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

 

Fair Is Foul And Foul Is Fair

Spent the morning amidst the primal ooze at the bottom of the pond.  You've got to be madly in love with a pond to go through the spring cleaning it requires.  It's kind of like changing a baby's diapers:  foul, but you do it because the end result is fair.

In the pond's case, the fairness will happen in a couple of weeks, when the lily pads rise to the surface of the water. Then the frogs will migrate in from the woods and we'll have music as well as circus acts throughout the day.

But in the meantime, ugh!  Although my job is made more tolerable by a pair of gloves that my daughter gave me--thick rubber with a soft cotton lining, and they reach all the way up to my shoulders--mucking out the pond is utterly gross.

On pond-cleaning day my husband sets up a siphon with a hose, which sucks up the water very slowly.  Meanwhile, I kneel at the edge of the pond and with a racket-type contraption scoop up as much stinky gunk as I can reach.  Then I shake the gunk into a bucket and deposit it on the vegetable beds (waste not, want not).

Today's bottom-of-the-pond take consisted of a million leaves from the ash tree across the yard;  two dead fish;  about a thousand drowned earth worms and a couple of live ones (why hadn't they drowned?); the long, gelatinous remains of many water lily stems;  and five extremely wiggly salamanders--or one salamander that got scooped up five times.

The scooping usually goes on for three hours or so, by which time the siphon starts clogging up and I'm exhausted, my knees hurt from kneeling on stone,  and I figure that a 50%  water change should suffice to keep the pond ecology going for another year.

While the pond fills with nice clean water from the hose, I take another look at the vegetables with their side dressing of pond gunk and think about all that fairness-yielding foulness, all that death leading to new life. When you live close to the earth, after a while those fair/foul distinctions start to fade.  I picture how much good that black slime is doing to my broccoli, and the smell doesn't seem so bad.

 

Compost And The Monk

A friend sent me a link to an interview with Thich Nhat Hanh (http://www.guardian.co.uk/sustainable-business/zen-master-thich-nhat-hanh-love-climate-change#skiplinks ).  In it the 86-year-old Buddhist monk, one of the world's foremost spiritual leaders, talks, among other things, about his own mortality:

"It is like the tea. When you pour the hot water in the tea, you drink it for the first time, and then you pour again some hot water and you drink, and after that the tea leaves are there in the pot but the flavour has gone into the tea and if you say they die it is not correct because they continue to live on in the tea, so this body is just a residue.  It still can provide some tea flavour but one day there will be no tea flavour left and that is not death. And even the tea leaves, you can put them in the flower pot and they continue to serve, so we have to look at birth and death like that."

And even the tea leaves, you can put them in the flower pot and they continue to serve... I could just see TNH using and reusing the tea leaves, then carefully dumping the residue into his African violet pot.  And it's true, tea leaves are the nectar of the gods to a houseplant.  I'm sure that TNH has champion African violets, what with all the tea leaves and his equanimous presence.

What I'm wondering is, where did this angelic figure learn about the benefits of tea leaves for houseplants--or do angelic beings automatically know such things?

Apparently this angelic being is deeply into compost.  When he learned that a temple in his native Vietnam was planning to build him a memorial, this was his reaction:

"I said don't waste the land of the temple in order to build me a stupha. Do not put me in a small pot and put me in there. I don't want to continue like that. It is better to put the ash outside to help the trees to grow."

Such a cheering thought:  compost as the means to resurrection.  What better afterlife could any of us aspire to, than to to continue to serve by helping the trees to grow?

The Biggest Gardening Day Of The Year

...or at least, that's what I call it as I shovel out the hen house and dump the contents on the vegetable beds.

In case you're not familiar with my chicken-assisted, lazy-woman composting method, here it is:  throughout the year, I scatter bales of cheap, not-good-enough-for-cows hay on the floor of the hen house.  The stuff builds up and keeps things dry and reasonably neat.  The hens scratch in it and peck at the weed seeds and, most importantly,they poop on it. In the summer I also add garden waste, and in all seasons, carrot peels and coffee grounds and tea leaves and other non-meat rejects from the kitchen.

(Lest you be disgusted by the idea of once-a-year hen house cleaning, I should say that my nine hens reside in a majestic eight- by sixteen-foot space, and that except when there is deep snow on the ground they spend most of their time outdoors.  So by chicken-shed norms, mine approaches Hilton standards.)

Then, on just the right day in the fall, after the chard and kale have expired but before everything, including the chicken bedding, freezes solid, I cart the entire contents of the chicken house, minus the chickens, to the vegetable garden.

Today was that day.  It took me a week to build up to it--would the weather be right?  Would I have enough energy?  But this morning I girded my loins and got it done, in a two-and-a-half-hour marathon of shoveling and carting and dumping.  All at once, full-out, non-stop is the only way to do it.  If I put down my tools and sit down, or even worse, eat lunch, I may never rise again to finish the job.  The dusty, weary, back-breaking job.

