Life in the batting cage

Phyllis in a more lushly feathered phase

The hawk (a hawk?) came back, and attacked poor Phyllis, our sole Ameraucana (blue/green egg layer). Luckily, I was around, and chased the bird off. What a horrible potential death, though: and yes, don't chide me about the "circle of life" and all that: the chicken doesn't die immediately, it gets ripped apart, bite by bite, while the hawk straddles its neck and tail with its talons. Ouch.

So she's missing a few feathers now, and is a bit more of a chicken chicken. The attack led me to move one fence line in about 30'. Their run is now about 45' wide and maybe 50-60' long. And I undertook a big crafting project: I covered the whole thing with deer netting, and sewed the 7.5' wide pieces together.

Ice caught on the deer netting at the coop's eave

Thus, the batting cage (thank you, Tom).

He suggested making a chicken wire geodesic dome, a la Bucky Fuller: hey, El, we could electrify it, he said.

Fencing as a state of mind

We fenced up the chickens recently, enclosing them in a large area of the yard behind some deer netting.

Last week, I was harvesting more spuds, this time in the greenhouse beds. The greenhouse is adjacent to the chickens' area. Bloody Beatrice let me know that, in no uncertain terms, their cage is really just a state of mind. She saw that I was digging up the dirt, and therefore had to join me.

The chickens were very young last year when they learned that a kneeling me with a trowel in my hands means there are worms and other goodies to be had. I have never been able to dissuade them otherwise. It's actually fairly amusing. It makes things like bulb-planting rather difficult (last year I had four birds vying for the gleanings). But I do enjoy the company.

And within no time, Beatrice's sister Bonnie made her way through the fence to "help" me.

On fencing

Verloe: Hey, what gives?

We locked up the chickens yesterday. It took about two hours to string 250' of fencing. Now, will it keep the hawks out? Hard to tell. It'll keep the chookies in, though, which is very much the point.

But don't feel too bad for them: I would have been OH so happy if I had half as big a yard as they do when I was a city person.

On guineas

Ick, another bad picture.

Robin wanted to learn more about our guineas. I have been thinking I should do a complete post about them, so here it goes.

We decided to get guineas because we lost two hens to a hawk last year. What's the connection? Well, guineas are the Chicken Littles of the farmyard. Anything that flies, drives, or walks by that's out of the ordinary, they start howling. We decided on guineas over a rooster, who'd also watch out for hawks, but...well, I didn't want to risk the idea of getting a "bad" rooster who'd attack our kid. (I also wasn't too hep on having pecked sex-enslaved hens or being awakened by a 2:00 a.m. crowing.)

The guineas, of which there are four (three hens and a cock) are virtually indistinguishable in looks, activity and any other way from each other. They subscribe to a severe case of Group Think so if one of them is doing something, the other three will soon be doing the same. As a farm animal, they haven't been domesticated for long. This near-wildness appealed to me if I had to continue to pen in our birds: I really like seeing the chickens walking around the farm, in pursuit of their chicken-y desires; I figured if the chickens needed to be penned, the guineas, who can fly, would still be free-ranging. Well, let's just say that near-wildness is an acquired taste.

So, the initial reason that we got them remains. They are excellent watchdogs. They immediately notify the other birds, and the surrounding township, if anything is amiss. On Monday, for example, they were making quite a din and I thought: geez, it's kind of late, aren't those birds in bed yet? And I look out at the side yard and they are yelling at THREE DEER, one with a huge rack on his head. They actually chased the deer, too, once one of them turned and started to run.

Other than that, they lay their eggs in the bushes, what few eggs there are, so...if you expect to get eggs out of these creatures, you really have to work for it. They can sleep in trees, and expect to have a very high perch in the coop. They completely imprinted on the one chicken that looks like them: Letha, the Barred Rock. Anywhere their Mama goes, they go...otherwise, they'll follow Maggie, the Black Australorps or Pauline, the white Leghorn. (Interestingly, they never follow any of the other birds, who're all red or brown: they definitely segregate themselves with the monochrome range of the feather spectrum.) I think it was a good idea to get them and put them with the young chicks we had, as they picked up some but certainly not all of those good chicken traits, like, She is not the enemy; She is the bearer of all good treats. The guineas were the ugliest birds imaginable until they got all their feathers. Now, at least, they are mature: their heads are the only things odd-looking about them.

And from a very young age, they developed the ability to count. If one of them is not with them, they start hollering, trying to find him/her. It's an interesting but annoying talent.

My friend Tim said he ate them a lot when he lived in Italy. He said his Italian friends told him they had them to eat small blood-sucking bugs, of which he never had the English translation. (Ticks. They love ticks.) Supposedly, their meat is great roasted. I guess I will never know. We will keep them for the rest of their happy dopey lives, I think, but...they are just so incredibly loud that I doubt Tom would ever go for getting more of them.

