A Generous Greeting, and Hopefully an Inspiration

Out with the dogs for their pre-dawn constitutional I could tell, even in the darkness, that the day would have more shivers than the forecast had predicted.  

As it turned out, I hadn't even begun to anticipate them. 

Damp -- more of a chilly presence than measurable precipitation -- I pulled my jacket closer to me until I could hurry the pups back inside.  I was hoping for a more temperate welcome since the Buff Orpingtons were supposed to arrive by express mail from Texas sometime today.  I was still scanning through the morning news when my phone rang.  At 6:55 a.m. it was the Post Office announcing a clucking arrival.  I had plans for the day, but birds in a box take precedent over a conference in a classroom.  I was waiting when the Postal Pickup Window opened.

Thinking back, though one of the two birds popped right out, the other hung back when I opened the box inside the coop annex and had to be encouraged out into the bedding.  They both seemed healthy enough; I chalked up the reticence to stiff muscles from cramped travel, and the chilly new environment.  I retrieved the shipping box, latched the door, and headed for the dumpster -- my mind already shifted to the conference at which I would now be arriving late.  Lifting the lid and hoisting the box I suddenly froze.  Amidst the bedding material and the remnants of the apple slice that served as traveling food I noticed something else.

An object.

Brown.

Oblong.

Almost like an egg.

"Why," I wondered to myself, "would they send the hen with an artificial egg?"  I have wooden ones inside the nesting boxes to help educate the hens what those boxes are designed for (so far, to empty result) but I couldn't fathom their purpose with shipping.

And then it hit me:  it isn't artificial.  It isn't "like" an egg; it's an EGG.  The ones we've had for two weeks now have not been forthcoming, but this new one presents a gift upon her arrival.

How courteous! 

I will let the new young ladies get settled in before introducing to the rest of the flock.  After all, travel can be a headache.  They have much to get used to -- a new house, a new run, to say nothing of the weather's damp chill.  But in a couple of days I'll push their protective run alongside the others where, with any luck, they can teach the older ones a thing or two about manners.

And eggs.

An Almost Biblical Glimpse of A Baser Nature

It is a parable of greed.  But I get ahead of myself.

The seeds have been nestled in their sprouting trays for more than a week now, presumably stirring their little germinations beneath the potting soil.  A few varieties-- kale, cauliflower, broccoli and one obscure variety of tomato -- have actually shown themselves greenly above the surface while we wait for others to catch up.  It's early yet.  Since I first began to reorganize the greenhouse a couple of weeks ago, readying it for the new season, I was aware of rodent activity.  The box of extra compostable seed trays left over from last year had been seriously nibbled through, and on more than one of my visits an especially precocious mouse supervised my work.

Let me just interject here that I am not a big fan of mice.  Despite their acknowledged cuteness, they creep me out; flinching is my instinctual reaction.  I have no objective data suggesting that mice will wreak mischief on my nascent vegetables, but I have no interest in my carefully selected and lovingly sown seeds being excavated and consumed as mouse food.  I know, I know; as Lori periodically reminds me, "this is nature," and mice will have unrestricted access to the seeds I direct plant out in the garden.  But it somehow feels different among the trays and the shelves, and I don't much care to greet them each morning and evening in the greenhouse.

So, I have been setting traps.  High-tech and low-tech varieties, seductively slathered with peanut butter and strategically placed around the edges of the shelves.  When we noticed a neighborhood cat sauntering across the back yard proudly dangling one of the little buggers from her mouth as a culinary trophy I wondered if my trapping efforts were unnecessary -- until I began to notice missing peanut butter from otherwise undisturbed traps.

I redoubled my efforts.

More peanut butter.  Rearranged placements.

And then one of the new trap varieties signaled that its work was done.  I disposed of it, and reloaded the more basic trap that had once again been robbed of its bait.  The next day the bait was gone again, but still the spring was unsprung.  I watered the seed trays, but delightful house guests gave me better things to do than worry about clever and dexterous mice still on the lamb.

