Backyard Nest Egg

Chicken Dreaming

2010-06-10T07:13:00.010-05:00

I dreamed about the chickens last night. In the fragment I remembered as I awoke, I was holding them in my arms, feeling their soft silky feathers against my skin – just briefly. Then they fluttered away and through a pop door that led somewhere I couldn’t see. (It wasn’t the pop door to their coop.) And they were gone.

I sold the remaining two chickens shortly after Batgirl died. We got an offer on our house from the very first guy who toured it at our very first (and only) open house. So I knew I had to find new homes for the chickens. (We’ll be staying at an apartment while we plan and build our next home.) For some reason, it seemed easier to do after Batgirl died. Kind of like ripping the rest of the band-aid off quickly.

Their departure has left a hole in my life. I had them for just a year plus a few weeks, but they managed to thoroughly integrate themselves into my daily routine. First thing in the morning, I’d look out my bedroom window while I was pulling on my jeans to see what they were up to. Then I’d bring them their morning greens and fresh water.

Now there are no little chickens to greet me enthusiastically in the morning. Nothing to see when I look out the window, except a big wound in the garden where their coop (now sold) once stood. No real motivation for digging the big dandelions that emerged after all the rain last week out of the lawn – because there is nobody to get excited about them and gobble them down voraciously. When I step out the back door to snip a few herbs for cooking, no little birdies start squawking and banging their beaks on the wire of their cage, hoping to be let out. No eggs to collect and marvel over. “How many today?” we’d ask each other. We had five dozen in the fridge when they went away.

I miss them, but I hope they’re enjoying a better life – meaning more space – in their new home. At least that’s what the guy who bought them promised.

The photo above is a good representation of what I imagined having chickens would be like. They’d be an attractive garden feature, wandering through the yard, their gorgeous feathers contrasting beautifully with the foliage and flowers of the garden. They’d not only produce eggs for us to eat and manure for the garden, they’d be living “lawn ornaments”.

Of course, the reality is that they would tear up the garden in a heartbeat if I let them run free. They’d eat what I didn’t want them to eat, dig huge holes all over the place, and drop their uncomposted manure everywhere.

I took that photo of Amelia a few days after Batgirl died. I was tending the remaining chickens, but distracted by thoughts of Batgirl. In my absentmindedness, I failed to close the door to the pen all the way when I came in, and Amelia quickly ran out. It took me more than an hour to catch her, but truthfully, I wasn’t trying very hard that whole time. I was observing her and snapping a few photos. My fantasy had been that, shortly before we moved out of this house, I would fling open the door to their pen and let them all run free in the garden for a day.

Long-time readers of this blog will recall that I have struggled with the problem of having to keep the chickens penned and wanting to give them the space and freedom all living creatures seek. Our goal at our new place is to have enough land to give them just that; to allocate a large area for them to run outside, chase bugs, dig worms, eat what foliage they desire, and generally live the good chicken life.

So while I miss my chickens, I try to imagine them enjoying a life in the country, and look forward to giving our next chickens the same benefits after we move. It’s hard, however, not just to give up the chickens, but to leave the garden. I thought it would take much longer to sell the house, that I’d have one last summer to enjoy what’s shaping up to be our best garden yet.

Already we have harvested pounds and pounds of strawberries. They’re larger than the ones I grew a couple of years ago in the planter boxes and much juicier and more flavorful than the ones you buy in the grocery store. So far, I have canned seven jars of jam, 4 jars of strawberry syrup, and Rick has frozen two quarts of whole berries. Plus we have eaten many and given some away. Last evening he came in with that half peck box overflowing with yet more strawberries – and they’re still coming! All from an $8 package of strawberry roots I bought last spring.

The sweet potatoes I over-wintered survived and transplanted well, the potatoes are going gang-busters, and the tomatoes I started from seed in the house are my biggest and strongest seedlings yet. But I have to look to the future – to having more space for both chickens and garden, as well as a more energy-efficient home.

My last post for this blog will be up early next week. In it, I’ll detail the reasons why I feel it so important for all of us to get going on growing more of our own food. I’m taking my time with it because I want to provide plenty of links to other articles. I’ve been steeped in this stuff for six years, but some of the issues may be new to some people. So I want them to be able to read more about it if they’re interested. Look for the post on Monday or Tuesday.

Farewell, Batgirl!

2010-05-24T14:02:00.004-05:00

Batgirl - around 3 weeks old

Batgirl (Barred Rock in background) last summer

My very favorite chicken died yesterday. I was stunned; am still stunned. She showed no signs of ill health and was frisky that morning. When I went out to give them their morning greens and fresh water, she pecked at my jeans like she often does so I would pick her up. She only tolerates a few seconds of petting; then she wants to be free. But she seems to want just that little bit of attention.

When I went out in the afternoon, she was lying on her side in the pen, beak tucked into her breast. The other two were hanging out in the side pen, as far away from the corpse as they could get. I couldn’t even go into the pen. I ran back to the house calling for Rick. He checked her and confirmed what I knew; she was definitely dead; stiff as a board. My neighbor who grew up on a farm suggested it was the sudden heat that did her in. After a spell of cooler-than-usual spring weather, it suddenly got hot, with a high of 88 frickin’ degrees yesterday.

I guess I didn’t think carefully enough about how to protect them in these conditions. There are trees on either side of their pen, so they get lots of shade and had plenty of water. But apparently that wasn’t enough. Today I’ve been supplying the remaining two with ice-filled plastic containers they can cool off next to, ice in their waterer, and tomatoes and cucumber. Hopefully, all of that will keep them reasonably cool and hydrated.

Batgirl was the first chicken to ever touch my heart; heck, the first animal to do so. At 52 years old, I never had any pet or livestock before these chickens. How do they cluck their way into your heart? I don’t know; she just did.

Things I loved about Batgirl (in no particular order):

• I loved how she always tried to escape and be free. She’s a major reason I want to move somewhere with more land. I want to give my chickens lots more space to roam and play. Batgirl was our best escape artist – sneaking under netting, flying over it, nimbly flitting past me when I opened the door to their tractor or pen. I silently cheered her every time she made it through.

• I loved how when she escaped by flying over the temporary netting I’d put up in the yard, she’d come over to where I was working in the garden and stay next to me, scratching in the soil alongside me.

• I loved how she was always the bravest and first to try anything new. Like when she was just a couple weeks old and we put a low roost in the brooder. She investigated the new item immediately, hopped up on it, and tried to walk along it like a balance beam. She looked like a little toddler, unsteady on her feet and was adorable when she fell off.

Or when we started taking the 5 week old chicks outside. We’d put a smaller box with chicken wire over the top and a drop down door cut into it inside their brooder and try to get them to walk in. Then we’d close the door and carry them outside in the box. While the others resisted walking into that box, she’d brazenly march right in. Of course, she crapped immediately and panicked when we shut the door, but once we got her outside, she had a great time.

• I loved her independence. Although she didn’t stray too far from the group, she liked to keep a little distance between herself and the other hens. She was happy off doing something else by herself.

• I loved how she would pout when something didn’t go her way. She’d turn her back on you and take a few hops in the opposite direction. Sometimes she’d even turn back, look at you again, and take a couple more hops. Just to make sure you got the message. She stayed mad at Rick for about a week in winter when, against her will, he put bag balm on her comb to prevent frostbite. She really hated that indignity.

• Her latest funny thing: whenever I’d transfer them from pen to tractor, she wouldn’t go. The other two would run obediently from one place to the next, but she’d just stand there, looking at me and making some kind of mewling sound. It’s hard to describe – it wasn’t the clucking sound they make when they’re contentedly digging. But there she’d wait, at the door of the pen, for me to pick her up, pet her once or twice, which was all she could take, and then put her in the tractor. Why she had to have me physically move her, I do not know. I guess she just wanted a little attention.

Unlike the other hens, she really seemed like she wanted to interact somehow, if just for a few moments. The first time she pecked at my clothes, I freaked out for a second. Then I realized she wasn’t being aggressive, and maybe just wanted attention. In winter, when I’d give them their greens in the morning, she’d peck at my coat pocket, wanting me to bring out the little bag of cracked corn she knew I’d have. Unlike the others, she loved that corn more than greens (and they all love their greens). Other times, she’d just peck at my jeans a couple of times. When I’d turn to her, she seemed to look right at me, like she wanted to communicate.

Probably I’m imagining it, or reading too much into her little chicken behaviors. But I feel that somewhere in there a little spark connected her little chicken soul to mine. Farewell, little Batgirl. I miss you so much.

Catching Up

2010-05-21T06:40:00.008-05:00

We’ve been so busy preparing the house to go on the market that I’ve neglected this blog. I really miss it, too. I enjoy writing it, but also think I need it for my mental health! I even sleep better when I’m writing regularly. But we’re done with the hard labor, having our first open house on Sunday, and I’ve got a backlog of ideas for posts. The first is a quick “catching up” entry.

Happy Hatch Day!
I meant to do a special post for the chickens’ first hatch day, and somehow let it slip by! I got them as day-old chicks on May 12th last year, so as far as I can tell, they were hatched on May 11th. What an interesting year it’s been. I’ve gone from being someone who never had or wanted any pet or livestock, who was a bigger “chicken” even than the chickens, easily spooked by their sudden movements and fearful of picking them up, to someone entirely comfortable handling them and fairly knowledgeable about their care.

I planned to experiment with putting up videos using one of them as baby chicks and one I just took the other day. However, I can’t find the baby chicks video. Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure I deleted it one day out of embarrassment. I was talking away to the little chicks on it. Now I’ve really gone over to the other side and don’t care what people think about me talking to the chickens.

So here is a still photo of the baby chicks, followed by a video taken a few days ago of the girls all grown up. (The photo was taken when we still had the ten chicks. When they were two weeks old, I gave six away because we’re only allowed to have four in the city.)

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Current state of the Garden

Look at these cherries – aren’t they gorgeous!!! I’m lucky they’re still so beautifully healthy. According to the books, I should have sprayed by now. But my preferred fruit tree pest control product, Surround (kaolin clay) isn’t locally available. I called everywhere I could think of and most didn’t even know what it is. One sales person, assuming I didn’t understand what I was asking for, patiently explained that they didn’t carry it because customers didn’t like the look of it! Isn’t that the American way – style over substance? It’s true that covering your lovely trees with a fine mist of white clay is less visually appealing than glossy green leaves, but hey, I’d rather do that than eat chemical pesticides.

The only way to get it is to order it online, and it’s clay – it’s heavy - the shipping costs almost as much as the product. The smallest quantity I could get was 25 pounds, which will last years and years with just a small number of trees. But I took a deep gulp and finally ordered some because before we move, I really, REALLY want to taste at least a few cherries off those trees we have worked so hard to nurture. We should probably go all out and have some champagne with those cherries – they’re going to be the most expensive ones we’ve ever eaten!

The strawberry plants are loaded with fruit, as are the blueberries, and the raspberries are covered with flower buds. Tonight I’m planting out my tomatoes, sweet potatoes, peppers, cilantro, parsley, basil, and eggplant. I’ll put up some photos afterwards.