In the last couple of years, as I breathe in clouds of chicken dust and heft and dump heavy shovelfuls of bedding into the cart, I've been wondering how much longer I can keep this up.  What with CFS and advancing age, I'm not getting any stronger.  The obvious solution would be to hire somebody to do the job, thus saving my energy and contributing to the local economy.  Likewise, my husband could hire out the splitting and stacking of the winter wood, and the mowing of the summer lawn.

But "use it or lose it" is a persuasive motto, even if it does not promise that by using it you get to keep it.  So we persevere, doing menial tasks related to such exotic essentials as warmth and food.

It's not so bad, really, especially since on hen-house cleaning day the hens have such a blast.  They can't believe their luck, having me in their midst for an entire morning.  And they love it that I'm acting like a giant chicken, scraping and scratching on the shed floor, moving stuff around and exposing buried treasure for them.  As if this were not enough, there comes next the ceremonial dumping of the new hay, fluffy, pristine and full of seeds that help to while away a hen's dull winter evenings.

And for me there is the garden, snug under its duvet of hay, manure and the occasional biodegradable coffee filter, and the delicious knowledge that, until next April, I am well and truly done with gardening. 

To My Garden Helper...

Dear V,

Remember those beans you helped me plant when you were here?  First we scratched up the dirt and mixed in the chicken manure.  This was to make sure that when the seedlings started growing the dirt would be nice and soft for their little roots, and they would have good things to eat (the chicken poop).

Next we put the bamboo grid on the first garden bed.  The grid had sixteen spaces, a square foot each.  Into each space you put three rows of three seeds each.  I followed behind you and poked each seed into the dirt with my planting stick. When we finished that bed we went on to the second one, and then the third.

The sun was hot, and we were sweating, and your back hurt from bending over for a long time, but we persevered.

Nine seeds x 16 squares x 3 garden beds = 432 seeds...and every one of them sprouted!  Now each of those 432 plants is giving dozens of green beans, which contain the young seeds to make future plants grow.  And every time I pick a bean, the plant thinks "I'd better hurry up and make more seeds before the weather turns cold!"  So it puts out more flowers, which turn into more beans for me to pick. 

We're having an avalanche, a hurricane, a tsunami of beans.

I wish you were here to help me deal with it.

Just think--all those bright and tender beans for us to eat from now until next summer, and to share with others (I'll bring you a big basketful when we come for your birthday).  And all we did was stick a bunch of seeds into some dirt.  We didn't have to put in chemical fertilizers to feed the plants, because the hen poop did that job, and we didn't have to spray herbicides because the plants grew so close together that the weeds couldn't get any sun, so they never sprouted.

I don't know whether you will want to grow your own vegetables when you are older.  But I hope that you'll remember how generously the earth rewards us if we show her a little kindness.  And I hope that you will always pay attention to your food, and to where and how and by whom it was grown.

Hugs,

Lili (Lali's nom de grandmere)

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.

In Which The Gardener Gets A Reprieve

Not once since I embarked on my vegetable-growing career decades ago--not in Alabama, North Carolina, or Maryland--have I worked in the garden in January.  But yesterday, in Vermont, I did.

Every year, in March, I go out and plant spinach in the snow, which guarantees me an early crop of greens that snatch us back from the brink of beriberi.  As I pick the delicious but none-too-abundant leaves, I promise myself that this time I will not neglect to put compost on the spinach beds at the end of gardening season.  And every fall, sick of garden tasks, curled up by the stove, reading a book, I tell myself that it's o.k. to have early spinach that is less than lush, as long as I have some spinach.  By the end of November the ground freezes solid, the gate  into the chicken yard where I store the compost freezes shut, and the whole question of fertilizing garden beds becomes moot.

Yesterday, however, out of nowhere, the sun came out;  the temperature rose into the 40s;  and the knee-deep snow melted down to a mushy couple of inches.  In some places I could actually see the compost that, having filled the two bins to overflowing, I had dumped on a corner of the chicken yard.  I tried the gate and, sure enough, I was able to work it open.

It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I seized it.

I got a shovel and a big tub (the gate wouldn't open wide enough for the wheelbarrow), filled it with compost, carried it to the garden and dumped it into the first spinach-destined bed, then filled it again and dumped it into the second bed.  I gave a few desultory digs with the shovel to see if I could work the stuff into the soil, but couldn't make a dent--the soil was still frozen hard.  Come spinach-planting time in March, the little seeds will have to find their own way through layers of snow and compost to a bit of dirt to burrow into.

I spread the compost as best I could, then put away the shovel and the tub, and bid them adieu until spring.  As I did so, a cloud obscured the sun, a cold wind picked up, and the chickadees, who had been chirping while I worked, fell silent.