Until this morning.  Returning to the greenhouse for the morning's review and sprinkling, I noticed that the trap was disarranged.  Closer examination revealed the southerly half of a quite-dead mouse dangling from the clenched jaw of the trap.  (NOTE:  Photographs have been withheld out of gastric deference.)

Thence, then, is the parable on greed.  The mouse, the day before, had already thieved the whole of the bait.  Nevertheless it had come back for the more that only existed in the aroma of memory.  And there, cocky and emboldened by the success of earlier plunder -- or distracted, perhaps, by the determination born of empty-handed disappointment -- the last sound it heard was the spring snapping shut.

Or greedily pawing in disbelieving futility, didn't hear at all.

"Two down," I thought to myself as I gingerly disposed of the remains -- three if you credit the cat;
"I wonder how many more?"

More, I'm sure; but I think I'll pause a bit before re-baiting the trap.

And ponder.

Because What's a Little More Insanity?

We are going condo.
At least the chickens are.

It all started with a funeral.  One of the eight chickens that set up housekeeping in our coop almost two weeks ago died a few days after arriving.  The birds came from Waco, TX and more than one has surmised that she didn't much care for the change in climate.  Iowa winters aren't for everybody, after all, and this particular winter has been challenging even by Iowa standards.  Never mind that the ladies arrived in the waning weeks of the arctic grip; the change would have been startling nonetheless.

From eight, then, down to seven.  The loss was especially grievous because while all four of the breeds represented are handsome in their own way, this one -- a Wyandotte, with its vivid blotches of black and white -- was beautiful.  True, one of the pair remains, but we opted to adopt a replacement.  OK, we opted to replace the lost ONE with TWO.

But they won't be available until the end of April.  Our replacement juices actively flowing, and there being so many appealing breeds, it only made sense (in some parallel universe) to order additionally a pair of one of those other options -- Buff Orpington -- that would be available in a couple of weeks.

That's right:  FOUR hens to replace the ONE we lost.  This is the kind of math I understand.

The impending arrivals created, however, a new problem.  Chickens, as it turns out, don't automatically get along.  Like new neighbors, I suppose, who must first get accustomed to one other across the back yard fence before extending an invitation to dinner, chickens must be segregated for the first couple of weeks -- within view of each other, mind you -- before adjusting their established pecking order in non-lethal ways.

This, of course, necessitated the acquisition of a secondary coop and run which I didn't really want to afford but saw little alternative.  I considered the various homemade options, but even though the birds would only be housed there temporarily I hesitated.  After all, we are talking about me, and tools.  Usually not a promising combination.  So let me hasten to calm my friends and family members who have already started looking up the number of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals with the relieving news that Craig's List connected me with an industrious soul in the heart of Des Moines who makes chicken coops close enough to my price range that the problem could be agreeably solved.  What I now refer to as the "coop annex", on Sunday we precariously wedged the new acquisition into the back of the pickup, and brought it home.

 Yesterday afternoon I assembled a PVC and chicken wire run using a design I located on the internet, and last evening a friend helped me liberate the coop from the pickup bed.

So, we are ready.  Mostly.  There is still some furnishing to be done -- bedding, food and water dishes, adding a little ventilation and a hatch pull system -- but that is easily accomplished.  And then next week the Orpingtons should arrive.

Hopefully to more agreeable temperatures than those with whom they will shortly get acquainted.

Welcome to the neighborhood!

The Sobering Truth of More to Learn

I received some very disappointing news yesterday.  It came, as with so many awakenings, at an angle; indirectly, in the context of a different conversation.

A very helpful and congenial man from the Department of Natural Resources visited the farm to advise us on development and management of the several acres of grassland that spread over the northward crown of our property.  Standing at the sunroom windows looking out over the expanse of it, we talked about our goals for the area -- what we wanted to accomplish; what values we wanted to honor.  We walked the trails ankle deep in snow, pulling seed heads here and there to crush between fingers and sniff for tell-tale aromatic identifiers.  We pushed our way into the brush beyond to explore varieties of trees, and we sat around the dining room table comparing aerial view maps of the property from the 1930's to the present.  Readily apparent from the photos was the encroachment that we had confirmed in our walkaround:  the cedar trees will take us over unless we take concerted action.  That, along with the pernicious multiflora rose that has already gained a foothold.