The “It’s for Everyone” Argument and Social Control
The other night I was flipping channels before going to sleep and found the 1975 film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest playing on TCM. Of course, I had to stay up late and watch it all the way through. It’s an amazing film. On one level, it’s about institutional control over individuals and crushing the human spirit. Jack Nicholson’s character, Randle McMurphy, opts for a mental institution to get himself out of a hard labor prison sentence. But he finds himself in a new kind of prison.

Anyway, the incident relevant to this post occurs when rebel McMurphy politely asks during group therapy session whether the work schedule might be changed to allow the men to watch a World Series game. Nurse Ratched explains in her calm, controlled, and steely manner, that a lot of thought is put into the schedule, that changing it may be upsetting to some patients. The schedule, like the constant anesthetizing music, she says, is for all the men on the ward. But she offers a vote on the matter, confident that the men are too cowed by her to side with McMurphy.

The vote fails, but on a subsequent day, Cheswick, who voted with McMurphy, asks for another vote. Irritated, Ratched reminds Cheswick that they had a vote. Cheswick presses the issue, pointing out that there is another game on today. Ratched allows the vote; this time all the men vote with a jubilant McMurphy.

Ratched looks around the group at calmly before telling McMurphy, “I see only 9 votes. There are 18 men on this ward.” The other nine she refers to are too out of it to even participate in the group therapy sessions or understand that a vote is taking place. They orbit around the dayroom, lost in their own worlds. McMurphy later complains to the doctors that Nurse Ratched “likes a rigged game.”

I woke up the next morning thinking about how the argument that the schedule could not be changed because it was for everyone was like the argument that we can not have a community garden in the park because the park is for everyone. It’s an argument that seems, on the surface, like ethically based opposition to changes in the system. We are looking out for everyone. You are asking for changes that will only benefit you. Don’t you see how unreasonable and selfish that is? Democratic rituals and phrases are used to uphold the system and enforce control. You are the crazy one, if you don’t see and appreciate the fairness and rationality of the system. I’m still thinking through the full implications of the analogy.

It Takes a Community

2010-05-06T07:37:00.005-05:00

Yesterday I wrote my report on the neighborhood garden survey. I’d been putting it off – I’m not sure why. Maybe because it represents closure for me. Once I had it finished, it was like a great weight had been lifted – and not just because I had one more task off my desk. It’s the weight that is lifted when you make a big decision and are ready to move forward.

For us, that decision is to sell our house and move someplace where we can have a little more land. In some ways it was a difficult decision, especially now that we are finally going to enjoy the fruits of some of our labors. The first cherries are forming on our trees, the blueberry shrubs are covered with blossoms, and our best strawberry crop yet is coming along beautifully.

I never wanted to live out in the country, and wrote a post about that last summer. (You can read it here.) I like living in the city and hoped to emulate the Dervaes family by packing as much edible landscaping into a city lot as possible. When the opportunity arose last winter for an “urban orchard” in our neighborhood, I was thrilled! Here was yet another way to stay in the city, and expand the land available for food crops. Plus, I’d get to meet more of my neighbors.

I’m a believer in the value of community – of looking out for one another, working together, and helping each other in times of need. That was the kind of neighborhood where I grew up, back in Illinois in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The fathers in our neighborhood were skilled blue collar workers. When someone wanted to pour a driveway, the masons among them would lead a group to accomplish the work. When toilets or other plumbing malfunctioned, they’d call on the neighbor behind us, who earned his living at that trade. When anyone had electrical problems, they’d call on my dad, a proud member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW).

In this way, these blue collar families could afford to keep a wife out of the labor force and maintain attractive homes. It was a multi-ethnic neighborhood, but with a common religion, as most were practicing Catholics. When First Communion or confirmation rites occurred, there were usually a number of children going through the ritual. Mothers in the neighborhood would plan communal celebrations which I mainly remember because of the terrific ethnic food – pasta dishes from the Italian families, next to strudles from German-descended families. It was hard for a kid to get away with anything in that neighborhood. The watchful eyes of many mothers were upon us, and quickly reported our doings!

In 1976, I married a man from a low-income family. (We just celebrated our 34th anniversary!) He joined the Air Force and there we experienced another kind of supportive community. It was the norm in those days, at least among the enlisted, to look out for one another. If somebody’s husband (most of the service members were male) was TDY (temporary duty at another base), neighbors and co-workers would check in on her, to make sure she got help if she needed it. Since we usually lived far from our extended families, when holidays rolled around, especially when we were stationed overseas, we typically planned communal celebrations. Everyone asked around and made sure that single guys had somewhere to go for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners.

You didn’t have to know people for a long time to benefit from this mutual aid. Since we were a transient community, we’d reach out to one another almost as soon as we met. Rick could strike up a conversation with someone while he was on line to in-process at a new base, and get us invited to a BBQ that week-end. The common bond was military service.

We didn’t go to college until later in life – that’s how we came to be living in this neighborhood of white collar professionals. The neighbors we’ve met seem to be nice people, but are not very involved with one another. They will help if they see a need, like the time I got stuck in snow at the bottom of my driveway, and one of my neighbors helped dig me out. But mostly we don’t interact much – maybe because we don’t need each other as much as did the blue collar workers in the neighborhood where I grew up?

Sociologists have observed that working class people and those from racial-ethnic minority groups build and maintain networks of economic interdependence among neighbors and extended family and that these are essential for their survival and quality of life. Men trading skilled work in the neighborhood where I grew up are a perfect example of that. When one neighbor does electrical work gratis on another neighbor’s house, knowing that he can later call upon that individual to provide free service when he wants to pour a driveway, those neighbors develop a relationship. They need and depend upon one another, and therefore work to build a relationship, in ways that neighbors who are white collar professionals do not.

If say, a judge from our current neighborhood needs electrical work done, he will engage a licensed electrician and pay him for the work. Their relationship ends there. Middle and upper middle class professionals do, of course, develop interdependent social networks, but these are usually focused primarily on their colleagues, rather than their neighbors.

The point I am trying to make in this rambling essay is that I’ve come to believe that you can’t establish a community garden without a community – meaning something more than a group of neighbors, unless a majority of that group of neighbors values a garden. Then community may grow through work on the garden. Many people in relatively affluent neighborhoods appear to have trouble seeing the value of an edible garden. After all, they can just buy whatever it is they need, just as the hypothetical judge in the example above can pay an electrician. He doesn’t need to have a relationship with one and perform a service in return.

If people don’t see the need for a garden, they will oppose change and cling to the status quo. Even reason will not work, as with the woman who opposed an orchard on the (quite valid) grounds that she didn’t want chemical pesticides in the neighborhood, yet clung to that argument and opposition despite assurances from me and others that we shared her concern and planned to use organic pest management.

If I ever doubted my decision to give up on a community garden and move to a place where we could have a little more land of our own and grow a bigger garden, it was dispelled a few days ago when a heated dispute arose over a proposed prairie garden. A resident of our neighborhood stopped by a few weeks ago to drop off his survey. He suggested on his survey and in person establishing a small prairie garden on the green space of one of our cul-de-sacs. Currently, neighbors are using it as a dumping ground for branches and other garden waste. He offered to lead a project to plant a few coneflowers, rudbeckia, a third crabapple tree to join the two already there, and possibly dedicating the garden to a former resident, now deceased.

I thought it a lovely idea and encouraged the few who responded to the survey indicating they wanted a garden to join this neighbor. I offered to help, too, thinking that even if we didn’t get a community garden or orchard, this small project might be a good start. Interestingly, the woman opposed to the orchard also suggested a similar garden on this green space back in the winter. She is one of his neighbors and plans to help him with the project.

If you think such a garden would be uncontroversial, you’d be wrong. Despite the project leader’s polite tone and effort to hear everyone’s concerns, loud opposition has emerged. “STOP!” one woman emailed. “I have a three year old. I am completely opposed to a prairie garden.” She didn’t elaborate on what she saw as the hazards of a few prairie flowers for a pre-schooler.

Another, hiding behind the “I’m just concerned about the children” mantra, angrily wrote:

It is an inane idea to take away a common play area for the kids. I for one will not be chasing kids out of the nice plantings nor will I help maintain the area once the glow wears off.
Since the area in question is essentially a part of my view every time I gaze out a window, I would prefer to
see children playing in the area as opposed to seeing an often barren and browning ornamental "prairie style" garden.

Instead of plantings, maybe the folks interested in improving the appearance of the area who have extra time on their hands would consider weeding and cutting the grass which would improve the appearance of the area while maintaining the circle as a common area for the small children in the neighborhood.

Bear in mind, there are two parks in this neighborhood, and the suggested plantings will not take up all the space on the circle. And, there are other circles with plantings in the city – it’s nothing new.

He also argued that the garden would be a safety hazard, because children could emerge “undetected from plantings” and get hit by a car. Understand that this neighborhood is so quiet, I feel completely safe riding my bike around it without a helmet. And how small would a child have to be to be hidden by a coneflower? A child that small should have adult supervision – which would prevent them being run over by a car.

This person is so vociferous and angry that volunteers are dropping out of the project, saying they no longer want to be involved. If people can get that worked up about a few native plants, I can only imagine what opposition I would face if I pressed on with the community garden idea. And if others will not stand with you, but drop out of projects because of a few angry people, it’s just not worth it. I feel badly for the guy who wanted to establish this garden, but have to admit enjoying a bit of schadenfreude at the anti-orchard lady’s expense. Maybe she will learn something when her own garden project is opposed by people who cannot be reasoned with even when their concerns are addressed.

I hope this post doesn’t sound bitter; I’m not really feeling that way. I was sad and disappointed for a few days, before we made our final decision. But now I’m looking forward to more land, more chickens - honeybees! Room to plant more than one pumpkin and more than one watermelon. It will be an exciting new beginning.

Chicken Pickin's

2010-04-30T05:37:00.008-05:00

Is there a way to minimize purchased inputs when it comes to your chickens? Obviously, a backyard is too small to grow grains for their feed. Eventually, I want to learn how to grind and mix my own feed. Many people recommend that. For now, however, I buy them a high quality organic layer feed.

Traditionally, people have supplemented their chickens’ diets with kitchen scraps and leftovers from human dinners, using the chickens, in the words of our extension agent, as “garbage disposals.” I haven’t done much of that, for several reasons. First, I doubt whether, left to their own devices, chickens would make a fire and cook up some grub. It seems to me that it is more natural for them to eat raw food.

Secondly, much of what humans (American humans, anyway) eat these days is not healthy for humans, let alone chickens. We try to eat healthfully most of the time, but we enjoy things like chocolate cake now and then (more often when I was younger and could more easily keep the weight off!) I wouldn’t dream of giving chickens chocolate cake. They’d have to fight me for it, like anyone else, and although at 4’9” tall I’m smaller than most grown people, I’m bigger than a chicken!

Seriously, the white flour and sugar are empty calories, let alone the hazards of the giving chocolate to animals. If you think I’m crazy to even mention chocolate, you should check out the Backyard Chickens message board sometime. I once saw a post asking whether it was okay to give chickens chocolate. Some of the moderators eventually put together a list of safe “chicken treats” in response to all the questions they were getting.

