, unhealthy crop and possible damage to the tree from too much weight on its branches.

So every year, after blossom time, I go out and, armed with nothing but my God-given fingernails, cull the apple crop.

This is light, pleasant work, especially since, true to my European heritage, I believe strongly in pruning, and the tops of my semi-dwarf trees are within comfortable reach of my outstretched arms. Slowly I part the foliage, looking for apple clumps. If any two are closer than six inches, I pinch off one. And for each clump that I leave on, I look for the plumpest baby, and I get rid of the rest.

The job is soon finished, as I only have the two little trees, but every minute that I'm culling apples I think back to the time, many years ago, when I culled...baby rabbits.

This was back in the 1970s, when, having read in The Mother Earth News that rabbit meat offered a higher-quality protein than even chicken or fish, I decided that I owed it to my husband and children to raise rabbits for our table. You couldn't go wrong with rabbits: they would fatten on yard and garden waste; they made the best compost in the world (with which to grow more veggies, to feed more rabbits); and they reproduced in the proverbial manner.

I had grown up, in Spain, on my grandmother's home-grown and -processed rabbit meat, and I remembered that it was delicious. I wasn't ready to tackle the slaughtering--something my grandmother accomplished quickly and without fuss--but the rabbit man who sold me the pregnant New Zealand Red doe assured me that he would be glad to do the job for me.

The girls and I had fun feeding the big fluffy doe green treats from the yard in addition to her rabbit chow. We gave her lots of water and made sure her cage was sheltered from the sun. And a month later, just as the rabbit man said they would, the bunnies came--twelve of them, pink and hairless and hungry.

I went back to the original article to read what to do next. And what came next was culling. A doe, even a big one, could only successfully raise a maximum of eight rabbits, so it behooved the rabbit husbandry-person to cull the litter at the earliest possible moment.

I was, I thought, serious about raising rabbits, as I was serious about most everything in those days. My vision of homesteading on our 1 1/2 acres was as solemn as it was heartfelt. I was determined to escape the tyranny of agribusiness, and felt it my duty as a mother to feed my kids stuff that I grew with my own hands, whether they liked it or not. As for culling the baby rabbits, was I a real homesteader, or was I just channeling Marie Antoinette?

Back from teaching my classes the next afternoon, I parked the girls in front of Sesame Street, got into my jeans and boots, and strode to the rabbit cage. The mother was eating, so I had clear access to the nest box. There they were, all twelve of them, squirming in a cloud of fluff, their heartbeat visible under their paper-thin skin.

I took a breath, closed my eyes, and reached into the nest. I carried the four bunnies into the chicken yard, set them down on a brick, grabbed another brick, struck...and, leaving the remains for the hens, ran into the house and poured myself a glass of sherry.

And that is what I think about every spring, the whole time I'm culling apples.

Chickens On Pasture

We may have blizzards (well, almost) here in April, but that doesn't keep the grass from growing thick and lush and green. Today, barely into May, my husband did the first mowing of the 2010 season.

That meant that we had to move the temporary chicken yard from the lawn into the field. In the field, away from the chicken shed, the hens will need the portable house that my husband built last year, with beautiful, smooth carrying handles, a ground-level "lounge" and a top apartment (accessed by a retractable ladder) with room for roosting and egg-laying. This keeps the hens safe at night.

During the day time, they are supposed to range freely within the confines of the portable fence, but last year we noticed that the hens spent most of their time inside the house, not eating grass, not catching bugs, not making their egg yolks a deep orange color, and not saving us thousands of dollars in laying mash. Out there on their own, under the deep blue sky, I think they felt exposed and vulnerable--and with reason, what with spring-mating hawks wheeling and whistling above.

This year, in addition to the portable coop, there is, inside the portable fence, an A-frame structure, also husband-built, that will provide shelter from the hawks and shade from the sun. We moved all these portable-but-heavy structures into the side field this morning--close to the driveway, away from the woods where predators lurk. Tonight, after sundown, we will transport the hens to their new abode.

To transport a hen, the most important thing is to wait until the sun goes down. Blessedly, after sundown chickens go into a sort of catatonic state, and you can do with them pretty much what you like. You go quietly into the quiet chicken shed. The hens make some muted greeting sounds, which you ignore. You pick up the nearest hen by her "shoulders" (the part of the wing nearest the body) and, supporting her with both hands, tuck her head under your arm. The bird you have picked up may make some protest, and so may her mates on the roost, but they will all settle down as long as you move quietly and don't trip on any feeders or waterers or nests that may be in the way.

That is what we are going to do tonight. I have gotten so good at this that I can catch and carry two hens at a time. When they are inside their portable house, we will close all doors hermetically. Early tomorrow morning I will go out with water and food, and let them out into a brave new world of tall, tall grass and wild, wild bugs.

I am hoping that the A-frame shelter will make them feel secure enough to go out and catch their meals on the wing or on the hoof. I am especially hoping that the three new pullets, who so far have barely ventured out of the shed, will learn to enjoy the intoxicating flavor of new grass. This concept of moving chickens around from place to place during the growing season is the dernier cri in chicken keeping. I just hope my chickens agree.

After getting the chickens' summer quarters ready, I spent the rest of the morning threading sticks into another panel of my wattle fence--not much more to go!