In the course of making recommendations he confirmed what a friend had already pointed out:  that our prairie is largely populated and held together by brohm grass -- a basic ground cover that was the DNR's weapon of choice in a previous generation to prevent soil erosion.  In that capacity it is virtuously successful, but its additional virtues are few.  As a feed it is a passable C+ -- better than nothing, but hardly as desirable as others; the agricultural equivalent of corn flakes without milk or fruit.  What it does best is prevent topsoil from vacationing downstream, and that has counted for something.

Then my new friend called attention to the aerial map of the property overlaid with soil survey data -- what kinds of soil were located on what parts of the property.  Alpha-numerically labelled, it was all gobbledy-goop to me until he translated the codes -- these numbers in the string representing soil type, this letter indicating fertility, this number tracking erosion.  On the one hand, it was a fascinating revelation -- the multiplicity of types banding our single property, coupled with one thing we already knew.  We live on slopes and grades that make for highly erodible land.  For conventional cropping, most of our land earns a score in the vaunted "Corn Suitability Rating" of "don't even bother."

But that wasn't the disappointment.  As I said, we already knew much of that.  The sobering douse of cold water came with the designation printed squarely on top of the garden plot I have been planting.  The soil there is better than I had thought.  No, maybe not Garden of Eden quality, but generally well-drained, suitable Iowa soil with a moderate pH and much to commend it.  I was devastated.  For two years now I have been accepting my relatively poor harvest results philosophically as the understandable effluence of a challenged raw material.  "Anyone working in this kind of soil," I comforted myself, "would experience these limited results."  But with the prick of an informational pin, my delusional bubble was burst.  The deficiency turns out not to be in the soil, but in the ignorant farmer who has been arrogantly judging it.

Ah, the sobering white light of truth.

I suppose it is only appropriate.  This is, after all, the beginning  of Lent -- the traditional season of confession, contrition, and the sobered re-engagement of life on more clear-eyed and less narcissistic terms. The truth turns out to be that I have more to learn, more to practice, more seeds to sow, more lessons to learn -- all on humbler terms.

That little fenced in enclosure will have to find its place in a lengthening line, however.  The garden, as it turns out, isn't the only place in my life where all those things are true.  So much for the cockiness of new beginnings.  Encumbered with and coddled by fewer excuses, now it's time to get back to work.

To See the Cosmos in a Bag of Compost

Tomorrow the compost.  I know it's not a lively topic, and I will be the first to acknowledge the mystery of my warm fascination with the stuff, but there it is.  Without my really intending it it finds its way into conversations.  I read about it.  I have taken a class or two on the subject.  I have been trying to make it in the burgeoning mounds rising like the Tetons behind the garden shed, and in the barrel spinner outside the garage -- religiously sequestering kitchen scraps, shredded bills and credit card offers, miscellaneous manures and, in their season, extricated weeds, all for the important part they can play in the grand transformation.  And until I get it right -- until that earth-bound abracadabra has been incanted -- I buy it by the bag.  From Wisconsin.  From certified organic materials.  Don't laugh.  This is serious stuff.

This season I partnered with the CSA farmer who has been supplementing our harvest in recent years; combining our orders in pursuit of a little savings on shipping.  Having heard from him today that it has arrived, tomorrow I'll fire up the pickup and haul it home.  The twelve bags of it.  Which will hardly be enough.

As I say, its allure is hard to pinpoint.  Sure, there is the intrinsic nourishment -- the organic matter, the natural nutrients.  The soil needs it -- especially, I am coming to realize, my soil.  For all its vaunted fertility, this little corner of Iowa soil leaves a few things to be desired.  That's fine of course; it gives me something to complain about and, more to the point, something on which to blame my failures.  But it also gives me something more to learn about, which I like.  If I intend to grow the vegetables I will, along the way, honor the necessity of building the soil.  Like anything else, it needs its care and feeding.  The tires need their air; the equipment needs its oil and gas; the blades need their edge.  The soil needs its replenishment.