I’m not trying to put down posters on that site. Some terrific people post over there and I don’t know how I would have made it through my first year of chicken keeping without them. Everyone is extraordinarily helpful.

It is also the largest site devoted to backyard flocks that I know of, and so is a great place to get a sense of what’s going in with the trend. The problem I see is that many people want to treat chickens as pets rather than livestock. Even when you start out, as I did, with the intention of treating them as livestock, if you have just a small number of birds, you find yourself naming them and getting attached to them whether you want to or not.

One problem with treating them as pets is the desire to give them “treats.” People want to give their beloved pets foods they (the humans) enjoy. The result is a lot of fat family dogs and cats. Even foods like pasta, unless it is whole grain, can contribute to obesity (as with humans) because it is mostly empty carbohydrates. Our extension agent says many of the chickens kept in backyards are obese and that obesity causes many of the reproductive disorders you see in chickens, such as double-yolked eggs, internal laying, and prolapses.

What I’ve tried to do is observe my chickens and let them educate me about their diet. They have tiny brains, but they are programmed with specific information related to their survival as a species.

What I’ve learned from my chickens is this:

* They do not particularly care for cooked food, even on a cold winter morning. I’ve read and heard from many sources that cooked grains are good for warming up chickens in winter. Mine had no interest in the oatmeal I lovingly prepared for them. I offered it a couple of times, thinking maybe it was just unfamiliar to them. The only time they went for it was when I put diced apple in it. Then they just picked out the apple! I tried making a porridge of their layer mash and hot water, but they didn’t go for that, either.

Unlike many other chickens I’ve read about, mine do not care for pasta. I even offered them the good stuff, whole grain pasta. They nibbled a bit, turned up their beaks, and walked away. The only cooked food I ever got them to eat was popcorn. But they only like it occasionally.

* They are omnivores; consequently, they usually don’t want the same treats over and over. I knew, intellectually, that they are omnivores, but it didn’t really sink in until I tried giving them something they seemed to like more than once. They went crazy for popcorn the first time I gave it to them, so I made it again the next day. They just looked at me, as if to say, “Popcorn, AGAIN? With no movie? What else have you got?”

Similarly, when they were molting in winter, I read that you should give them a little extra protein. Some people give them dog or cat food, but I questioned the quality of that. Then I read about a woman who gave her chickens deer liver when they were molting. Since liver is a high quality protein, and I happened to some pastured turkey livers in the freezer, I offered them liver. They went crazy for it. The next day I brought out more, and they were, “meh.”

* The “never fail” treats they will always go for, no matter how many days in a row or times per day you offer them are greens, bugs, worms, and grubs. Big surprise, huh? These are the foods closest to what their ancestors, Asian jungle fowl, ate in the wild. The great thing is, you can give your chickens their favorite (and most healthful) treats and minimize purchased inputs at the same time! One of their favorite treats is dandelions, which are extraordinarily nutritious (for people and chickens!).

Whenever Batgirl, one of our Barred Rocks, gets away from me, she makes a bee line for the raspberry and strawberry patch. So now I give them leaves from raspberry shoots coming up where I don’t want them, as well as leaves from extra strawberry runners. I’ve also given them extra parsley from the herb bed, volunteer squash shoots coming up in the compost, pea vines after I harvest the peas, and carrot tops. They also love the leaves, flowers, and seeds of sunflowers – the only crop I plant specifically for them.

Last summer when I was moving their tractor to a new spot on the lawn, I happened to pass over an ant hill and they went crazy. So I just left the tractor there, and they had a blast cleaning out the ant hill. The next day I set them over another ant hill and fairly quickly had my yard cleaned of ants.

One of the hard realities I’ve learned about backyard chickens is that you can’t really let them run free – unless you don’t have a garden. Some people fence off their gardens and give their chickens free run of the rest of the yard. But that only works if your garden is limited to one spot in your yard. From my reading, I thought I’d be able to let them run around and take care of any bug problems in my yard. I especially hoped they’d be a big help with the Japanese beetles. In practice, we’ve had pick the beetles off our roses and cherry trees and serve them up to the chickens, who will greedily devour them.

The reason is that chickens will eat many kinds of greens (even the ones you don’t want them to eat) and will dig huge holes in the garden where you don’t want them. For example, a neighbor who lives a few blocks away from me let her chickens run free, for just an hour or so every evening, in her back yard and they quickly decimated all her hostas.

They’ll work their way through your vegetable garden, too. For instance, they’re smart enough to avoid eating tomato leaves, which are harmful to them, but they love tomatoes – and especially enjoy taking a few pecks from each tempting fruit you have hanging on your vines.

Chickens are champion diggers. Apparently convinced they’re going to find something good somewhere in there, they relentlessly dig without rest. One of my neighbors who has no experience of chickens, watched ours in disbelief one afternoon. “What are they looking for?” he asked. “They just won’t stop!”

It’s useful when you want to turn the soil in spring, so I put up temporary netting wherever I want them to dig and let them have at it. Yesterday, when I went to return them to their pen, I noticed that Amelia was outside the temporary netting. She had dug her way free and was busily digging a deep hole under a nearby shrub.

So, the point is that there are plenty of things you can feed your chickens, or allow them access to, that will keep them happy and healthy and will help to minimize your purchased inputs. I’m convinced that a major reason my chickens are so healthy without antibiotics or vitamin supplements, and survived the winter so well, is that I feed them greens twice a day. Greens are nutritional powerhouses – for chickens and people. I’m trying to get more into my diet.

Unfortunately, since they’re backyard chickens, I usually have to serve the greens up to the chickens, rather than let them forage for them on their own. I hang them in suet cages, in part, to keep them busy for awhile pulling them out. Watching them time their movements so they can deftly grasp a green sticking out of a swinging suet cage, I began to think giving them their greens this way, rather than just throwing them on the ground, might also help to keep their reflexes sharp. They don’t get many opportunities to use their quick reflexes since they’re penned up most of the time.

Social Class & Community Gardens

2010-04-23T17:08:00.018-05:00

I’ve been trying to get my head around why someone would actively oppose a community garden. I can understand apathy and indifference towards a community garden. Over the past several generations, Americans have become so far removed from their food sources that many can not recognize a common vegetable plant in a garden, let alone know how to grow one. Some vegetables, even after they have matured on a plant, are unrecognizable to some people. I know I’m not the only one who’s had to identify produce in a grocery store so a young checker unfamiliar with the item could ring up the sale.

It’s amazing when you think about it. The most basic skill any living creature teaches its young is how to provide food for itself. That a majority of Americans don’t know how to do that, and further, believe that food production is something that should be out-of-sight and away from where most of us live is . . . I don’t even know how to finish the sentence. It’s just breath-taking when you think about it; I mean, REALLY think about it. From an evolutionary standpoint, it’s suicidal.

It’s also elitist. The gap between rich and poor has been growing since the Reagan administration, and the current economy and job market is dismal, so it’s hard for most of us to see ourselves as “wealthy.” Compared to the truly wealthy in this country, most of us are rapidly falling below middle class. But compared to much of the rest of the world, we are wealthy. Historically, it was only the upper classes who could remove themselves from the most fundamental activity of all living creatures - food production. In much of the world today, as was true of our great-grandparents in this country, people who can’t produce at least some of their food themselves will go hungry.

So I do understand apathy and indifference towards community gardens. Food production is an activity many contemporary Americans have had no experience of and no need to learn. But active opposition to others planting a garden in their neighborhood is something I’m still thinking through. It appears to me that opposition is rooted in class bias. I’m also guessing that those who oppose community gardens in their neighborhoods do not recognize their own elitism and would be deeply offended by the accusation.

Consider some of the objections to community gardens.

1) We don’t want pesticides in our neighborhood. When the urban orchard opportunity emerged last December, and I recruited volunteers to qualify our neighborhood for the grant, I received a few emails opposing the idea. (Interestingly, those opposed did not contact me directly. They lodged their concerns with others, who then passed them along to me.) One individual adamantly opposed a public orchard in the neighborhood, in part, because she did not want more “noxious” pesticides in the neighborhood and believed that fruit production could not be done without spraying. Chemical pesticides were also a concern when a few residents in the Sycamore Hills neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio attempted to organize a community garden.

My first reaction to my neighbor’s objection was: fair enough. I emailed her to explain (as the Sycamore Hills community garden organizer did with her neighbors) that our group agreed with her stance on chemical pesticides and planned to use organic methods of pest control. When I later conducted a survey of our neighborhood, the same neighbor reiterated her objection about pesticides and continued:

[An orchard is] labor intense (sic) requiring pruning and spraying . . . And for how many years can we sustain a volunteer crew? Without them we’ll be dealing with decaying fruit and bees (which we don’t want to eliminate). Fortunately for us, we have two farmers’ markets within walking distance where we can buy and enjoy a great variety of local fruits and even nuts.

Let’s unpack the layers of meaning in this remarkable statement. First of all, she either isn’t listening or doesn’t believe that fruits and vegetables can be produced organically. She also doubts (perhaps not unreasonably) that volunteer interest in growing our own food can be maintained. More importantly, the statement implies that the messiness, labor, and hazards of food production should occur elsewhere, with others undertaking the manual labor and health risks of pesticide exposure.

2) Vegetable gardens detract from the beauty of the landscape, especially during unproductive seasons.
One (of the very few) respondents to our survey objected to a community garden, in part, because “vegetable and flower gardens on a large scale (emphasis in original) can be attractive for the few months they are in production but are a visual blight the remainder of the year.”

In Atlanta, U.S. Congressman David Scott and more than a dozen of his neighbors blocked a proposed community garden at Inman Park – across the street from Scott’s mansion - because it would spoil their view.

During a heated town meeting in Maplewood, New Jersey, one opponent of a proposed community garden in Orchard Park expressed a related sentiment when he commented that “it was his understanding community gardens were used to improve abandoned properties or deteriorated areas—which is not the case with Orchard Park.”

Here we have another version of the idea that food production is an ugly business, best done out-of-sight of the non-laboring classes. However, if the gardens are located in poor neighborhoods afflicted with urban blight, then those hideous fruits and vegetables can be an improvement.

One wonders what some of these objectors want to look at in the parks – just lawn and trees? Shrubs? My own neighbor (cited above) didn’t even want flowers because they are a “visual blight” when they aren’t blooming!

It’s worth recalling here that lawns originated in Europe as a symbol of social class. They indicated that their owners were so wealthy, they could afford to keep great swaths of land out of food production and pay people to maintain the closely cropped turf (since mechanized mowing machines had yet to be invented.)

3) The land in this public space should be for everyone, not just the few growing gardens. As I wrote in an earlier post, this was the argument our neighborhood association board used a couple of years ago to block the city from moving an existing community garden to a new location in our neighborhood. In January, when the president of the neighborhood association got wind of a meeting I was organizing to start a community garden or public orchard, he reiterated that argument. Although he repeatedly claimed that he was “not against” community gardens, he stated that “the whole park should be used by all neighbors and not just a select few.” Maplewood, New Jersey opponents of a community garden in Orchard Park voiced similar objections:

"It's not fair for a small number of people to determine the use of the space," said St. Lawrence Avenue resident Maura Sackett.