Would I ever get guineas instead of chickens? Not in a million years. Chickens are friendly, egg-laying, happy souls. Guineas have an amazing persecution complex, one that will probably be worn down by another 10,000 of domestication. Don't get them if you have neighbors, period, unless your neighbors have them or their near cousins, peafowl.

Morning errands

Maggie has gone broody, so I brought her some food...

...but it looks like she'll have to share. I ended up putting those fake eggs in the right nesting box (from the kiddie kitchen section at Target: quite realistic, which is why I've marked them with an "X") under her to make her feel useful.

Every morning, between dropping our daughter off at school and starting work, I try to do one outdoor task. This morning, I headed east to the Fruit Exchange to get the birds some more scratch.

I adore the fruit exchange. It's our feed-and-seed shop, but it is also the regional fruit processing and storage facility. Normally, I can chew the fat with the guys who work in the warehouse. They look at me (I think) as an anomaly: when we first moved here, I was in there often to get supplies to beef up my compost piles (greensand, dolomitic limestone, cast-off fruit, moldy straw) so I guess I have rightly earned the reputation as "that organic gal." But today they were busy, far too busy to chat, and the place was hopping! Big semitractor trailers are rolling in, their trailers piled high with wood boxes filled with apples and pears. Conveyor belts were rumbling away in the now well-lit warehouse, with a few women sorting and dumping the beautiful red round fruit rumbling down it.

I got a peck of Cortlands for $3, got my scratch, and made for home.

Ugly bugs

Did you ever wonder what those disgusting tomato hornworms look like when they grow up?

I found out yesterday...YUCK. It was so ugly I had to grab my gloves. I think the pink part behind its head freaked me out more than its size.

But around here, it's Chicken Dinner!

A surprise

So, maybe those guineas aren't completely useless after all.

We got them because we lost a couple of hens to a hawk last year. Instead of getting a loud and obnoxious sex-crazed rooster with eyes peeled to the sky, we got loud and obnoxious guineas instead. I will have to take a picture of them, though it is hard: they're really skittish. Anyway, the guineas are loud and proud, and extremely alarmist about the slightest thing flying overhead. So they're useful.

I didn't expect eggs, though.

From all that I have read, these birds tend to lay in sneaky places, places other than the coop's three nesting boxes. Guess what. At least one of the guinea hens (there are three, plus a boy) is laying in the box. Just like the chickens.

So we cooked up our first one on Sunday for lunch. Economic, this egg. Not at all watery. Tiny yolk, thick white...and the most amazingly thick little shell and inner lining: I had to all but cut the darned shell open! It was TASTY.

But it sure would take a lot of them to make a souffle.

POSTSCRIPT: I spoke entirely too soon. I just went to investigate a particularly long guinea-screaming-session, and behold: behind the greenhouse garden, in the weeds, a guinea nest.


Little sneaks.

Chick pics

Do you know how hard it is to take pictures of chickens?

I had Tom chase them around with his camera yesterday. I wanted to show you how big the chicks and guinea keets had gotten, but they weren't cooperating. (Everybody freeranges all day now.) The only one who was a ham was Bonnie, and that's only because she thought he had food.

Meet our new peeps

The newest residents of Old Vines are four pearl guinea keets. Male? Female? Who knows. They're loud and proud and have the hooky-spooks much moreso than any of the chicken chicks. Cute, though, and boy are they tiny. And to show how busy we are here, we've had these birds a week and I haven't posted about them until now!

In other bird news, our big chickens have been released on parole every afternoon when the kid comes home from school. They are so bored in their chicken run; they just sit under the lilac bush and hold court, not letting the younger chicks come near the food or water bowl. (Definite pecking order evident here, and that's why there's now a second feed station in the pen.) So they are happy to walk the grounds again, and either I or the Australian cattle dog are not far away if the hawk makes a return. The dog is really great with them, and knows they are her charges.

The new plan is to let all the chickens and guineas out for part of the day. That should happen around mid-summer. Guineas are pretty territorial (actually, most people have them because they're pretty good watchdogs), so between 8 chickens and 4 guineas, that's a lot of eyes on the sky should danger swoop down. Better than three sets of eyes, certainly.

Chick update

Gangly teenaged chicks

This cold turn in the weather has kept the chicks in their temporary coop. I had been releasing them into the chicken run with the big girls during the day and then returning them to their own warm spot for the night. Now, they're in there 24/7 with brooder lights blazing. I worry they'll get bored.

It is fairly amazing how quickly these little birds become big birds. Miss a week and you'll say holy cow. Now, the biggest of them perch at night as opposed to huddling in a chickpile. They're very adept at chicken things already, like scratching and finding bugs and green bits.