But as important as all that is, it doesn't quite get there.  That's the sterile stuff of science and pragmatism -- what you do because it helps you accomplish your goals -- but there is more to it, somehow, than that.  Compost has, for me, something almost soulful about it.

Yes, I hear you.  You're laughing again.  But stay with me.

It's the circle that fascinates me, captivates me and draws me in.  One thing becoming another, enabling still another.  Nothing lost; simply transformed.  In the dying, a rising.  At how many gravesides have I stood over the past 30 years and pronounced similar affirmations of creation's cyclic symmetry?  "Like dust returning to dust," I say; "earth returning to earth" -- an almost ineffable testament to the essential oneness of all things.  "Hummus to human and back again" as agrarian theologians remind us.

Which, of course, is compost's essential constitution.    Brown, green, root and rot, what once upon a time found its expression as leaf or fruit or pulp or cud, completes that purpose and, in its expenditure, offers its remainder to still another.  Teeming in that bag from Wisconsin (and, with any luck, in that pile out back) are the flapping wings and thundering hoofs of dinosaurs silent now for millenia; the frost of glaciers long ago melted and evaporated; the waving prairie grasses long since scythed, and in every handful a microbial cacophony more populous than New York City, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro  and Beijing together, taking yet another spin around the wheel.

And I find that infinitely wondrous -- sacred, even.  So that spreading it, spading it into the garden spaces and entrusting it with seeds -- those crusty and, for some varieties, almost feathery wombs of life-to-be -- becomes almost sacramental.

And I the sacristan, humble behind the scenes.

...And the Guard Towers are Staffed and Armed

Ostensibly it's about the chickens, but lately the focus seems to be more on the predators.

The chickens have not yet even arrived -- they aren't due for another two weeks -- but so far we have accumulated the coop with attached run, the extension cords necessary to power its light and socket, a heated watering dish, bedding (both straw and shaved pine), organic feed plus a rolling tub in which to store it, crushed oyster shells, grit (cherry stone #2), scratch (whole and cracked organic grains), dishes to hold noted supplements, and countless books, magazines and pamphlets, all with lengthy and appropriately anxious chapters on predators and keeping them at bay.

I never knew the world could be so dangerous.  Several guides advise heavy gauge wire sheeting on the ground beneath the coop and run to deter up-popping intruders like moles.  Chicken wire, they note, is adequate to keep chickens in, but far too flimsy to keep hungry invaders out.  And then, of course, there is concern for aerial attacks from flying carnivores of miscellaneous species -- hawks, eagles, owls to name but a few.  Any serious flockster, say the experts, must consider netting of some kind to prevent dive-bombing.  Ultimately, though, it is the ground-based threats that represent the greatest concern.  Raccoons, foxes, canines both feral and domestic, possoms, skunks, rats and God only knows what else.  Grizzly bears, no doubt, and Big Foot and the Boston Strangler.  And neighbors, I suppose, hungry for a drumstick.

So of course we bought an "energizer" -- a delightful euphemism referring to the power plant connected to and electrifying the fence so as to deliver a deterring jolt to anything daring to encroach.  It was delivered today.  Of course it's solar powered.  The electronet fencing I had purchased a couple of years ago when we moved in, but I had never "energized" it.  Perhaps I was then too cheap, or feeling kindlier toward the bunnies that represented the greatest agricultural threat.

Or perhaps I simply have a tenderer disposition toward the chickens that brings out my parental concern.  Not that the spinach and the tomatoes, et al, weren't alive, but the chickens are "walking-around-live".  At least a few strands of DNA closer to humans, they will have, at least according to the guide books, entertaining personalities that we would be heartbroken to find dismembered.  They will likely come to have names and recognize and respond to the hand that feeds them.  In ways impossible for a carrot or a beet, they will come to be -- and I can't believe I am actually anticipating this -- members of the family.  We don't leave our doors unlocked at night, nor did we allow our children to play in the street.  How could we be any less vigilant with the chickens?

