Yesterday White Chicken was diagnosed. The real cause of her ill health was “internal egg laying.” There is no certain cause of internal laying, and no real cure. It means that a chicken’s yolks (ovum) begin to be deposited in her internal body cavity, rather than traveling down the oviduct, getting clothed in egg white and shell, and laid.
After a week of nursing her on the dining room, thinking she looked better, it felt bad not to get to say goodbye and thank you.
Thank you, White Chicken, for two solid years of laying an egg just about every day. I always admired your ability to escape whatever fence I created, so you could go out and forage, but even more I admired that you could always find your way back in! White Chicken, you were unusually smart, and very independent. You got out where you wanted to go, but the fox never got you. You also perpetually thought I was about to kill you, and rushed around in near panic every time I came in with food and water.
Which is why, until she took up residence on our dining room table, there were no up close photos of White Chicken – except this one, of her with her adoptive mother, the crazy broody Wellsummer Mama:
White Chicken as a chick
Last night it was comforting to read in my online search that the most likely cause of internal laying is genetics, or how the baby chick was raised or maybe handled. In any case, it wasn’t me.
But still I felt sad all evening.
White Chicken was a really memorable, hard-working, nutcase hen. There is so much to know about animals — so much to learn about any living being you are trying to care for or love! Study is required to do it right. And paying attention. Listening. This October has been a month full of learning for me, in so many ways.
Last night I de-loused the flock. (The vet found lice on White Chicken.) I held each hen on my lap and massaged the powder gently into their skin. At first they panciked, then I hope they enjoyed the attention. At least they should feel better free of parasites. Today I will clear and dust the whole coop. I generally think of myself as providing a good home to my chickens and dogs – but I guess the lesson is that one can always do better. There are always things to learn. Listen.
ADDENDUM:
Yesterday I learned that my niece had a beautiful baby girl the night after White Chicken’s passing. This is such a comfort. I do not equate a chicken with a human life, still, there a beauty is the thought of a beginning of a life at the time of another life’s ending. I think, once I get to know my grandniece and see if she deserves the honor, I will add to her other beautiful names Liesel Eden the title Little Chick.
Ohoh! You can’t hide and running away won’t help you, honey!
Two of our chickens now have white discharge stuck to their butts, and this morning’s research suggests they have “vent gleet.” Hooray there are some easy fixes. Sharing this article with with you – here’s to poultry health!
Messy vents are not uncommon for even the healthiest chicken flocks. The tell-tale signs of what look like clinging droppings on the feathers followed by eventual feather loss and redness or scald…
Like so many who survived The Great Depression, my mother’s mother was a big canner. I never knew Mary Scalbom Nicholson in those days – by the time we grandkids were snacking round her kitchen table, or massed around the big green picnic table in the backyard, Grama had given up canning tomatoes and peaches. She still made her famous sturdy brown bread (bacon fat was the trademark ingredient), and beef vegetable soup though. I can remember the taste of each. I loved Grama’s bread, but it workd out best toasted. Woe to to the eater of a sturdy brown bread pb& j; best dunk it in the soup before you bite.
I have a theory that interest in food preservation skips generations. Adult kids of big canners that I know aren’t into it . My mom had no good memories of the process. She could still see Grama sweating over a steaming kettle in August – for something you could buy for ten cents at the grocery store! “Tomatoes are cheap!”she exclaimed to me. Marianne loved the art world, and she saw the two as competitive and mutually exclusive.
But from childhood I had a strong interest in “living off the land” (I loved art too). When Mom told me how Grama would get permission to pick all the wormy apples from a farmer’s tree, then spend hours and hours cutting all the wormy spots out, to make applesauce, I thought Ah! How clever! The difference in flavor between homemade and commercial applesauce is particularly noticeable. But Marianne may have known at some level she had only a short number of years on earth and she didn’t want to be remembered for applesauce and stewed tomatoes. She did make fantastic, towering lemon meringue pies – works of art! – and yummy soup.
I will be surprised if any of our six highly artistic children wind up canning, freezing, or dehydrating. I’m waiting to share all that I’ve learned about it with the grandkids.