"My kids play there on a daily basis," said Chris Coreschi of Headley Place, as he noted that the raised beds would remove open space.

As I argued in my earlier post, this objection is illogical. There are plenty of facilities at parks that not everyone uses – like the softball pitch that only softball teams use or the playground that only children use. A community garden need not be any different. The only way this objection makes any sense is if one assumes that the garden will commandeer the entire park, rather than be allotted a portion of the space, as with a softball pitch or tennis court. So why make such a statement? Perhaps because asserting the right of the whole community to the use of public space has the ring of egalitarianism?

Even when the proposed garden will not be located in a park, residents have been known to vociferously object. In Shelton, Connecticut, organizers attempted to locate a community garden on a former farm, “bought by the city for $2 million in 2002 with the idea that the public would have access to the open space.” Angry residents insisted that a garden would increase vehicle trips by 500-600 per week on their quiet cul-de-sac. In fact, similarly situated gardens in Connecticut do not create that level of traffic and the planned garden would have provided parking on the farm rather than the cul-de-sac.

Residents would not be mollified, however. They put up posters, signed petitions, and packed the Board of Alders meeting to make their objections known. Interestingly, their concerns included vandalism and “security at the gardens.” A flyer circulated prior to the meeting called upon residents to “stop the madness” and “be there to defend your home.” This sounds to me like fear of outsiders, perhaps even fear that low-income people, interested in growing some food, might set foot in the neighborhood. (As of April 19th, opponents of the garden had successfully stalled the project, as the garden committee still awaited a decision from the mayor.)

There are legitimate concerns about community gardens in neighborhoods, including, but not limited to, pesticides, traffic, and how the site will be run to ensure that negligent gardeners don’t allow it to become an eyesore. It should also be expected, given the woeful ignorance of many contemporary Americans about food production that some residents will not understand some aspects of gardening; for instance, that properly managed compost does not smell or create unwanted pests. But when honest attempts to address these concerns are met with obstinance, irrational assertions, and cries to “defend your home,” it’s clear that something else is going on. As far as I can tell, it’s a social class issue.

What do you think? Do you have any community garden organizing experiences to share?

Blueberry Blossoms

2010-04-21T08:40:00.008-05:00

Edited to add: I can't believe I forgot to mention coffee grounds! They're a great source of nitrogen AND they help acidify the soil - so a perfect soil amendment for blueberries. I only learned this late last summer, so just recently started using coffee grounds. If you don't drink coffee yourself, you can usually get free used coffee grounds from places like Starbucks. They give them away for compost. Another way to minimize your purchased inputs.

Aren’t these gorgeous? I am soooo looking forward to harvesting our first crop of blueberries this year. We planted two Dwarf Northblue (one pictured above) and one Northland (a “half-high” cultivar developed from a cross between a high bush and low bush blueberry) in the spring of 2008. The Northblue was developed at the University of Minnesota and the Northland at the University of Michigan, so they are hardy enough to withstand our Wisconsin winters. (You need two cultivars for good pollination.)

According to the labels that came with the shrubs, the Northland will grow to be about 3-4 feet tall and, when mature, will produce about 20 pounds of medium to small fruit. The two Northblue are smaller; when mature, they’ll be about 20-30 inches tall and produce 3-7 pounds of large berries.

Gardening authorities advise removing the flowers from the shrubs the first two years to promote foliar and root development. I found this very difficult the first year. The tiny shrubs developed beautifully and produced blossoms almost immediately – as you can see in the photo below. I felt like I was practically desecrating the plant – and more importantly, depriving myself of some tasty fruit! The promise in the literature that removing blossoms in the early years will produce better harvests in later years was only thing motivating me to comply with the rule.

It was a lot easier to pull off the blossoms last year because I could see that something was not quite right with the shrubs and I wanted them healthy before they went into fruit production. The leaves were paler than they should be and growth appeared to be slower than normal. I had a soil test done, expecting to find that the pH was too high. That was true – although it was close. But I was surprised to learn that the soil was very low in nitrogen.

Rick built beautiful two-tiered raised beds for our shrubs because blueberries need acidic soil (pH 4-5.5) and the soil here is very alkaline. With raised beds I thought I could better control the soil pH. (Research at Ohio State University found that blueberry yields in raised beds were comparable to those planted in flat soil.) Following recommendations in a University of Iowa publication, I included a lot of peat in the soil mix. I later learned that peat has little to no nutrient value. So although I nearly achieved proper pH, the poor things were starved of nitrogen!

I amended with compost and chicken manure. I also switched to using pine needles to acidify the soil. In addition to the peat, I had added soil sulfur, but the yellow flakes never seemed to dissolve. Even when I had watered well, or we had a heavy rain, I’d find undissolved flakes in the soil. Someone recommended pine needles to me and I liked that idea. These are abundant around here, so I can minimize purchased inputs by using what’s available for free.

(Interestingly, Ruth Stout claimed (in her No-Work Garden Book (1971)) that once she built up her soil with organic matter, like hay, she found she didn’t need to pay attention to soil pH. Following Stout, my goal now is to prioritize soil building over pH – although I will continue to use pine needles.)

As with other perennial food crops, berry bushes are great for a Backyard Nest Egg. Once they’re established, you can harvest fruit for many years. They’re extraordinarily nutritious, with the highest antioxidant capacity of all fresh fruit. Blueberries are one of the foods recommended to retard aging, preserve vision, and protect against heart disease. I just like to eat them – in muffins, pancakes, or most often, in yogurt. When we lived in Washington state many years ago, some friends showed us where to pick berries for free. We ate them fresh, baked them in pies, made jam, and froze many to last throughout the winter.

Last year I must have missed a few blossoms, because I found a couple of berries on one shrub that summer. They were delicious. If this year’s crop is just as good, we are in for a treat!

No Community for This Garden

2010-04-20T10:44:00.006-05:00

[Note: My laptop, recently on life support, has now expired - may she RIP. :( I have managed to get regular access to another laptop while I wait to get a new one, so WILL be posting more frequently.]

Over the last few years, dozens of articles have appeared in the media describing the development of community gardening projects across the country. But not every neighborhood welcomes a community garden. Google “opposition community garden” and you’ll find plenty of stories about resistance to community gardens in different areas across the country.

So, why do community gardens emerge and blossom in some neighborhoods and not others? Is it possible for community gardens to be established through the efforts of just a few dedicated volunteers, or is wider community support required to get the project going?

These are questions I’ve been asking myself a lot lately. Back in January, I wrote about an opportunity neighborhoods in our city were offered by the Fruit Tree Planting Foundation to establish urban orchards. I posted an email to our neighborhood list (which includes only about a third of households in the neighborhood) and was thrilled to get a group of 20+ volunteers willing to be trained to care for the trees and help maintain them, if our neighborhood was selected for the grant.

Ultimately, we did not get selected; neighborhoods with established garden projects were given preference. At the time, I thought that was a little unfair. How could new garden projects get started if preference is given to those with established projects?

Now I’m beginning to think that was a wise choice on the part of those determining which neighborhoods would be selected to apply for the grant. The interest I thought we had for an urban orchard quickly waned. After my initial disappointment that we were not selected to apply for the Fruit Tree Planting Foundation grant, I decided to use the list of volunteers I’d collected to pursue other grants, either for an urban orchard or community garden.

I emailed the group and set up a meeting, but attendance was low. Of those who initially expressed enthusiasm for an urban orchard, only four in addition to Rick and me showed up. Nobody else emailed (even after follow-up reminder emails from me) to say they wanted to be involved, but just couldn’t make that date and time. So I could only conclude that very few were interested.

Our tiny group of six decided to do a survey. The survey had two purposes:

1) to reach out to the two-thirds of the neighborhood not on the email list and perhaps enlarge the group of those interested in a garden project; and,

2) to fulfill a requirement for a local new garden grant.

The response rate to the survey was anemic – around 3% of households. (For comparison, among social researchers, a 33% response rate is considered “good” for a snail mail survey.) Responses were low even among the original group who volunteered for the urban orchard opportunity. Only about a quarter of that group responded to the survey.

So what’s going on with our neighborhood? I think it’s no accident that Detroit has a thriving community garden network while our (upper?) middle class neighborhood of university professors, lawyers, judges and other professionals is largely disinterested. People in areas hard hit by the economic downturn (impending collapse, some would say) have had to struggle to meet basic needs; i.e., food, shelter, and clothing – and in the process, learn about the importance of food security. Whereas many people in our affluent neighborhood do not seem to understand the value of growing your own food in your own neighborhood, when you can, as one person told me, "just go to the Farmer’s market or grocery store and buy it."

To be fair, one woman in our neighborhood is getting a children’s garden started at an elementary school. Unbeknownst to each other, she was trying to get a children’s garden going at the same time that I was pursuing the urban orchard. They are slated to break ground for the children’s garden this month.

The children’s garden has the advantage of having the land problem solved: they can plant it on school grounds. Whereas the location of an urban orchard or community garden will likely be contentious. The neighborhood association Board of Directors successfully resisted a past effort by the city to move a community garden to one of the two parks in our neighborhood. The Board argued that the park should be for all the residents of the neighborhood, and not just the few who would be gardening there.

When the Board was notified by a well-meaning neighbor that I was holding a meeting to discuss a potential urban orchard or community garden, the president fired off an email to me reiterating their opposition to use of a park for that purpose. I’d always thought their reasoning was ludicrous on its face: There are plenty of facilities at parks that not everyone uses – like the softball pitch that only softball teams use or the playground that only children use.

Besides, some people enjoy a garden even if they are not working in it themselves. Several elderly neighbors who responded to the survey indicated they would like to see a garden project in the neighborhood, but noted they would be unable to participate due to age or disability.

Moreover, the argument that a community garden should not be in a park because the park is for everyone, not just the few who garden, sounds like the kind of thing people say when they want to cover less worthy motives with something that sounds a little more high-minded.

The woman who initiated the children’s garden project advocated for it using educational research on children and learning. So far as I know, she has not encountered any opposition. I’m guessing that’s probably because it’s hard to oppose something that’s “for the children,” that has a foundation in research on education, that utilizes land nobody else is using, and that involves only people who live in the neighborhood.

It may be that I took the wrong approach to advocate an orchard or community garden. Not wanting to scare off my neighbors with talk of “peak oil,” the problems with industrial farming, climate change, predicted food security concerns, and the like, I instead wrote about my experience of a mini neighborhood orchard back in New Mexico.

I began my article for the quarterly neighborhood newsletter by describing the pecan trees that were planted in our New Mexico neighborhood as part of a Depression-era jobs creation program. I related how much our neighborhood enjoyed those pecans and that I had the opportunity to meet the guy who had been paid thirty-odd cents per tree to plant them.

Then I went on to talk about the Fruit Tree Planting Foundation, how we were not selected for the grant, and noted that those selected already had established gardens and organizations to run them. My (not so subtle?) goals were to describe the non-controversial benefits of producing food in the neighborhood and to suggest that we were missing out on opportunities enjoyed by other neighborhoods who had already gotten started on their gardens. I urged everyone to make their “voice heard” by responding to the survey.