Indeed!

All that, plus they are expensive.  There, I have admitted it.  I'm almost embarrassed to acknowledge that in addition to all those nobler motivations, in the end it all comes down to investment.  Let me just say that a package of seeds is pennies compared to the cost of a 20-week old pullet shipped from Texas.  So, as a wise man once said, "where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."

And your electric fence.

Know, then,
that you are welcome to stop by and visit.   After all, watching me tend a garden AND a flock of chickens can only be entertaining.  And I won't mind your laughter.

But keep your distance and watch what you touch.
Consider yourself warned.

Let The Clucking and the Laying Begin

It's official.  For reasons that even I cannot fully articulate short of total insanity, we are getting chickens.  I know that it's official because yesterday the Missouri-built coop we had purchased was, with no small amount of fanfare, delivered to our yard.  Yes, I know that most people build their own poultry housing, but I care too much for any chicken that comes into our keeping to condemn it to an existence in anything I might slap together.  So we read, we researched, we shopped, we spoke to Murray the builder who resides and works in southern Missouri, and finally we purchased.

As is obvious from the picture, it is something a fowl castle with a built-in feeder, electric lights, an external egg removal access door, spacious run, laying boxes and roosts, along with wheels by which to move it around the property for a quasi-free-range existence.  The "quasi-" part a necessity because of the plenitude of predators in our neighborhood -- raccoon, possum, fox, coyote, bobcat, eagle and hawk just to name a few.  Those, and two only-occasionally behaved Welsh Corgis with an insatiable curiosity and an already developed taste for eggs.

The ladies of the manor -- two each of four breeds of laying hens -- are scheduled to arrive on or about March 5 having already reached the ripe old age of 20 weeks.  This, to leap-frog the close attentions required of the more usual purchase of day-old chicks, and move directly to the more interesting egg laying phase that commences at approximately 22-weeks.  Yes, I know this means missing out on that "cute and fuzzy" baby chick stage and all the bonding that no doubt occurs therein, but it also misses out on the heat lamp, the constant monitoring of temperatures, feeding, watering and cleaning up in our basement storage room.  It seemed to us a reasonable trade-off.

The birds themselves will warrant their own post.  Or perhaps I simply don't want to jinx their safe arrival by presuming too much right now.  They will, after all, be harried and well-traveled by the time they appear, but hopefully still alive.  Though I sourced them from an Iowa hatchery an hour or so away, when I suggested picking them up in person I was told that they would be coming from Texas.  Of course.  Perfect.  At least I will recognize the twang in their cluck -- and they in mine.

As to that still-unaddressed but larger question of "why", it is, as I indicated, hard to fully name.  It's true that as recently this fall I had steadfastly maintained that we weren't going to do it -- that there are perfectly adept farmers already raising chickens and selling farm-fresh eggs; that the better part of wisdom would rest in supporting them.  But here we are.

What nudged us across the line from refusal to enthusiasm certainly isn't economy.  Whatever the benefits of gathering and consuming fresh eggs from our own back yard, they do not include saving money.  The initial investment isn't...well...chicken feed.  No matter how prolific they prove to be, we'll never amortize the start-up costs of the imported coop and the well-traveled pubescent hens.  Neither we nor the chickens are likely to live that long.  Those, and the organic feed I have secured and the ground oyster shell and scratch.  And as enriching as I understand chicken manure can be in the garden, neither is the prospect of enhanced agricultural fertility enough of an explanatory incentive.  No, what we finally conceded is that we simply needed the experience -- the caring, the tending, the protecting, the gathering.  We have, after all, moved to the country to hone some skills of self-sufficiency.  There are certain incumbent obligations to the education. The eating, while not at all incidental to the project, is gravy.

So, now we wait for the chickens to make their red carpet appearance.  That, and we purchase the requisite heated waterer and a long enough extension cord with which to plug it in.  Chances are that they are going to want to actually drink something instead of pecking away at Iowa winter ice.