And here it is harvest again. End of year review — in words and photos:
June –Peeling garlic at the MVA – Oskar’s driving test!
Year in review: 2016 – started out wet, but ended so very dry. Cool spring, so Asparagus came up late this year – (it loved the fall manure Edward put down! lots of new plants.) We got some Strawberries (4 quarts?) Spring Garlic – we ordered cloves and proved once again don’t buy seed from catalogue! Just buy grocery store (organic). We missed our black raspberries this year – but froze a batch of our blueberries. Finally a better year for Green Peppers! (But can someone tell me why they would start out strong, and then peter out, making little thin walled fruits??) Yay Cucumbers!! best production in ages.
Not a super year for Tomatoes here – how about yours? LOTS of Green Beans! The usual problems with Summer Squash and low yields – boo hiss! every single mold and bug that likes to kill squash plants must thrive in our yard, just waiting. Butternuts needed more water early on, so they are small, but many! Great luck with Herbs – I have dehydrated big jars of dried basil, lavender, and sage, and some rosemary.
August brought us lots of peppers
But my proudest garden moment was this week’s final planting of Lettuce and Kale seedlings in a south facing garden, which I think I can keep going well into the fall. We’ll see.
September brought us lettuce, greens beans, and herb harvests
And then there were the chicken/fox/racoon adventures.
Chickens added in to increase the laying, and chickens lost. More new chickens added to the remaining flock, and chickens lost again! Terrible. I returned from a summer trip to find multiple carcasses, and feathers strewn about where a fox had gotten in. We blocked the fox entry (he’d dug under a paddock fence) by driving stakes into the ground. The raccoon invasions and killings were harder to figure out, solved eventually thanks to the bulldog Trumbull, who although he very happy to chew on a chicken himself, can be counted on for ferocious interest in any raccoon that tries it! Trum scented the first raccoon hanging inside the chicken run, hiding in the dark in the branches of the hated mulberry. (Remember the hated mulberry? It may be scrapped). Edward found the carcass of a chicken, but walked right past that hanging coon, searching the ground and ceiling with a flashlight, until Trum’s intense staring gave the culprit away.
When I was a kid, racoons were my favorite animal – such cute faces! The awful thing about racoons in a flockster’s world is that they just kill. They don’t even eat the bird they kill. I am sure there is some kind of animal logic in there, somewhere. Some reason why. But I no longer like raccoons. Foxes have my respect, they take their kill away and feed their cubs with it. But raccoons break in for the sole purpose of eating the chicken feed! So why kill the roosting chickens?
We never did educate ourselves about racoon behaviors, but Edward did find the gap in the hard-cloth fencing where coons of all sizes were sliding in, and that was the end of the cycle of killing. We also began calling chickens in at dusk. No more “sleeping out” in the trees on hot summer nights! Better hot and stuffy in the coop than dragged to a shocking and untimely death. Our final additions to the flock are three Golden Marans from our local, down the road feed store (local readers find here: Glen Dale Feed Store) – the marans were a pricey addition, but I decided I wanted some dark brown eggs.
Our three Golden Marans and an Orpie enjoying grass!
So, what to do with this harvest coming in? Mostly just eat it.
September gathering in our messy kitchen
In other years I spent hours canning salsa and applesauce, but I find myself more likely to freeze things or dry them in the dehydrator nowadays. I’d like to come back to canning. Someday. All that steamy work in August/September pays off nicely later, with quicker meals during the winter months. And maybe next year I will learn how to use the pressure cooker canner that is waiting for me, upstairs… if I conquer my fears! With the higher heat of the pressure cooker, I can put up just about anything (green beans! homemade soup!), where with the usual boiling water bath you can only safely handle high acid foods like fruits and tomatoes. I did start some applesauce last night (not from our fruits, but our friend Joel at the Bowie Farmers Market. You can always do better, and learn more, about how to grow your own and feed yourself.
But for this year I’m pretty satisfied with the chicken flock safe and laying, some frozen and some dried remembrances of summer’s growing put up, nurturing a couple beds of lettuce and greens to help create October breakfasts and lunches.