This morning the gate to the chicken yard is frozen shut, the compost is covered in ice crystals, and we're in the depths of winter once again.

Purification Rites

Cleaned the chicken house this morning before the sun got hot.  It wasn't a particularly gross job--I believe in a high bird-to-bedding ratio--but it was horrendously dusty.  All that pecking and scratching and fluffing the hens do all day long, week after week, just pulverizes the hay, and the dried manure eventually turns to dust as well.  I put a scarf over my hair, and considered wearing a dust mask.  It would have protected my lungs, but might have made me pass out from overheating. 

I clean the chicken house twice a year--in between I just add more hay as needed.  The fall cleanings go on the garden after the last vegetable has been picked.  By spring they will be ready to mix into the soil, to feed the new crops.  Thus, as I shoveled today my thoughts were on next year's garden.  Chickens and compost and gardens are things outside time.  They just go round and round in an endless cycle.

I did the job soon after breakfast, and as it was both early and bright, the hens were in an egg-laying mood.  When I entered the shed, one of the young Rhode Island Reds was sitting on the nest, wearing that inward, meditative look that a hen gets when she is about to lay.  I had to open the door to the outside because of the dust, however, and that let in a lot of light, which she didn't like, since hens prefer to lay in secluded, shady places.  Out of the corner of my eye I saw her looking annoyed, and finally my shoveling got to her and she hopped out and ran outside, protesting .

All the time I was working I could hear her cackling.  Every few minutes she would come to the door to see if I was finished.  But I wasn't, so she went away complaining, and pretty soon the rest of the hens were cackling as well, having just been reminded by their sister that they had eggs to lay too.

There is nothing like a bunch of hens pacing up and down and cackling at you to make you want to finish a job in a hurry.  So I shoveled as fast as I could, and carted away cartloads of old bedding while muttering "O.k., o.k., I'm almost done now.  Just a little longer and you can come in."  I usually try to get into a Zen state of mind when doing jobs I don't enjoy, but there was no way I could do that today with all those hens harassing me.

Finally, I carried away the last cartload.  I swept out the corners of the shed, replaced the roosting pole and the water dish, and scattered clean hay on the floor.  I closed the big door and the room became cool, dark and inviting.  As I was putting away the shovel, one, two, three hens filed in through the little trapdoor, and made a beeline for the nests.

An Egg Of One's Own

The minute the salmonella egg brouhaha broke out, I started surfing the web for information about the incidence of salmonella in the eggs of backyard flocks.  Like every researcher, I had something I was hoping to prove:  that an egg from a hen who is known to you personally is safer  than an egg from an industrial egg factory.  This would not only make me feel good about the eggs I eat, but would enable me to write a post encouraging my myriad readers to get (just a couple of) hens.

I'm sorry to say that my searches failed to yield the results I wanted.  Salmonella can infect an egg externally through fecal matter.  Thus, cleanliness is important, and one could make the case that it is easier to keep a clean environment for three hens than for three hundred thousand.  But industrial egg producers do clean and disinfect the eggs, so external salmonella is not likely to be the culprit.

Unfortunately, a hen can be infected with salmonella and, while appearing perfectly healthy, pass the bacterium into the egg while it is being formed.  I could find no studies of the incidence of salmonella-infected hens in backyard flocks.

Today, at last, I heard on Morning Edition an interview with Dr. William Schaffner, Chair of the Department of  Preventive Medicine at Vanderbilt, (you can listen to it here ).  He said--briefly, and in passing--that, while there are no studies to this effect, it makes sense that hens from smaller flocks would be less likely to be infected than egg-factory hens.

Thus, though it is remotely possible that one of your three or four hens might be infected, the rest of your little flock, having access to the great outdoors, living in clean, well-ventilated quarters, and enjoying a natural, stress-free existence, would be much better able to fight off the infection than their caged egg-factory sisters, who lead the most inhumane lives of all domestic animals.

Now for a statistically insignificant data point:  my family and I, and my dogs too, have been eating eggs from our own hens off and on since 1975.  These eggs have been consumed in various stages of doneness--the dogs eat them raw--and we are all alive and well.  (Well, some of the dogs are no longer alive, but they didn't die of salmonella.)

So yet again, I will make my case for keeping a small backyard flock of hens:


1.  Eggs from your own hens are fresher, tastier and probably healthier (see above) than eggs from industrial farms.
2.  Hens are good for you.  They are companionable, attractive, and not at all stupid. I am sure they raise your oxytocin levels.
3.  Hens are good for the garden:  they produce fabulous manure that, mixed with old bedding and allowed to age over the winter, will make your vegetables and flowers flourish.  Also, they will happily consume your garden waste and all the extra veggies that you would otherwise feel guilty about throwing out.

