Tonight I'll be dreaming chickens...zzzz

Today we had chickens both coming and going.  The postmistress from the Farmington post office called us a little after eight this morning to tell us that our order of chicks had just arrived.  I could hear enthusiastic cheeping in the background.  Usually a hatchery will email the day before chicks arrive to make sure someone is able to go pick them up that day, but we'd heard nothing.  Surprise. I asked Tammy to please babysit them until I got down there. 

Bruce and I got the Cornish chickens herded into three cages and loaded into the trailer for the trip to town.  It was still cool outside and chickens were calm and mellow about the whole thing.  They took off down the hill, while I got the place prepared for the new arrivals and then went down to pick them up.  I was very OK with having such an excellent reason not to have to go with Bruce. 

This is what 21 vacuum-sealed chickens in the fridge looks like.  I'll admit that they don't look too appetising this way.  They came back from the processing plant cleaned and plucked, but there was still plenty to do.  In reading up on preparing chickens for the freezer, I read so many lurid accounts of salmonella poisoning that I washed and disinfected everything I could lay my hands on in the kitchen.  Then we got to work.  Bruce was in charge of the vacuum-sealing part, and I cleaned the gizzards.  And the hearts.  And the livers.  And, finally, the chickens themselves.  It wasn't the happiest work in the world, but it was interesting.  I now know a lot more about chicken anatomy.

When we were finished, we packed them into the fridge and will freeze them in the morning.  We left one chicken unsealed so we could try it out for dinner, but we're both too tired to cook.  A can of lentil soup for me and then I'm headed off to bed. 

The baby chicks were well babysat by Tammy.  All thirty of them (what was I thinking?) arrived healthy and active.  I dipped each little beak in water to make sure they knew how to drink and left them to it.  They spent the remainder of the afternoon alternately bouncing around and falling asleep (sometimes in mid-bounce). 

Definitely a chicken sort of day.

Last Day

The duck in with them adopted them when they were small chicks

Today the Cornish Cross chicks are eight weeks old and it's their last day.  Tomorrow morning Bruce and I will cage them up for the trip to the processing plant, where they'll be slaughtered, cleaned and plucked.  They'll come home in ice chests.

As they've gotten older, their genetics really kicked in -- their main activities are eat, drink , poop and sleep.  They do have a fenced passageway from the stall in the barn to a large dog kennel, so they can be out in the sunshine.  This also gives them a little exercise.  One will occasionally half-heartedly snap at a fly, but they're really not into it.  They are solidly couch potatoes. 

These last two weeks, they've really put on the weight and the heat is hard on them. They do seem like they're ready to go. It also will be relief to get the barn well hosed down. And I won't miss the smell or the flies.

They've had good lives...for meat chickens.

I'm really working on allowing this to feel natural and right.  I think I'm getting there. 

I've been studying my recipe books and believe that I'll be making Coq au Vin tomorrow night.

Southern Magnolia

It arrived yesterday evening, just before dark and while I was watering.  The dogs started barking and here came neighbor Leo's white truck bearing a large tree that he'd been promising to bring us for months now.  He'd augered a hole for it in the field outside the orchard garden last weekend, so we were ready.  It was dark as we followed the truck that carried it to the place where it was to be planted.

In the morning light, this poor tree has been pretty stressed and is in bad shape -- the whole upper half of it looks dead as a doornail.  But there is still new growth coming in at the bottom, so we hope for the best. 

This morning, with the sun already beating down and a forecast of 97 degrees, we got it in the ground. 


I gave it a ring of rocks, a thick mulch and a long, slow soak from the hose.  We've done what we can -- now we'll see what happens. 


A ring of rocks works wonders.  Our new tree has exactly six leaves.

It looks like I planted a stick.  Fingers crossed.

On a sadder note, our little tabby cat, Mulligan, has been missing since Saturday.  I fear that she's been taken by a coyote.  With our many cats over the years, this has happened very infrequently.  But it does happen.  I still have a glimmer of hope that she'll turn up, hungry and demanding to be fed.  But it's only the merest glimmer.  I miss my girl.

Weed Eating

Here we are solidly into the month of June, and I'm still putting in my summer garden(s). I'm actually ahead this year, but the problem is that every year I add another bed or two (or, as this year, three).  I'm now up to nine beds that are 8'X8' each (some are joined together) that must be weeded, planted, and watered.  Every year, around August when it's hotter than snot, the gophers are chewing down everything with roots and any plants left living are gasping in the heat, I vow to cut back on the number of gardens I'm a slave to.  Last summer I actually did allow my giant triple-sized bed to go fallow, and it felt great to have the burden of watering it removed.  However, this spring I made up for lost time by digging it up and planting it with pumpkins, Indian corn and sunflowers.  And then I got Bruce to build three more beds for me in the orchard garden.  I'm an idiot.