Often at this time of year, I struggle with the “loss” of an early morning hour of light. But this year’s time change has been the worst that I remember. Maybe I am just getting old, crotchety, and inflexible. I really wish we could just cut out the “daylight savings” myth. Ben Franklin thought he had a clever idea. But not even a great inventor can be right 100% of the time.
Truth: we just cannotget more time by changing what time we say it is! We can’t save daylight – anymore than we can turn it off. Real time is fluid, constantly in flux as we rocket around our sun, in ever-changing yet predictable patterns. Predictable is good. If only, I tell myself, we would go to bed right at dusk, like the chickens, I tell myself, imagine how much better we ALL would feel (I tell myself, my kids, my husband). Stop projects, stop thinking, stop planning…and sleep. You can’t save daylight, and you can’t save sleep – you can just go get some more.
As long as we’re slinging mud at great Americans, Thomas Edison is another one who I have it in for lately. Without the light bulb –the TV screen – the computer screen – the cell phone screen – we would all go to bed like the chickens. Can you imagine trying to read a dark cell phone screen by candle light?? About the most highly intelligent thing that chickens do is file into the coop at dusk every day, for a full night’s rest. Get up with the sun, nature’s light bulb. Sleep more in winter, and don’t do anything you don’t have to do when heat and light are turned low.
But now it’s spring!! Tired or not, I have windows full of seedlings, yearning to breathe free, and garden beds to prepare for them. While these beds were not in use this winter and early spring, the chickens had free access. They did a super job of turning the soil, making it light and fluffy… also kicking a lot of soil out of beds… into the walkways…
Partly emptied garden herb beds, where chicks love to hunt bugs and kill old plants..
Oh well, focus on the positives. From now on, seedlings planted in beds will need protection of wire walls and a roof. The first thing my raised beds need to be is chicken proofed – so that’s where I am headed next.
Turns out Edward and I are not in agreement on what comes first. Oh-oh…
The first thing the raised beds need, Edward says, is to be rebuilt, since they are rotting. I confess I would have ignored this, cheerfully planted up rotting beds, and moved on. The beauty of teamwork, and the frustration…
Rebuilding project awaiting completion…
My garden partner is a far more speedy and efficient weeder than I, a remarkable green thumb, and an unexpected perfectionist about certain things that I am not. For instance he vies with the chickens in creating perfectly aerated, fluffy soil. Edward just loves to move dirt around. I am the better harvester, the seedling starter, the veggie preserver, and a perfectionist about certain things that he is not. It works out. Mostly. For now, the seedlings will have to lean into the window glass pining for sunshine another week – just as well, with last weekend’s temperatures. (One night 26 degrees…)
It works out. On we march, into April, aspiring to sleep like chickens. Dreaming of real spring…
Do chickens dream of spring?
Coming Soon: I have my Worm Consultant! But am I really ready for Vermi-Composting??
These are exiting and nerve-wracking times in the political landscape – doubtless many of us are tired of hearing about the latest shenanigans from the stump. But I couldn’t help making the connection last week to the presidential hopefuls as I passed by the table in our bedroom this morning that is loaded with greening trays and pots, and reminded myself that I MUST transplant the sprouts today.
We are all transplants in North America, depending how far back you go, considering Africa as the cradle of human civilization, and theorized emigration across the Bering Strait bringing humans to this continent(what made them do it? cold? war?…alas, history lesson forgotten). Every time I put the frail-looking seedlings into bigger spaces, watch them strengthen and rise, becoming producers of volumes of edible stuff, I am amazed. And deeply satisfied. True, transplants human or horticultural require some extra TLC – but once established they are tough contributors. But being as this is a horticultural more than a political post, I’ll leave that rumination there, and run for my potting soil.
In times of upheaval it’s a wonderful thing to slink away and spend time planting seed and seedlings for a summer of eating. Nature’s cycles of growth are a reassuring pulse, deeper, stronger, and longer-lived than the flapping of jaws on the podium. True that our climate lately has turned as chaotic as our political scene — last week temperatures varying from 30 degrees to 80s, very unsettling for Maryland in March. Hard to plan or guess what will come next?