I've read that you should separate the new birds from the old because chickens are beasts with a sense of hierarchy. Frankly, I have not seen much aggression from my older girls. The chicken run is a large one, though, and they're separated at night, so I am sure the big girls are just accepting the little ones as a concession of some sort.

The evening before the temperatures fell, I let the three big chickens out of the run. I stood with them (not trusting that red-tailed hawk nor the girls' love of my perennial beds) the whole time. Time just flies by when you watch them. Bloody Beatrice was picking up worms at every step (step-bob-peck-pull-slurp, step-bob-peck-pull-slurp) and the other two were dethatching Mont Merde (our septic hill). And me, sick as I was, just stood there. It was really fun. Then I called them and they followed me back into the coop. A good evening on the farm.

Happy hatch day to the girls

We've been chicken owners for a year now. Boy, are they funny. I'm so glad we have them.

We just got back from a trip to the other side of the state. That zone thing must mean something, because the trees are budding out here yet life was still mostly dormant out the windscreen. Here, the magnolias are blooming. The woods all of a sudden has a dimension to it that indicates distance. The monochromacy of winter and summer don't show this distance; it's only the transition seasons of spring and fall where you can tell the short and the long. I feel hemmed in in the summer, and rather exposed in the winter because of it. Early spring feels pretty okay, though!

Chickies out of the house (yay)

Awful pic of the chicks in their new digs

I've been sick the last couple of days; I got whatever the kid had. So sick that I finally went outside (other than morning chores) around 4 yesterday and--shocking--realized it was about 70*. (We were of course huddling in the house with the heat on.) And it was scheduled to be warm again today so I thought: hey. The littlest chick, the Rhode Island Red we call Verloe, just got her first feathers over the weekend, so it is time to move the chicks out to the interim coop.

These chicks are nowhere near as friendly as the last bunch. They definitely display herd (flock?) mentality. If one bird gets the hooky spooks, it catches on. The last batch of birds (3 Ameraucanas, 3 Isa Browns) did not display this characteristic, mainly because the Isa Browns are just such calm things. They ate out of our hands the second day we had them. This crew? Haven't had any luck with that.

Of the five new chicks, the Barred Rock (Letha) and little Verloe seem the friendliest, and the most willing to explore new things. Pauline, the Leghorn, is definitely the chief Chicken chicken. I didn't want her but the kid thought she looked like Maudie, our favorite bird (an Ameraucana), so of course I caved.

When I was making up the temporary coop for the chicks, the big chickens met them for a bit when I put the little things in their outdoor pen. There was a bit of noise, with the two Isa Browns protesting (at a safe distance), but they all seem to recognize each other as Not Foe. It will be another month or two before we'll have all eight together all the time.

Peep peep peep!

New at the farm:

Letha, a Plymouth Barred Rock
Pauline, a White Leghorn
Maddie, a Black Australorps
Phyllis II, an Araucana
Verloe, a Rhode Island Red

I am glad I did my recent dip into genealogy. We name the chickens after our grandmothers, and the more creative names shown above are from Tom's side. The first batch last year were Helen/Lester (s/he, left us for greener pastures), Phyllis, Margie, Bonnie, Beatrice, and Maude. We still have the last three. These newbies are named after our kid's great-great grandmothers, and then a few further up the tree.Pauline, Phyllis and Maddie

Every day more snow

Looking up the drive this a.m.

So we are not alone in giving up on plowing this year. Our average highs at this time in March are supposed to be in the 40s; let's just say we're shooting for average highs around 30. With sun, and the white stuff usually melts a bit. Maybe we're all just tired, but on my way out this morning I noticed that the only people who'd bothered to plow were the road and highway crews: I made a stop at our big-box farm shoppe and noticed that they'd not plowed AGAIN.

Why the quick trip to the farm shoppe? Well. Lest anyone think "Hey, El is a woman, she must like to shop," I will have you know that if shopping is somehow related to a gene expression on the X chromosome, well, it certainly skipped me. I HATE shopping. (And it's why I married a shopper.) I do make an exception for shopping at the big-box farm shoppe and our feed and seed two towns over! I love the smell, I love the sights, I love the...tack. The possibilities inherent in crates of dirty seed potatoes. The shiny farm implements and hardware. The peeping of the chicks and the ducks and the turkeys.

Uh oh. Yep. Looks like we'll be getting more chicks in a day or so. Ostensibly, I walked in the store looking for something for the sheep, but instead, I came home and told Tom we need to get the chicks tout suite. (The guinea keets won't be out until the end of April.) They've got barred rocks, black australorps, isa browns, white leghorns, ameraucanas, rhode island reds...peep...peep...peep...