Shade cloth over the tomato plants -- without it they'd fry

Yesterday I finally finished planting one the closest gardens to the house -- eight tomato plants, a few Swiss chard, artichokes, and basil.  I added (probably more than I should have) giant sunflowers in the back and a row of marigold seed in front for good measure.








Today I got to the second bed by the house.  One reason it took me so long was because it still had poppies blooming in it and I couldn't bear to pull them up.  This morning I decided that it was time. 

This year I didn't plant any potatoes, but a number of plants came up anyway from tubers that got missed when I harvested last summer.  There were about six of them sprawling in the bed I worked in today.  At first I was going to leave them in, but I kept stepping on them.  So instead I got the shovel, and dug them up. 

The parsley had gone to seed and bolted, so it also was weeded up

Like magic, dozens of lovely baby white and purple potatoes rolled out from the dirt. 



And I yelled, "Lunch!"

New potatoes quickly boiled and served with fresh parsley, butter and sea salt

Yup; today I weeded the garden and then ate the weeds.  They were delicious.

The Help

In the morning, my retinue and I march down to the garden to work.

Zzzzzzzzzzz

Zzzzzzzz and Zzzzzzzz

Zzzzzzzz

Is it any wonder things get done at such glacial speed around here?   {Yawn.}

Venus Transit

Yesterday afternoon Bruce came home a little early so we could go to the polls together to vote.  Also, yesterday afternoon Venus passed in front of the sun.  Both of these events converged quite nicely.

Photographer: Tom Ruen

Bruce gets very excited about anything astronomical.  On the way to the polling station, he spotted a gentleman who'd set up a very large telescope in the back parking lot of our little Copperopolis town square.  We stopped on the way back and the man happily let us look through the lens.  Amazing!  What we saw looked very much like this image (copied with permission) from the Internet:

There it is: the sun, a few sunspots, and the dot that is Venus.


So, when we got home, Bruce was all jazzed about Venus, astronomy, photography and telescopes.  Not having a fancy-schmancy telescope like the nice man in the town square had, he went out behind the house and made do with what he had.  The following is the image that he photographed and his own commentary which he emailed to me:

Photographer: Bruce Winningham

"Here’s the result of our playing “Backyard Astronomer.” The black dot in the upper right is Venus. The dark smudges are actually the cloud layers in the atmosphere. They prevented a good view of the smaller sun spots.

Set up was a pair of binoculars mounted on a tripod projecting the image onto a piece of white paper. Now that we know what we’re doing (koff-koff), we’ll be ready for the next time in 105 years."



I think it's amazing that Bruce's picture using nothing but field binoculars on a tripod, while certainly not of the clarity and caliber as the ones using a strong telescope, is still in the ballpark.  Even with his much more primitive technology, he too got a picture of the sun (which is skewed only because the wind was whipping the little piece of paper he held like crazy) and the dot that was Venus. 

So there you go! 

The Blackberry Beds

The final third of the garden is through the rose arch and down to the lowest section.  In very early spring, Bruce and I put in two raised blackberry beds and filled them with our own homegrown compost.  We bought vigorous blackberry roots from a nice man in the Bay Area who I found on Craigslist.
Years ago, composting used to be a more exacting process, but now we just pile up in one big ol' heap all the biodegradable matter that accumulates so readily around here.  Kitchen scraps, leaves, manure, straw cleaned from the chicken coop, the occasional dead rodent and lots and lots of vegetation all gets chucked on the pile.  The animals have a field day scratching through it and, every once in awhile, Bruce fires up the Kubota and turns the mountain to aerate things a bit.  The only rule is that all bad pest weeds that have gone to seed are banned -- these are either burned or hauled to the landfill. Only "good" weeds of my own dear garden plants are allowed.  

The only problem is that, although few "bad" weeds do get through,  all sorts of "good" seeds sprout up all over the place from the garden plants that I toss onto the compost.  With a vengeance and a vigor that is almost frightening, up pop seedlings of all my favorite plants.  And they are in all the wrong places -- which, I believe, technically makes them weeds.  Weeds that are very, very, very hard to pull because I love them all.

And this brings us, painfully, back to those two blackberry beds and the 12 blackberry plants that had all but disappeared under the greenery of "good" weeds. 

Good weeds.  Really!

Let's see, for "weedy" flowers there were California poppies,rare purple poppies, field poppies, columbines, sweet peas, sunflowers, chamomile, bachelor buttons, morning glories, stock, lambs ears, correopsis and hollyhocks.

The weed vegetables were potatoes, chives, artichokes, tomatoes and some sort of squash. 

I'd put off this weeding for as long as I could, but the time had come -- the blackberries were drowning in a sea of everything else.  So yesterday I closed my eyes and ripped out (with a bit of transplanting here and there) piles and piles of good weeds....

...and ended up with this. 

It's so much easier weeding out the noxious weeds -- pulling up my green darlings was hard.  But, in the end, I kept some of every one of my volunteers.  The rest went back into compost.

 And the blackberries are able to see the sun once again.

Life is complicated but good.