Still, if we wish to eat food we must grow food – or else someone must grow it. This is a simple fact. So forward we go. And even though the weather patterns are uncertain it is still true that when you put a seed into moist warm soil, it grows. The process is primal and satisfying magic – and constant, at least a high percentage of the time.
Looking through the plastic sides of the berry boxes I use to get my seed started, I see some seedlings’ enormous web of root below, supporting those few baby leaves. Or, looking the other way, each set of tiny green leaves feeds a relatively enormous web of root – extracting from light and carbon what they need to make FOOD. The fact that carbon, problem of urban/sunurban living, is the food for plant life – what a remarkable system. It’s a privilege to partake in the process.
Partook in the process a LOT this weekend — flats of seedlings in berry boxes (my favorite method of for good germination of seeds)
become pots, and pots, and POTS (help!) of transplant seedlings –
filling every window – table – ledge, strengthening, growing, waiting for warmer weather to fill the garden beds outside.
Meanwhile, the Lettuce Boxes continue to add bulk to salads —
The author’s teenagers chicks – out on grass for the first time
It’s a horrible day to be a chicken – rainy, 40 degrees, and two more days of rain predicted. I just slipped off the chicken house roof (thankfully cushioned by a 3 foot wide raised garden bed covered in leaves, and not skewered by the garden stake that I broke in half with my fall) trying to close up the hole in the screening there to the sparrows, who are ever ready to take food and leave parasites behind, to say thanks.
At least our run has metal roofing panels on it, and straw covers the run floor, so the girls can scratch out of the raindrops and off the mud. Chickens should never be left to stand in mud – nor should any animal of course. It breeds disease. I learned long ago from a chicken lady that to keep suburban chickens odor-free you keep them on mulch, which they keep on turning their poops into, in their endless quest for seed and buggy snacks.
Post-chicken-former lawn…
Now that our chickens are ‘paddock method chickens” rather than free-range–and-destroy-the-backyard-chickens, our strategy has been to keep on throwing in more piles stuff for them to work through: straw (winter), or mown grass and weeds (spring/summer), or leaves (fall), or chip mulch if necessary. We shovel off the old composted stuff it when we need some dirt. I also have a compost pile for veggie scraps that I am not actively feeding to the chix that they can dig through – if they get bored.
Our current 3 bucket system – chick scraps, filtered water, & other compost
But today they seemed happy to have me leave them in peace, after I hoisted a couple more panels up over their heads (rattle crash!!) to keep them dry, and after I fell off the roof I was happy to leave too, feeling stupid and lucky. And lucky to be warm.
Before I give you the baby chicken update – got to have that! – let me digress a minute to stand on my soap box . I know that given who is likely to be reading this, I am likely preaching pointlessly to the choir. But as I look into the nesting box on this dreary day to find six eggs in a swirl of straw, I am smitten again with amazement for these creatures who with so little attention from me or Edward, kick out day after day this nutrition- packed oval of deliciousness in its own porcelain carrying case.
Rainy day eggs fresh from the nesting box
How can it be that humans feel justified in buying eggs at rock-bottom prices, from hens kept in cages, out of sunlight, or clean air (imagine the ammonia), unable to engage in scratching? How can it be that humans, who couldn’t pull this trick of an-egg-a-day off if they tried, feel not only justified but smarter if they get the cheapest price a dozen, knowing that it is a blood price? Good eggs cost $4-5 to produce (with no profit to farmer). If you are paying less, someone is getting hurt – either the farmer, or the chicken. Or both.
The dark yellow yolks: chickens saw sunlight, ate bugs and green stuff = more vitamin A &D = better flavor, better nutrition
Now, if you have lots of pasture to let your chickens really free range, you can get your eggs almost free, fed by what they can find for themselves. Chickens love to forage anyway. My sister’s farmer keeps his flock this way, providing some additional support in the form of cracked corn, in order to produce soy-free eggs for his customers. But this requires lots of space, preferably rotating pastures, per chicken. Not very possible in suburbia.