I was disheartened by the anemic response – but not too surprised. I’ll write in more detail about the survey results in my next post, but just leave you with this question. Of 998 households, only 32 (counting our own) responded. Two were opposed to any garden project, two opposed an orchard, and several preferred ornamental gardens like prairie gardens or rainwater gardens. Just 12 indicated they would be willing to help with an effort to get a garden project started. I had hoped to get a core group of at least twice that number. Given that 25 volunteers to help with an urban orchard quickly dwindled to six, (two of whom are Rick and me), my feeling is that 12 may be too few.

Or maybe I’m just lazy. I take that back. I don’t mind doing a lot of heavy lifting, as I already have done to solicit volunteers for the first grant opportunity for trees, research other grant opportunities, write the newsletter article and survey, recruit volunteers to hand deliver a quarter of the surveys (as our Board president funded postage only to those households who had paid their association dues) and now analyzing the survey results and writing a report.

But I can’t do everything, and feel I need a truly dedicated core group to work with to make it happen - especially as I have reason to believe there is more opposition than the survey indicates. What do you think? Anybody out there have experience with establishing a community garden in a relatively affluent neighborhood?

Cherry Blossoms!

2010-04-14T20:36:00.009-05:00

(Quick note: My laptop, which has been on life support, is quickly fading away. :( I'm writing this from someone else's laptop - hopefully, I'll get regular access until I replace my own - and so will be posting more frequently.)

Both our cherry trees are sporting beautiful blossoms on multiple branches - dare I hope for cherries this year? We planted dwarf Bing and Black Tartarian trees in the spring of 2007. Generally, cherries take 3-5 years to come into production, a bit less for dwarf trees. When I saw a few blossoms last spring, I got all excited, but only a handful appeared on one branch and I never saw any fruit.

Still, it was a hopeful sign. We took a chance planting sweet cherries. Door County, Wisconsin is famous for their tart cherries. However, here in Madison, we’re on the border between climate zones for sweet cherries and University extension publications generally advise against planting them.

But I love sweet cherries and didn’t want to plant fruit I’d have to add sugar to in order to eat them. (I’ve since learned that if you dry tart cherries, they’re sweet because the sugar is concentrated.)

Cherries are rich sources of antioxidants, helpful in preventing cancer and slowing the aging process. Cherries, and cherry juice, in particular, are an old-time folk remedy for gout and arthritis. My mother says my grandfather swore by cherry juice for his gout. I have an arthritic hip and can vouch for the effectiveness of cherry juice in reducing inflammation – and therefore pain. Medical science supports the claim of anti-inflammatory effects of cherries. A study published in the Journal of Nutrition in 2006 reported that consumption of Bing cherries lowered markers of inflammation in otherwise healthy men and women.

Those trees have been a lot of work. I’ve noted before that I never even heard of Japanese beetles until I moved to Wisconsin. Then I unwittingly set about planting just about everything they love to devour – roses, cherry trees (which are in the same botanical family as roses), raspberries. (Come to think of it, there aren’t too many plants those voracious beetles won’t devour.)

Japanese beetle season generally begins the first week in July. It’s been a battle every summer to protect those trees without chemical pesticides. The first year, we tried spraying them with Neem oil; however, the beetles all but laughed in our faces. Next, I sewed together large swaths of cheap, fine mesh netting (found in the bridal section of fabric stores) and we draped those over the trees. This worked okay, when the trees were small, although the wind tends to shift the netting, sometimes bending the branches, so we have to reposition.

As the trees got larger, this solution became unworkable. One year we tried stapling sheets of floating row cover together and draping this over the trees. Our neighbor thought it was cool-looking, especially at night, when a light breeze moved the draped trees giving the appearance of two large ghosts swaying.

I awoke one night, during a thunderstorm, looked out and saw the trees bent nearly double from the weight of the water on the row cover. Frantic, I shook Rick to wake him. “The cherry trees are about to snap in half!” I wailed. We ran outside in the pouring raining to remove the cover. Amazingly enough, they survived and eventually straightened up again.

Last year they were too big for any physical barrier. We just had to do the tedious work of picking the bugs off by hand. We fed them to the chickens who went crazy for them.

This year I plan on trying kaolin clay. I read about using this product for protecting the fruit long ago, but stupidly never considered using it to protect the leaves until someone recommended it to me last winter. With any luck, I’ll be protecting our first crop of cherries as well!

Spring has Sprung!

2010-04-03T07:22:00.025-05:00

My computer's been down; luckily, I have my own personal, live-in IT guy - with benefits! It was a HUGE job to get it sorted out - Thanks, Rick!

Meanwhile, life goes on! Here's a little photo essay of some of the season's earliest growth in my garden. The first is (look closely!) lettuce coming up.

I planted pots of Bronze Arrow and Emerald Oak, as well as some baby leaf spinach and left the pots outside. I knew they would take longer to germinate there than inside under lights, but transplanting is always tricky and it's a pain in the ass to "harden off" plants.

Basically, this means dragging them in and out for a week or two, gradually leaving them outside for longer periods of time, so they can adjust to outdoor temperatures, light, and wind. I'm trying to avoid all that and minimize my use of grow lights by planting everything I can outside. I'd love to have a little greenhouse, and not use fossil fuels to start any seeds, but that's down the road a bit.

Besides conserving space under the lights, I'm also trying to conserve precious garden space by growing these in pots. Plus, I'm trying to get around the usual problem of having too much lettuce all at once in early summer, and then having it bolt as soon as the weather really warms. I'm thinking I'll plant a few at a time, move the pots to cooler spots when the weather warms, and hopefully, space my harvest out over a longer period of time.

Here you can see garlic coming up in the long containers, and maybe if you squint, see the spinach coming up in the clay pot.

I'm very pleased with the garlic. I planted it in the fall, when I planted garlic in other places in the garden - among the roses, in the herb garden, and a few in places I now can't remember!

Anyway, after I planted it, I checked "the bible;" i.e. McGee & Stuckey's The Bountiful Container and learned that garlic is one of the few crops they recommend against planting in containers. Oh, well.

I left them in the garage over the winter, stumbled across the pots a few weeks ago, and was pleased to see them sprouting! I think I will carefully transplant them soon, into the ground. Or maybe just one container, and leave the other - see how it works out.

Here is the current state of my herb bed. I should have taken a "before" photo; before I let the chickens dig here, and then pruned things back. You can see a heavily pruned clump of sage in the back, between the tree and the window.

To the right and forward of the sage, you can see chives coming up. To the left of the chives is a clump of oregano, with clumps of thyme in the left foreground. The right foreground has two seemingly bare patches that actually have mint and the only clump of parsley I left from last year coming up.

Parsley, as I'm sure you know, is a biennial. That means it will come up again this year, but quickly go to seed. I started new seedlings indoors, but left one of last year's so it can seed the garden for next year. Hopefully, that will be one less set of seedlings I'll have to start indoors next year.

Here's something fun - "volunteers"! I like this name for seedlings that you haven't planted, at least not this season, that sprout in unexpected places. These seedlings look like curcubits of some sort, but what I do not know. I don't remember ever planting cucumbers in one of these planter boxes, but it's entirely possible that compost I dumped in there had cucumber seeds in it.

The more I think about it, though, the more I think it's spaghetti squash. The reason is that, during winter, I gave one to the chickens. The hay you see on top is from the chicken pen. I wanted to keep them active in winter, as our extension agent advised, so put a flake of hay in there.

Normally, I wouldn't do this, because the hay, like their droppings, is high in nitrogen. The goal with a chicken pen is to keep the carbon (wood chips, e.g.) to nitrogen ratio high. If you have too much nitrogen, you end up with a very nasty smelling pen.

In the fall, they had a blast in the yard scratching apart flakes of hay. But in winter they just stood on it. I finally realized it was keeping them up off the cold frozen ground. So I gave them more, thinking I'd take it out as soon as the weather warmed - and before I ended up with a nasty mess on my hands.

A couple of weeks ago, I raked up the hay (which by now they had scratched apart), together with their droppings and other matter, put some of it in these planter boxes, and covered the planter boxes with plastic, thinking to speed the composting process. Yesterday, I took the plastic off, and voila! Curcubits.

The potatoes (that I wrote about here) sucessfully transplanted out. You can see one of our two potato towers in the background of this photo. In the foreground are three raised beds with dwarf blueberries.

What else? The raspberries are starting to leaf out. Indoors, I have Juliet, Amish Paste, and Brandywine tomato seedlings just sprouted under lights, as well as parsley, cilantro, basil, and eggplant. The bell peppers are just starting to lift their heads, and I'm still waiting on the poblanos and jalapenos.

What about you? What's sprouting in your neck of the woods?

Reflecting and Redirecting

2010-03-29T07:41:00.003-05:00

I started this blog in July of 2009 as a way to write about my experiences of, and ideas about, a Backyard Nest Egg – an investment in food security. The idea gradually came to me, after a difficult period of my life. I had lost my second grant-funded job in three years, health problems that had been festering for awhile demanded my attention, and the stock market crashed, with many people losing a chunk of their retirement savings - some up to 40% of their 401Ks. It seemed to me then, and still does now, that investing in one’s own food security is one of the best nest eggs one can establish.

After all, I reasoned, what are our most basic needs to sustain life? We need food, shelter (a low-cost, low energy-consumption home is my next project – one that is in the beginning stages at this point), and clothing. Inspired by gardeners like Ruth Stout, who devised labor-saving strategies for producing, well into her eighties, all the vegetables she, her husband, and her sister required, I began thinking about how I could provide for Rick and myself. Three general principles emerged from my thinking and work: minimizing purchased inputs, labor-saving, and sure bets.

Minimizing purchased inputs means to me finding ways to produce food each year without buying tons of seeds, plants, fertilizer, and other garden amendments. Anybody who has done any gardening learns very quickly how fast these things can add up. When gardening is just a hobby, you don’t mind too much. But when the goal is to actually provide food for your family in hard times or during retirement, spending more on your garden than you would spend just buying food at the grocery store makes no sense.

Seed-saving, taking cuttings, rejuvenating a strawberry bed by training new runners and removing “mother” plants each year as I described in Wednesday’s post, making your own compost, keeping chickens or some other small livestock, like rabbits, for fertilizer, planting perennial food crops like walking onions, asparagus, fruit trees and berry bushes are all ways to minimize your purchased inputs so that you can truly realize a return on your investment in food security.

Labor-saving, obviously, means finding ways to make the work easier. Initially, I was thinking about my health issues and inspired by Ruth Stout’s ideas for a “no-work” garden. I realized that serious gardening to put food on the table was possible even with physical limitations imposed by disability or advancing years. My goal was to investigate and write about gardening practices that enable gardening throughout one’s life. When I read Masanobu Fukuoka’s One Straw Revolution, my notion of labor-saving expanded from simple work reduction to encompass the need for free time in order to become a full human being. (Read more on Stout and Fukuoka’s ideas about “no-work” and “do-nothing” gardening and farming in this post.)