Hens Feasting On Overgrown Zucchini

4.  A few hens are not at all time consuming.  I probably spend no more than five minutes a day feeding and watering my six hens, and gathering eggs (I'm not counting the time I spend chatting to them).  Because I use the "deep litter" bedding method, I only clean their shed in spring and fall.  I should mention that my hens spend the day outdoors except when there is deep snow on the ground, and their shed is quite large.  A smaller shed, or a bigger flock, would require more frequent cleaning.
5.  Many cities (including NYC) now allow people to keep small flocks of hens.  My feeling is that as long as you keep things small, clean, and are generous with gifts of eggs, you'll get no complaints from neighbors, and that means that you can keep hens just about anywhere.  Please note:  I'm talking about hens, not roosters.  Regardless of his other charms, the male of the chicken species is always loud, and often bellicose.

If you're curious about raising eggs of your own, here is a terrific website.

First Failure of the 2010 Gardening Season

Last month, I wrote here about planting spinach in the snow. I have believed unswervingly in this method since I read about it in The Mother Earth News, and have spoken about it with such fervor that I have made several converts.

One such acolyte (you know who you are) informed me matter-of-factly last week that her spinach was an inch high. Now that the temperature is in the 70s, she must be eating baby-spinach salads. Moi, on the other hand, have nothing coming up in my garden. Nothing, that is, except for green grass and emerald weeds.

Being a good (recovering) Catholic, I made an examination of conscience. What had I done wrong, or not done right, to account for this failure? The answer was, I had committed sloth, one of the seven deadly sins. Specifically, I was guilty of autumn sloth.

I confess that by October, when the leaves turn and the birds leave, I get heartily sick of gardening. The intensity of it! The endless planting, weeding, harvesting, washing, blanching, freezing! Lord, I pray, deliver me from all this bounty! Kyrie eleison, hurry up and send that killing frost.

To get the animals ready for winter, I clean out the shed and pile the manure-enriched bedding on the garden. This is hard work, but I do it gladly because it marks the end of the gardening season. When I'm done, I put away the pitchfork and the cart and go inside and light a fire. The last thing I want to do is go back to the dead garden and work the compost into the ground. Instead, I leave it on top of each bed, like a kind of duvet, waiting for the first snow.

When I went out with my seed packets last month, the snow had melted overnight, but the ground was far too hard to work. As long as I was out there, though, I figured I might as well drop the seeds into the compost, and hope for the best.

Well, the best hasn't happened. Those little seeds never did find a molecule of dirt to glom on to, or they would have come up by now. Despite torrential rains, the hay-and-manure duvet was far too thick for them to navigate, and I am sure they are stuck somewhere near the middle of it, not germinating.

As a result of my autumn sloth, I have no spinach, alas, and no arugula. Moreover, last summer having been a bad veggie summer, I now have three packages of frozen veggies in the freezer: one of pureed pumpkin, one of broccoli, one of peas. I cannot believe that I am going to be forced to buy greens at the grocery store.

I know that I should get out there right now and work that fabulous compost into the ground and plant some seeds. And I know that if I do that in the beds where I put in the spinach and arugula I will turn up and kill sad little green embryos. What to do? Just in case, I'll fork over and plant the beds in which I didn't plant the early greens. And in another couple of weeks, I'll replant those early beds again. Mea culpa.

Putting The Garden To Bed

I'm glad I live in a place with four distinct seasons. It suits my temperament, which thrives on change and variety. Here in Vermont, no sooner do I fall prey to serious cabin fever than spring arrives. No sooner do I run out of vegetables in the freezer than the garden goes into production. No sooner do I get sick of looking at the garden in decline than it's time to call it quits for the year.

That's what I did this afternoon. I pulled up all the frozen bean plants (we'd have had a bumper crop, if only I'd planted them a week earlier) and fed them to the chickens. I pulled up the broccoli and fed it to the goats. The tomatoes, eggplants and peppers had been reduced to twigs by the recent frosts, but I threw them over the fence into the goat yard anyway—they'll give the babies something to play with. The ground under the Sungold tomatoes (the only plants that produced significantly this year) was covered with green fruit, which I carefully gathered for the chickens.

Then my husband dumped cartloads of lovely hay-cum-manure from the goat house on the garden, and I spread it carefully until each bed was covered in a couple of feet of the stuff. When I was done, the garden was slumbering under a fluffy, slightly smelly duvet of compost that will quietly work its magic in the coming frozen months.

“Good night,” I said to the garden, “sleep well. See you in the spring.” And I went into the house. The 2009 gardening season was officially over. Time to turn my mind to the wood stove and to the drawing table.

Of course the gardening season is not really over. The Swiss chard is still going strong, as is the kale. I still have to dig the potatoes, and bring in the rosemary, and harvest the sage, the oregano and the thyme.

But I like to think that it's over.