My chickens used to have my whole yard, (sometimes my neighbors’ yards, with eyes on our whole development, and it’s woods) to roam. We tried that, and it means I don’t get to have much of a “gardens and people yard.” Plus the neighbors were not into chickens roaming their lawns, and were worried about dogs hurting them. Domestic animals make the trade of freedom for safety. Last summer the hens who insisted on freedom in our back yard trees to enjoy their summer nights fed the fox. I lost ten last summer, and ten the summer before that. The fox has been hungry since…but the chickens get restless. Life is compromise.
The thought of better supporting my chickens leads me on a quest this blustery rainy day. In order to find out more about feed, I called Nick’s Organic Farm in Potomac Maryland – find him here www.nicksorganicfarm.com/. I used to buy my chicken feed from Nick, and would love to again, but I don’t love making that drive around the Beltway to Potomac to get it. The young woman who answered the phone told me that the soy Nick grows is organic and GMO free, he grinds it himself, and it forms the protein base for his chicken feed. Soy-free feed exists, she said. Can chickens digest soybeans, though? I queried. Is it natural for them? Well, chickens are from Asia, and so are soybeans, she responded. In this mix they may encounter more of it, but it is something early chickens would have eaten. Obviously a well-prepared employee.
My searching lead me next to Geoffrey and Sally Fallon Morrell’s website for their farm in Brandywine, MD (not too far from me) where I read that they give soy-free feed to their poultry. But – where do they get it? When a representative later called me back, I learned that they create their own feed, but so far do not sell it. The woman I spoke to also reassured me that soy isn’t bad for chickens, but can be bad for soy-sensitive people who eat their eggs (or meat). Find Morrell’s farm here – http://pabowenfarmstead.com/farm/
All this brings me back to the soapbox I stepped up on today, that giving our chickens good nutrition so that they are healthier and happier, so they can pass good nutrition on to the people they feed, is not a walk in the park. Does it matter? I have to say yes. The closer we can come to imitating what nature does and what animals do in nature, the better things will work out for growers and eaters of vegetables, fruits, eggs, milk, and meat.
But you have been patiently waiting — the baby chicken report!
Under the heat lamp October 2015
Our late October babies are young ladies now, not quite to point of lay. The young flock and the old still have not incorporated into a one – they tend to hang out and feed separately. But I plan to mix them up at night, on the roost, to help that process toward one flock along.
We introduced our old hens to the new chicks slowly. They shared a henhouse and run dived in half by chicken wire, for a long time before they were allowed access to each other by day – and then by night. The key is to create places where the little ones can escape the big ones, who have to prove dominance at the feeder and the water bowl. I’ve been adding simple visual barriers in the run with cardboard — good for chickens all the time, not only when introducing two flocks to each other.
The author’s teenagers chicks – out on grass for the first time
Making the barriers of cardboard is lazy – of course it would be better to make them from wood, or metal, so I don’t have to do it again. But what in life is perfect? Maybe watching chickens root through straw or fresh dirt happily in the sunshine? That’s pretty close to perfect.
PS: Inspired by my rainy day reading about the value of grass/pasture to chickens, I went back outside and let the chickens out on the grass. Somehow, some way, we will keep improving what we can offer to our little flock in our suburban growing landscape.
Teenagers get their toes in the wet grass on a blustery day – February 2016
Or…maybe not. Not everything we humans try is a success. This is just a truth. But it’s the one that got away – the experiment that flopped – that fascinates me most. So I am likely to keep trying.
Gardens of lettuce and spinach are growing inside at our house! That’s the good news. But this tub (above) was started about 2 months ago.
This about one month ago…
This one 2 weeks ago…
At this rate we’d get to eat a couple of salad per winter. Shucks! – it seemed like such a great plan.
Edward and I embarked on “Banting” – a South African diet that focuses on veggies first and mainly, fat second, meat next, cheese only if you can do it, then very little fruit. No grains, no flours, so no bread, pasta, etc. The recipes in the cookbook look and taste delicious, focusing on high fat (butter, olive oil, bacon), moderate proteins, lots of vegetables, and very, very low carb. The Banting Diet says good fats silence those incessant sugar cravings. Sugar, even natural forms of it, confuses your appestat, the part of the brain that tells you when you’re full – so eating carbs makes a person (especially some people) constantly hungry. Edward has found it very helpful – removing the carbohydrates from his diet has ended the sugar cravings that dominated his taste experiences before. He has begun (after some tweaking) to drop weight. He says he plans to eat this way from now on.