Deconstruction Weekend: One Day Later

And in the morning light...the orchard garden still looks a mess. But it's a mess that is infinitely moved forward after a single day of intense labor.  Progress is being made.



The last thing that we did last evening was set the post for the new north gate to the garden. I was relieved to see that we had set it relatively perpendicular and it had stayed upright throughout the night.  Hmm...actually, I think that the post itself has a bit of a curve to it.  We shall say that this gives the area even more character than it already had.  Also note that the other post is made from a  railroad tie that we decided to use rather than try to dig out.  Even more character.  I suppose that the whole thing looks a little odd...but I love it anyway (Bruce, are you reading this????)   :)

Down the path from the new north gate things still looked a little rough. This stretch still needs landscape cloth tacked down and then several loads of shredded cedar bark (called "Gorilla Fur" around here -- it's great stuff for keeping in the water and keeping out the weeds). A job for tomorrow. Or the day after that.

And here is the planting bed that traveled three places in the garden before it was firmly settled in the right one. What a relief to see it in full sunlight and realize that it was indeed finally in the best location.

Here is the bed from another angle. This is standing in the drive, looking in through the hole in the fence that will soon (please, God, please) be spanned by the second new gate. I think that this is going to work. This angle also shows the challenges of working with a long, thin garden on a slope.

If I had pots of money, I'd order pallets of beautiful green-grey local serpentine rock and hire strong workmen to build sturdy two-foot terraces at 20 foot intervals across the slopes. Then I'd fill it in with rich black loam. But the pots of money must still be in the mail; so I must do with garden beds built from old railroad ties and table legs on the downward side of the hill propped higher with rocks. But I do enjoy this rag-tag little Eden that I get to play in.

One of my favorite garden writers, Beverley Nichols, said it best:

"To dig one's own spade into one's own earth!  Has life anything better to offer than this?"

                                                                                                      -Down the Garden Path

Deconstruction Weekend

I have had the great good fortune to be married to a most patient man.  To say he indulges me is a vast understatement.  This weekend's labors in the orchard garden proved this yet again.

We pulled out a vegetable bed in the center that had never done very well and was hard to navigate around.  Then Bruce dragged up the railroad ties and began putting together a new raised bed to the side of where the old one had been.  It was in the process of nailing in the chicken wire on the bottom, earlier this week, that he bashed his finger. 

The project was going along slowly, but steadily.  And then I took another long look at my new garden design...and hated it.  The bed was causing the path to have to make a sharp angle around it.  So I meekly suggested to Bruce that we might try to shove the bed down about six inches.  Saint that he is, he only grumbled a little and shoveled back out the dirt that so recently shoveled in.  Next the chicken wire came out and then, with straps and a crowbar, we slid the thing down the hill six inches. 

And it looked a little better.  But then it hit me that the bed needed to be shoved eight feet farther down.  Bruce barely twitched an eyebrow and we set to work.  In the midst of all of this, our neighbor, Leo, came with his Bobcat tractor and his young sons to auger post holes for the new gates that we'll be putting around the garden.  Men, boys, every tool we owned, heavy equipment, bags of cement and piles of posts -- all in the area around my little orchard garden.  The wire fence was snipped open in the three locations that the gates were going to go.  My garden was a wreck.

The supervisors

                                                                                      


As the sun went down and it grew dark, we kept at it.  Finally, as a lovely almost-full moon rose in the east, we called it a day and trudged back up to the house.

I look forward to seeing what things look like in the morning light.



Always check behind the door...

It's been a mousy sort of week.  As of yesterday, there's still the faint odor of dead mouse wafting through my classroom.  Earlier in the week I discovered that a water bowl that I'd placed in the barn for the ducks to drink out of had four drowned baby mice floating in it.  This made me alternately sad and pleased as I carried the bowl to the compost heap and emptied it.  On the one hand, I'm thinking, poor little baby mice ("I would have rescued you if I could").  On the other, I'm contemplating putting out another full water bowl in the same place ("Yipee! Four less mice !!!").   Hard not to be just a wee bit schizophrenic around here.

And then, there's been the bad smell emanating from the master bathroom.  Thinking that it had to do with my lax housekeeping skills, I scrubbed the toilet in the water closet.  Multiple times. It now sparkles beautifully, but the smell only got worse.  I suggested to Bruce that gas must somehow be seeping up the pipes from our septic tank and he patiently told me that this was impossible.  The smell grew horrific and, in desperation, I poured bleach into the toilet water tank.  It's sparkly in there too now, but it still did nothing to get rid of the stench. 

Hardly surprising, when the odor was coming from a very ripe mouse that's been steadily  decomposing behind the water closet door this whole while.  I made this momentous discovery this morning. Feeling a little like Lady Macbeth attacking her damned spot, after removing the body, I scrubbed out all traces of dead rodent with hot water, paper towels and massive amounts of disinfectant. The smell, I'm glad to say, is gone at last.

Country life....