Labor-saving strategies I’ve written about include no-till strategies of Ruth Stout, allowing your chickens to turn your soil a la Garden Girl, sheet composting or latter day “lasagna” gardening (Patricia Lanza), returning organic matter to fields to compost there (Fukuoka) and the benefits of compost tumblers.

Finally, sure bets refers to the principle of diversity – planting a variety of crops and using multiple strategies to ensure that you are able to harvest something even in a bad year. For example, last summer I planted Juliets, Amish Paste, and German Queen tomatoes. I harvested many Juliets, which are elongated cherry-type tomatoes that ripen early. However, we had a cool summer and “late blight” hit just as my beautiful Amish Paste and German Queen tomatoes were starting to ripen. Had I planted only the paste and slicing tomatoes, I’d have harvested virtually no tomatoes at all. As it happens, Juliets work well in salsas and we enjoyed many batches of that from our garden before the late blight.

How did we do that in a cool summer? Don’t chilies require warm weather? As I described here, we grew the chilies in clay pots, rather than in the ground, and were harvesting fruit right through the fall.

I plan to continue writing about these three elements of a Backyard Nest Egg, and my experiences of gardening and keeping chickens, but the focus of this blog will expand to reflect my evolving sense that the right and responsibility of individuals to produce their own food needs to be articulated and even defended.

All social movements eventually experience push back of some kind, or counter-movements. The return to producing at least some of our food for ourselves will be no different. It’s a loose movement, certainly, composed of many people with many different motivations.

Some gardeners and chicken-keepers want to eat food that they know has been produced healthfully, others are concerned about our economic predicament and want a back-up food source, still others simply want to be more self-sufficient. For many, it’s a combination of these reasons. Nevertheless, I see it as a movement, not a “fad,” and as growing in size and strength.

The opposition is, at this point, is not organized or strong. However, the signs of opposition are everywhere, from people in middle class neighborhoods who resist community gardens and public orchards, to animal rights groups lobbying city officials to disallow chicken-keeping, to University extension agents concerned about the “threat” backyard chickens pose to industry. These are the issues I will be writing about, in addition to the usual chicken and garden topics, in the coming months.

Strawberries and Raspberries

2010-03-24T12:54:00.019-05:00

It’s hard to say what I most look forward to in spring – opening the windows, at last, and filling the house with sweet fresh air, riding my bicycle outside, rather than on a trainer in front of the television, seeing the snow recede and the lawn green up, seemingly overnight. But I think number one on the list has to be checking the garden to find all the green shoots emerging from last year’s dead foliage.

So far, I’ve found sedum, Shasta daisies (VERY satisfying, because I planted them from seed last year), coreopsis, liatris, lupines, yarrow, sage and a few others I can’t remember just now. The hostas haven’t come back yet, nor the butterfly weed I planted from seed, and the roses and hydrangeas have yet to show signs of life. But it’s still early.

And the strawberries look fantastic! I pulled the hay aside about a week ago. I’m fairly new to growing strawberries, but the books say you’re supposed to remove their winter mulch early. This will be my first year with (I hope!) a significant crop, and I’m soooo looking forward to it, my mouth waters every time I think about it!

I first tried strawberries in 2008. So many books and articles describe strawberries as a great container plant, I thought I’d grow them in a strawberry pot I’d had for years and in a large planter box Rick built for me. I learned the hard way that the books and articles LIE! Anyone who has any experience growing strawberries knows they constantly send out runners and spread like weeds. They quickly outgrew their containers even though I was out there practically every day, cutting off new runners. They produced lots of beautiful foliage, but just a few small berries.

Part of the problem was the cultivar. The garden center was out of my top choice, Honeoye, so I bought Ogallala, just because I used to live in Nebraska and liked the name! Unlike Honeoyes, Ogallalas are everbearing, which means instead of one main crop in spring (usually June), you get a small crop in spring, and another crop later in the summer.

Which means the few my plants were producing were spread out over the season, making the tiny crop seem even smaller. Plus, the Ogallala produces a “medium to small” berry, even in optimal conditions, so it’s no wonder I got such small berries out of a container.

The next year I decided to get the cultivar I wanted, plant them in the ground, and follow the method of my new guru, Ruth Stout, for rejuvenating the patch. The books will tell you to buy new plants every few years, but Stout was a thrifty woman, and buying new doesn’t fit in with my notion of minimizing purchased inputs for your Backyard Nest Egg. Since her garden was wonderfully successful, and she prided herself on ignoring what she called the “authorities,” I’ll do the same. Here is her method in her words:

I planted three rows of berries, the rows about 8 inches apart. . . I let the first plant in each row make only one runner, straight down the row, and let the other plants in each row make two runners, one up, one down, the row. When I was finished I had three rows of plants, the rows 8 inches apart, the plants in
each row 1 foot apart. But it looks like and is, actually, one row. . .

A year from the following spring, after I had picked the first crop, I pulled up the first plant in each of the three rows, left plants number two and three, pulled up four, left five and six, and so on. In other words, I got rid of the mother plants and left the runners they had made. Then during that summer, the plants I kept were allowed to make just enough runners to replace the ones I had pulled up. Year after year, the older plants are removed, the newer ones are left, and that isn’t much of a job. You have a permanent bed of strawberries and will never have to transplant again unless of course you want
to try a new variety . . .
in August when, I’ve been told, the plants make their buds for next year, I treat them to a little cotton-seed meal for nitrogen
(Ruth Stout's No Work Garden Book, 1971, pp127-8).

I tried doing the same, but it came out a little messy. Still, it was at least controlled growth. I let one stolon grow on each side of each plant, staked it where I wanted it with a hairpin, and cut any other runners off. After I get my berries this year, I’ll try removing the “mothers” and let last year’s runners set some new plants in their place for next year.

I also have high hopes for a good raspberry crop this year. I planted them in 2008. They were just twigs and looked like this:

Raspberries have one of two fruiting habits: summer bearing and fall bearing. The summer bearing actually bear in late spring or early summer, and on canes that grew the prior summer. The fall bearing cultivars produce fruit late in the season, mid-August to mid-September, on the current season’s canes. (For this reason, they’re not a good choice for northern climates because our growing season is so short.)

I chose summer bearing over fall bearing partly because of our short growing season, but also because I wanted the fruit to set before Japanese beetle season starts, usually in early July. Several of our neighbors had raspberry patches that were decimated by Japanese beetles, so I wanted to avoid that. The plan was to cover them with fine netting (which interferes with pollination) once Japanese beetle season starts.

This worked beautifully last year. We had a small crop of berries, which was to be expected the first year, but the plants were fully protected and grew lush foliage and many new canes. (I can’t believe I didn’t take a photo last year – they looked fantastic! But I can’t seem to find one just now.)

But here’s where I made a mistake. There are two prunings that need to be done: one in the summer of the canes that grew the prior year, after they fruit this year, and one in late winter to remove the top ¼ of canes that will fruit this year. Some sources claim you can do the first pruning either in summer after fruiting, or wait until spring and do both prunings at once. (In fairness, most sources advise doing two prunings.) Lazy me decided to wait until spring and do both at once.

Here’s the problem: Now I can’t tell which are the canes that bore fruit last year and which are the canes that will bear this year! It was easy to tell them apart last summer, because the canes that had just fruited were woody, and the canes that will fruit this year were green. Of course, by now, both types of canes are woody! Lesson learned: Prune the old canes after they fruit; don’t wait until the next spring! It’s not that much work.

Since my master gardener’s manual says canes should be thinned to 4-6 canes per running foot of row, and canes in my patch are still almost that thin, I opted to leave the old canes in this year and just prune about a quarter off the tops of all the canes. If the canes that produced fruit last year don’t leaf out, I’ll remove them then.

Spring Chickens

2010-03-17T04:54:00.005-05:00

The snow has finally receded here on the frozen tundra of Wisconsin. (Southern Wisconsin, that is. I imagine they still have plenty of snow up north.) It’s amazing how fast big piles of snow can shrink once the weather warms.

So I put the girls to work turning the soil and fertilizing my raised beds. (I got the idea to make their tractor the same size as the raised beds for this purpose from Garden Girl.) They energetically dug deep into the soil, clucking contentedly the whole time. I always get a kick out of watching them. It’s like they’re thinking, “I’m SURE there’s something good to eat in here, somewhere. I just have to keep digging, and do it fast, before those other broads beat me to it!”

It’s such a relief to quit worrying about them out in the cold – and great satisfaction to see how well they came through the winter. Aren’t they gorgeous? I know, it’s hard to tell from the pictures above. But they wouldn’t hold still for a photo. Trust me when I say their coats are glossy, their combs have changed from pink with whitish dry patches back to bright red, and they have no sign of frostbite!

Many people told me they would get frostbitten and lose part of their combs, but not to worry! It won’t hurt them; you just won’t be able to show them. I never even thought of showing them – nor thought a little frostbite was acceptable. We worked hard to prevent that, although luck probably played a part.

Following the advice of our poultry extension specialist, we tried to ensure the coop stayed well-ventilated. The reason is that they are more susceptible to frostbite in cold humid air than in cold dry air. He recommended leaving the pop door open in winter for this reason. We could only bring ourselves to leave it half open at most. On very cold nights, we left it open only an inch or two. On a few extremely cold nights, we closed it completely.

I think we got away with it partly because I removed their droppings (collected in a tray under their perch) every morning. Droppings are a big source of humidity in the coop. We also put bag balm on their combs on the coldest nights – when they let us!

Sometimes Batgirl really fought this, and even held a grudge against Rick for about a week after he caught her and applied it. Since she had the smallest comb, and we didn’t want to upset her too much, we let it go when she resisted. Her comb is beautiful now, and even has grown enough that it’s hard to tell her apart from the other Barred Rock.

Although we didn’t heat the coop, Rick did put two 2+ gallon plastic gas cans (which had never held gas) filled with very hot water in the coop at night. This raised the temperature inside the tiny coop 10-15 degrees!

I also believe that giving them greens all winter helped keep them healthy. I have no extension research or other “authoritative” source for that. It just seems to make sense. I’ve never given them vitamins, but greens are loaded with nutrients – and their favorite treat. In summer, we let them out of their pen daily to eat greens, and threw dandelions, sunflower leaves, and any other greens we had on hand into their pen.

During the winter, we ended up buying most of their greens. Recently, I’ve been giving them turnip greens I’m getting for 81 cents a pound. But next winter, I’ll make more of an effort to grow greens, so I don’t have to buy them.

Now that they’re laying again, I make sure they get greens twice a day again, instead of once as in winter. After the snow melted, we found lots of green parsley in the herb bed. Since it looks good enough to eat, I've been giving it to the chickens, so I don't have to buy all their greens.

I’ve often wondered whether, if people fed their chickens plenty of greens, they would even need oyster shell for calcium. They’re programmed biologically to eat what they need, and it’s greens they go crazy for. I do put out oyster shell, too, but I can’t tell how much of it they’re eating. It seems like most of it gets spilled onto the floor of their pen.