Given that every day starts with greens cooked in butter and eggs, we thought if we could grow our own in the window this winter, wouldn’t we be clever?
Sigh.
I met a friend in the grocery store last night, and over a box spinach from California and a handful of laocinta kale, I confided our growing woes. Her husband is also a grower and an innovator. They have red wiggler worms in their kitchen, which in my opinion makes them hard core.
She responded with a smile that confided both sympathy to me and also perhaps long-suffering patience, “There’s a reason we buy this stuff.”
True enough. But the Steve Ritz in me (last post) wants to know why?Why didn’t the spinach grow faster? Soil not deep enough? Soil not rich enough? Not enough water? Not enough light? Edward says he doubts the plants can be fooled by the grow lamp, nor the plate warmer I jerry-rigged under them. That winter sun is just too pitiful and too low on the horizon to help out, and they know it.
But every day – there is a little more sunlight. (There must be a way…)
Meanwhile…we still have eggs! And chickens old and new have been enjoying spreading straw and stirring up the earth in garden beds to come…
Six baby chicks join the Simons household October 2015
For so many months this blog has lain dormant. Those who follow my writing know that my other blog has taken the bulk of my attention during the past year (embracing chaos.net, stories about life with our special needs young adult son Owen). If there is a “bulk” of anything so stretched and scattered as my attention. I am a writer, when I am not a landlord, cook, mom, builder, or gardener.
Trum the bulldog meets the chix…
But while suburbangrowing.com has lain fallow, the soil of the blog has rested. Time to seed it, and bring you a harvest of new ideas to use in your own gardens.
This year, in addition to writing about what Edward and I are growing around our property, how we struggle for maximum yield in suburban spaces, how we address the chickens-in-suburbia challenge (that constant tension between green scratch for them and unmolested gardens for us), I want to make a greater effort to learn how to bring garden spaces to un-gardened new places. And I want to take you along on that ride.
Gardens in my local school? Gardens for the DC soup kitchen we support? How about a community garden for homeless folks who panhandle along MLK Blvd in Baltimore? What about gardens for Owen’s Adult Day Care Program? What about being the connection between Owen’s day care program New Horizons Supported Services Inc, and Forested, the teaching garden up the road from me? Learning a skill like how to grow food could be life-changing. Being outside in sunshine is healing. Working the soil is satisfying. Eating quality food when you know how it grew and how to grow it, is the foundation of health. As you can see, my brain is teaming like a box of red wiggler worms.
Just some of the ideas percolating in my mind for 2016. You may say I’m a dreamer – but no one goes to jail for dreaming. Let’s see what we can get done.
The chicken-loved lawn……and recovery, thanks to a warm fall/winter 2015
I am passionate about eating good food, and growing good food, sustainably. I long for this to be something for as many people as possible – not just the few. By good food I mean fresh (locally sourced), non-chemically-contaminated-hence-organically-grown/or/raised-food. I want to see it affordable. I want to see it accessible. More suburban and urban people.
Chicken paddocks –> new forage areas every day – or protection for the growing babies from the big girls…
Fact is, toxic chemicals build up in soil, air and water, and so on our foods. This will affect our body function. Eventually it will cause illnesses. Good food grows a better brain. The brain you grow as a baby and child is the brain you get – how well kids are nourished could affect them for a very long time. So much hype about “healthy” foods – and SO little access to simple, fresh, organically grown veggie stuff. So little exposure to cooking it!
Enter Steve Ritz, my inspiration for the week!
Steve Ritz is really the reason I am sitting down typing to you now, waking up this blog. I heard Steve interviewed on NPR last week. As soon as I got home, I ran for the computer to Google him. Steve is a remarkable teacher who went from knowing nothing about gardening to energetically growing gardens in city classrooms – teaching kids how to grow, how to love veggies, and how to make city gardens as a job. You will love this guy —
Get inspired people!
Suburban Growing 