Cold seeds in the garage. That's a thermal blanket (mylar) in there bouncing the light around behind them. And the junk on the sill are various trinkets I have pulled out of the flower garden below it. Gotta love old farmers and their expansive notion of "garbage heap."

So for the most part, I have judiciously restrained myself from seed-starting. Thusfar I have not quite given in to the call of the dirt, having only planted those seeds notoriously long in germination, and even then, I have done so grudgingly. February 12th is a long way off from planting things around here, but February 12th is what parsley and onions require.

Things changed on Sunday, somehow. I was feeling quite the same about the whole process on Saturday, the day I actually started some flower and pepper seeds (for indoors) and cold salad stuff (mache, claytonia, spinach) that typically takes its sweet time in the unheated garage. Yesterday, though? I was ANTSY. I wanted to dig, I wanted to kneel, I wanted to give in to the agricultural process.

But I didn't. I only mucked out the coop and started another (the 4th) compost pile. The kid helped, kind of: she shepherded the chickens to the one snow-free spot on the lawn so they could eat their grass. It was a nice day in the upper 20s and we spent lots of time outside. It felt quite lovely. We even got a little sunburned.

Spring plans

Every year we take baby steps to be more of a farm and less of, well, whatever you are called if you live on a farm without really being farmers. The above pic are guineas. We'll be getting maybe 3 baby keets this spring along with maybe 3-4 more baby chicks. Aren't they weird looking? They're loud as hell, too, and somewhat wild (befitting the fact that they haven't been domesticated for long). They, unlike the chickens, will free-range, though they'll live in the coop with the birds. How will this happen? Well, they can still fly! Well enough to hopefully evade the hawk, that is...

Holy Cats! It's 47*!

Bonnie, Beatrice and Maude, experiencing coop freedom while standing atop their food bowl (yes, that's half a lemon. They like lemon.)

Yes, I think officially I lost it (if I ever even had it, that is). I shoveled a path for the chickens in their fenced run from the coop door to their condo. It was about 25', give or take.

And before you say "what's the big deal," please remember we have over 2' of snow here. And their pen is about 42" high. So I did the duck walk in the chicken run with the manure shovel.

Once I was finished, the darned biddies just looked at me, kind of saying, don't you know the snow is, well, cold? Why would we walk through the stuff? Why, indeed.

Last bloom

We stepped out for the weekend and--better late than never--winter has set in. Here is the last bloom I found in the garden: a shrub rose.

Like much of the country, we got socked by all that rain last week, and that rain eventually transitioned to snow, but made a stop at Iceville first. NOT FUN. Lots of downed branches around the farm, lots of slippy slidy conditions for all, chickens included. Poor chickens. Where did their grass go? They seem to appreciate their chicken condo. We've gotta get some de-icers, though, for their water.

The sheep, like the chickens, appreciate a doubling of food to keep them metabolizing, heating them up in the process. It has come as something of a shock to me that the sheep sleep outside. I had noticed some thawed patches of ground in their pen a couple of weeks back on a day that their wooly selves were covered with frost. Can't they go into their shed? I mean, chickens, with their minuscule birdbrains, at least have the sense to get out of the cold.

I am glad, though, for this snowcover. It's hard to think of snow as an insulator, but it is. So all those perennials, fruit plants and raised beds of microbial action are (blessedly) covered. For now.

New digs

White-knuckled trip to school today through the ice: One tree, three large branches across our country road, 8 cars in the ditch on the interstate. Dumb sheep were just hanging out, all icy, in their yard. (Get inside!)

On Thanksgiving, Tom and my father-in-law jerryrigged a chicken run. I had kept the chickens indoors on Wednesday, only letting the remaining 3 out with me in the garden when I harvested potatoes for the next day's big meal. Let's just say the new pen doesn't meet my exacting construction standards, but it will suffice, certainly, to keep the birds safe. The overall pic is taken from Tom's office upstairs. We've enclosed their two favorite spots: the lilac bush to the left and their dusting area in the garden against the garage. Their coop is the new-looking wood structure to the right. You can barely see the garden at the back on the right.

I can't say they're completely happy about the new arrangement.

Last night, in the rain, Tom moved the chicken condo into their pen (you can kind of see it at the back on the left). I knew the weather would be awful today, so we needed to get those girls a nice dry place to be other than their coop.

And then there were three...

So we went to Chicago yesterday for an educational junket (King Tut, aquarium) but the chickens weren't alone: the hawk came back and nabbed Phyllis.

I am so not good at this farmer thing. I am far too attached. I either need 100 chickens, or I need to really step way the hell back, emotionally. Fortunately, I don't have to work much today and don't have to work on Friday, so I am going to construct them a pen. They'll be so sad, but it beats the alternative, certainly.