Certainly, their eggs have very strong shells. After slowing production in December, they took January and February off. At the beginning of March, they started laying again, one by one. We’re now getting about 3 eggs per day from the three of them! I’d read that eggs are larger after their first molt, and that has turned out to be true. I’d say their eggs are now about the size of a grocery store “large” egg.

Potatoes and Eggs

2010-03-04T08:25:00.009-06:00

As usual, I got ahead of myself. These are Red Norland and German Butterball potato starts, but technically, they should not be set out for another month or so. In fact, the “lasagna beds” I prepared for them last fall are still covered in snow! According to the master gardener literature, early season varieties should be planted when the soil can be worked, usually around late April in Wisconsin.

The good news is that, beginning tomorrow, we will have highs of 40F or higher for at least a week. All the snow should melt. After that, I’ll cover the future potato beds with plastic for a week or two to help warm them up. Then maybe I’ll be able to plant the potatoes early, under plastic, in a sort of mini-hoop house.

What happened was that all the potatoes I saved from last year’s crop to use as seed potatoes long ago sprouted. They all had vines several feet long! I was afraid that if I waited much longer, the plant material would become unusable. Minimizing purchased inputs is crucial to my notion of a Backyard Nest Egg, so it was important to me to be able to propagate potatoes from last year’s crop.

Most sources advise propagating potatoes from seed potatoes, or by cutting up larger potatoes into pieces, leaving an eye in each piece. But I have also read that producers of seed potatoes grow them from vine cuttings, rather than from other potatoes. In fact, I read somewhere that if you grow potatoes only from seed potatoes saved from the prior year’s crop, after a few generations, the potatoes become “gnarly” and quality declines.

So it occurred to me to try rooting sections of vine as well as the potato. First, I cut off the ends of the vines and planted those in soil. Next, I cut middle sections of the vines – these have cuts at two ends. I stuck these in water to root. Lastly, I planted each potato with part of its vine.

All these pieces of plant material have rooted and leafed out! I’m very pleased, because I ended up with more plants than I would have if I’d just had little seed potatoes to plant. (I have another shelf of seedlings above those in the photo.) It remains to be seen whether these methods of propagation will produce nice potatoes, but I don’t have any reason to believe they won’t. Luckily, potatoes are notoriously easy to grow.

*****************

In other news, the chickens started laying again! We got our first egg of the season last Sunday. Clearly, they're not all laying yet, because we are only getting one egg per day from the three of them. I'm fairly certain that Tracy (the Rhode Island Red) is not one of them, although in the past, she has been one of our best layers. But she is still recovering from her molt.

Of the Barred Rocks, Amelia's comb is the reddest and most recovered from winter. Then, their combs were pinkish and waxy looking, with white patches. Now they are starting to look more like they did when they started laying last year.

And Batgirl's comb appears to be growing! Is that possible? We always called her the "tomboy" of the chickens. She has the smallest comb and was the last to start laying. She's more of a loner, too. She doesn't stray far from the group, but usually she is apart from the other hens. She's always been the most adventurous of the group as well.

When she did finally start laying, she was careless with her eggs. The others were very good about going to the nest box to leave their little gems. But she'd occasionally drop an egg on the floor of the coop or pen. One day, she did it while I was out there. I had just stepped out of the pen for a few minutes. When I turned back, there was an egg and two chickens had already pecked it open.

Having read about the difficulty of getting chickens to stop eating their own eggs once they start, I knew I had to take action immediately. "No! No! No!" I cried. I scooped up the egg with some shavings from the pen, carried it to the compost bin behind the coop, and dumped it in.

Then it was Batgirl's turn to get upset. Frantically, she ran up and down the side of the pen squawking loudly, presumably because her egg had been snatched. I went back into the pen and offered her treats - greens, the cracked corn she loves more than any of the others. But there was no distracting her or calming her down. She carried on and refused to eat for at least as long as I was out there doing chores. I don't know when she finally finished her mourning and got back to the usual chicken business of scratching and eating.

I decided it was a good development, though. She never again laid an egg outside the nestbox. Batgirl has grown up, I thought!

Mid-Winter Blues

2010-02-24T12:45:00.005-06:00

It’s hard to write a blog post about gardening in winter, and not just because there are fewer gardening chores to write about. It’s depressing, for me, anyway, to look out the window and see a foot or more of snow on the ground. It snowed last night, yesterday, and the day before, just an inch or so here and there, but enough to remind me that the annual nightmare we call winter is not going away yet.

Even the chickies seem to have the mid-winter blues. They run to the door of their pen eagerly when I open it, then stand in the doorway staring at the snow. Eventually, they walk away, beaks down, back into their little pen, defeated by yet another dreary day with a yard full of snow upon which they refuse to walk.

I returned mid-February from a trip to southern California to soak up some sunshine and visit relatives. I thought a mid-winter trip would provide a break and make the winter seem shorter. When I get back, I thought, it will be time to start seedlings under grow lights and in a few weeks, the snow cover will have melted.

With fantasies like these, you’d never know I spent much of my life in the Midwest. I grew up in Kansas and Illinois. I left when I was 18, but returned to the Midwest in my mid-thirties, living in Nebraska until about 6 years ago when I moved to Wisconsin. So I do have some inkling of what a Midwestern winter entails. Yet every year I delude myself into thinking “it’s nearly over” long before it is.

Wisconsin is by far the coldest part of the Midwest that I’ve lived in. There are many things I love about Wisconsin, the lush forests, the abundant lakes (when I moved here, one proud Wisconsin resident informed me that, although Minnesota bills itself as the “land of 10,000 lakes," Wisconsin actually has more), the plentiful wildlife – but winter is not one of them.

After experiencing my first winter here, I so dreaded the next one that the following autumn, I had low-level anxiety attacks as winter drew near. Over the years, I’ve become less anxious at the onset of winter, but I haven’t learned to like it. I wish I could. Some people here love winter sports – like cross-country skiing or ice fishing. My sister Donna and her friend Trish love to go on the night-time candle-lit hikes along snowy trails offered by some state parks.

If, like me, you love the outdoors, but don’t enjoy winter sports, the season drags on because you just spend it waiting for the weather to improve! And if one of your favorite outdoor activities is gardening, you’re really in for a long wait – followed by a frenzy of activity to get everything going to make the most of a short season.

Ironically, the wait was made more trying by the trip to California. It was hard not to be envious of the bountiful winter gardens, with gorgeous large heads of cauliflower and broccoli, peas trained up fences, and luxuriant lettuces. I failed completely to contain my jealousy at the sight of citrus trees loaded with fruit, what are to Midwesterners “exotic” trees like avocado growing in people’s back yards, and huge rosemary shrubs (my very favorite herb – which can’t survive the harsh Wisconsin winters.)

The good news (and there is a cheerful spot in this otherwise gloomy post!) is that the weather is subtly changing. The biting cold is past and the air is sweet, with the barest whiff of spring. I hear many more birds than I did a month ago. And I can start my spring gardening soon!

Mid-March is when I start tomato, eggplant, chili, and bell pepper seedlings under lights. I’ll start some lettuce and spinach, too, but they’ll get planted out earlier than the warm weather loving solanaceae family of plants. I plan on pruning my fruit trees and raspberries next month as well.

In April I’ll plant potatoes, peas, and carrots directly in the garden and start squashes and melons indoors, as well as herbs like parsley and cilantro. Like the chickens, I can’t wait to start scratching in the soil!

Review of Home to Roost: Chasing Chickens through the Ages

2010-02-16T20:08:00.009-06:00

Home to Roost is Bob Sheasley’s meditation on his research about chickens and their relationship with humans through the ages. The book is a fascinating and seemingly comprehensive examination of cultural beliefs about chickens and historical practices. For example, did you know that:

* Chickens were originally domesticated for cock-fighting. Cockfighting was especially popular among the aristocracy in Europe, but also in the U.S. Henry VIII, George Washington and Ben Franklin were enthusiasts.

* Many cultures used chickens for divination. In Cambodia and Thailand, shamans broke open the eggs to study patterns and colors while the ancient Greeks and Romans read chicken entrails. The Etruscans employed a less violent method, using chickens almost as living Ouija boards. According to Sheasley:

A temple priest would scribe a circle on the ground, make the letters of the alphabet around it, and place a kernel of corn on each letter. Inside the circle, he would position a sacred chicken. “Who will be the next emperor?” the priest would ask, or some such urgent question. As the chicken, wise and hungry, began eating, the priest paid rapt attention. And a remarkable thing happened: The chicken produced a sequence of letters, which the spellbound Etruscans found profound” (p45).

(I’m planning to try this game in the summer!)

* The Egyptians were mass producing eggs in 3000 BC! According to the Greeks, the Egyptians “built incubators of clay bricks that could brood up to ten thousand chicks” (p73).

Sheasley also examines contemporary issues and research, discussing problems with commercial chicken and egg production, the value of labels such as “cage-free” and “free range,” and reports studies finding, for example, that chickens put on weight faster if exposed to classical music.

I was particularly interested in the section on chicken mating practices. Sheasley reports that there is remarkable amount of research devoted to this. Apparently, hens are more discerning than they might appear. Researchers found, for example, that they can differentiate between roosters' calls that they’ve found food, and learn to ignore the liars. About 40% of the time, according to an Australian researcher, roosters’ calls are false.

Sheasley notes that researchers found that hens “wanted an honest rooster,” but more than that, wanted a brave one. Besides learning which calls for food are true, hens learn which alarm calls are reliable. Such calls were found to be the “strongest predictor of rooster success in mating” (p136).

Canadian researchers also studied whether hens preferred rougher broiler roosters or gentler roosters of layer breeds. They found that while different hens preferred different roosters, as they matured they generally preferred gentler roosters.

Frighteningly, broilers, bred to put on weight quickly and grow abnormally large breasts, and then genetically engineered in an effort to strengthen their hearts to better withstand this aberrant growth pattern, were found to be the most violent in their treatment of hens. They are excessively rough when mating, and some even attack and kill hens.

Sheasley weaves all this chicken lore with his experience of chicken-keeping in rural Pennsylvania. Written in a rambling style, reminiscent of a stroll down a country lane on a warm afternoon, and including imaginary conversations with Ulisse Aldrovandi, a 16th-century Italian scholar and naturalist, Sheasley’s treatise is a enjoyable read for anyone interested in history, culture, and chickens.

Why My Next Chickens Will Be Named Dino and T.Rex

2010-01-22T13:09:00.010-06:00

Yes, I am already thinking “next chickens.” I had planned to wait another year before getting new baby chicks. It was so much work to raise chicks last spring, I thought I’d give myself a year off.

But, by then the hens I already have will be two years old – and well into their third year before the new pullets start laying. The older ones will have slowed their laying, and you never know whether something will happen to one or more of them. When you have just a few birds, the loss of even one amounts to a significant percentage of your flock. Plus, I’m an “experienced” poultry woman now! Ha! It shouldn’t be as stressful as last spring.

It’s easy to get restless in winter, looking through seed catalogs, getting tempted by the variety of vegetables and fruits on offer, and now I have chickens, to check out the hatchery catalogs. Those Partridge Rocks sure are beautiful! They would provide some variety yet are still in the same family (Plymouth Rock) as our Barred Rocks, so I’m hoping they’ll get along. But maybe that’s a pipe dream. Maybe to a chicken, a Partridge Rock is just as different from a Barred Rock as is a Rhode Island Red.

On the other hand, maybe with their molt finished, they will hold wings and sing “Kumbaya.” I suspected they were starting a molt when I saw a few feathers last week, but it didn’t seem possible in the middle of winter. Now it’s clear they are molting. Batgirl has lost the most feathers; she is nearly bald on the back of her neck. I did a search at Backyard Chickens (what would I do without them??) and found others who had chickens molting in January, even in really cold places like Michigan, Minnesota, and Canada. It seems like a really stupid time to lose your winter coat, but who I am to second guess Mother Nature?

Many sources I’ve read say that chickens have hormonal fluctuations and are cranky during a molt. Maybe that’s why our previously well-behaved chickens are squabbling. I also read that I should give them more protein, to help with growing the new feathers. Some people give them cat or dog food, or feed with a higher percentage of protein. I’m suspicious about the quality of cat and dog food. Then I read of someone who gave their chickens deer and elk liver during a molt. She said it was safe because the livers had been in her freezer for two weeks - long enough to kill any parasites or bugs.

I had turkey livers in the freezer, so we thawed them and I gave them some this morning. They loved it! They abandoned their greens – their usual favorite treat – ignored me, and totally occupied themselves with devouring the liver. Usually, even after racing for their greens, they abandon that snack temporarily when they realize I’m leaving. They peck at my coat pocket until I bring out a little bag of cracked corn – their other morning treat in winter. Today their attitude was, Who needs corn when we’ve got fresh meat?

But back to naming my “next chickens.” As I’m sure you know, many scientists believe that birds evolved from dinosaurs, based primarily on similarities in bone architecture and respiratory systems. Recently, researchers got their hands on some collagen protein from a 68 million year old T.rex and used a mass spectrometer to sequence the protein. They found that the ancient T.rex proteins “appear to most closely match amino acid sequences found in collagen of present day chickens.”

Now some researchers have got it into their heads to manipulate chicken DNA during embryo development and presumably hatch a “dinosaur,” or something with dinosaur characteristics. Hans Larsson, the Canada Research Chair in Macro Evolution at Montreal's McGill University, says the goal would be to prove that birds are direct descendants of dinosaurs. I’m glad somebody’s on the case, because it’s been keeping me up nights! Apparently a practical man, Larsson went on to say that he has no immediate plans to hatch live prehistoric animals, in part because a dinosaur hatchery “is too large an enterprise.”

Larsson is a colleague of paleontologist Jack Horner, Montana State University. Horner is one of the scientists who worked on the protein sequencing and was also a consultant for the “Jurassic Park” movies. Horner has said that his dream is “to walk on stage on The Oprah Winfrey Show with chickenosaurus following him on a leash.” Like Larsson, Horner says this project has the high-minded mission of illustrating evolution. Why do I feel that it’s more like boys playing with really big toys?

I think Horner should start with baby steps. I’d like to see him get a leash on Batgirl, let alone walk on stage at Oprah with her following him. Batgirl doesn’t follow anybody. Better yet, let him try this stunt with a rooster. Then he can move on to bigger game, like the chickenosaurus.

Review of Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer

2010-01-19T14:09:00.009-06:00

I just finished reading Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter. In fact, I finished it in under 24 hours; I could not put it down. She’s a kindred spirit in many ways. I’m disappointed that I missed a chance to meet her. She was in Madison in October for the book fest. But, as often happens with interesting people who come to town, I wasn’t paying attention and read that she’d been here after the fact.

In the book, Carpenter describes building her urban farm in an economically depressed neighborhood in Oakland, California. She grew up in rural Idaho and Washington state, the daughter of two 1970s “back-to-the-land” hippies. There she learned to love raising her own food and to aspire to a degree of self-sufficiency. However, she also learned that she did not like the isolation of rural life; that she preferred the culture and energy of a city. With her mini-farm in Oakland, she attempts to have the best of both worlds.

While Carpenter is straightforward in stating her preference for city life, her social nature and love of people emerges organically in the telling of her tale. Her genuine fondness for her homeless neighbor Bobby, who lives in an abandoned car, her patience with children who stop by to see her animals, and her generosity with the fruits of her labor are evident on every page.

Carpenter begins by clearing a vacant lot next door to her apartment and building raised beds for vegetables. Eventually, she adds fruit trees, raspberries, and strawberries. An experienced bee-keeper, she sets up her hive and orders baby chickens, ducks and turkeys.

Many community gardens in inner cities start much as Carpenter started hers, by planting, with or without permission, on vacant lots or other disused land. Nobody seems to mind; in fact, these gardens are welcome improvements in decaying urban environments. Residents appreciate having access to fresh veggies – expensive for low income households, and often not available at any price, as supermarket chains seldom locate stores in these neighborhoods.

In contrast, I’m learning, much to my dismay, that it’s fairly typical for middle-class professional people to look askance at community gardens, or even vociferously resist the creation of one, in their neighborhoods. So her opportunity to just start planting, to be a guerrilla gardener of sorts, is very appealing. I don’t romanticize her situation, however. There is violence and danger where she lives – though she seems to negotiate these situations and relationships successfully.

Eventually, Carpenter’s love of pork, and especially cured meats, leads her to decide to raise a couple of pigs. At one point, a neighbor with limited English approaches her, child in hand, to complain about the stench from her pigs. The smell nearly made his daughter vomit, he says. Carpenter writes that she apologized profusely, and that she felt like a “complete ass.” She asks, “Who would want me for a neighbor?”

Really, Novella? I thought. It took this complaint to finally wake you up? The choking odor of fish guts you scavenged from a dumpster to feed those champion poop producers didn’t tip you off earlier?

I certainly wouldn’t want to be her neighbor if she were raising pigs – but I’d surely want to live within biking distance, to work with her in her garden and talk with her about this business of growing to sustain life.

In most ways, she appears to be a generous and tolerant neighbor. Conscious that the land on which she grows is not hers, that none of us really “own” the land, and that we all need to eat, she allows people to pick vegetables and fruits from her garden. She restricts foragers only with signs indicating when certain items will be ripe and admonishing them to leave some produce for others. Similarly, she shares meat from the animals she raises with her neighbors.

It appears that the Universe does reward those who give freely. In a turn of events that would require suspension of disbelief in a film or novel, Carpenter happens to meet a classically trained salumi artisan after rummaging in the dumpster behind his upscale restaurant in Berkeley to find yet more food for her pigs. He agrees to teach her the art of salumi, to make prosciutto, salami, and pancetta from her pigs - and they become friends.

I see Carpenter’s experience as the inner city, moderate-to-low-income answer to Barbara Kingsolver’s journey told in her book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Both women put a great deal of labor and thought into their gardens and animal husbandry as they strive towards their goals of a sustainable, healthful connection to their food. However, Carpenter farms a vacant lot in an inner city that belongs to someone else. Kingsolver moves to a farm her husband already owned when she met him. At one point, she describes harvesting cherries from an existing orchard on the property. Both women are serious foodies. Where Kingsolver attends Rikki Carroll’s cheese workshop (today these workshops range from $150-$350), Carpenter apprentices to a salumi artisan after scrounging in his dumpster, in exchange for a leg of one of her pigs which will be transformed into prosciutto.

I love and highly recommend both books. But I think Carpenter’s experience describes what will be possible for more of us than does Kingsolver’s. More of us will become downwardly mobile, due to fundamental changes in our energy situation and economy. More of us live in cities, and will continue to do so, than in rural areas. Certainly Carpenter’s project is more relevant to me. Although I don’t live in an economically depressed neighborhood, I also seek to combine the social life of a city with a degree of self-sufficiency. I’ve written my critique of lone homesteading here. At this point, I believe my biggest challenge will be convincing middle class people of the value of urban agriculture, that we need community gardens and public orchards here, too. Maybe that will be my book to write.

Odds & Ends

2010-01-15T13:01:00.003-06:00

We won! We won!
Well, okay, we got one of six honorable mentions in the most recent Backyard Chickens coop contest. But we were pretty excited about it. Rick deserves all the credit; he worked really hard on building our coop and altering it as unanticipated design problems emerged. You can see our entry here. Check out all the winners here. There were many great ideas and interesting coops. It’s a terrific resource for anyone thinking about building a coop.

Eggs-tra! Egg-stra!
Ever since the chickens started laying – and even before - people have been asking me for eggs and volunteering to pay for them. It seems that everyone is looking for better quality food produced in healthier conditions. I’ve given some away, but resisted selling them.

I finally realized that I was reluctant to sell them because even though I’m sure these people would be willing to pay premium prices, I’m not sure the best price I could get would really reflect the labor involved in producing the eggs. If I count only organic feed and bedding, I could break even at the Whole Foods organic eggs price – when the hens are laying every day. They’ve really slowed down since it got very cold and the days grew short.

But if you factor in all the work and money invested up until the point where they start laying – the researching, the purchase of tractor and coop materials, building said tractor and coop, caring for the chicks, cleaning pasty butts, taking them outside and back in when they are babies, getting up in winter to fill hot water bottles, cleaning poop, mucking out bedding – it goes on and on – we’re operating at a loss. The only justifications for the expense are the degree of self-sufficiency we enjoy from producing our own, that these eggs are fresher than supermarket eggs, and, I suspect, more nutritious than commercially produced organic eggs, and that the hens also produce manure (and plenty of it!) for the garden.

So I decided I would only barter the eggs, perhaps in exchange for some home-grown organically produced vegetables that I wasn’t growing myself; or, for some fish! Our friends John and Barb, lifelong Wisconsin residents actually love ice fishing. Last year John gave us a beautiful bass that was the most delicious fish I’d had in years. I don’t know whether it was the freshness that made it taste so good, but it was succulent and almost sweet.

You’ll never catch me out on the frozen tundra, drilling a hole through ice, setting up tip-ups, and shivering while I wait for the fish to take the bait. I’ve cleaned fish before, when I was a girl (interestingly enough, when Dad took us on vacation to Wisconsin), but that’s another activity I’d like to avoid. So trading eggs for fish is a no-brainer. John just gave us our first bass of the season. I’m looking forward to beer-battered fish and chips for dinner tomorrow.

Mean Girls
After Little Jerry left, we had a period of détente, when the girls appeared to stop fighting. We put bag balm on their combs to help heal their scrapes, treat the dry white patches from the winter cold, and prevent frostbite. Almost as soon as their combs were beautifully red and restored to nearly perfect, the pecking started up once again.

I was afraid of this; afraid that once we got rid of Little Jerry, someone else would assume the bully role. Astonishingly enough, that individual turned out to be Amelia, who I once described as our sweetest chicken. We’ve caught her picking on Tracy, the lone remaining Rhode Island Red, more than once, chasing her off treats or away from anywhere Amelia thinks is her domain. This morning was the first time I saw the tell-tale scrapes on Tracy’s comb. Judging by Amelia’s comb, Tracy gave as good as she got.

Still, Tracy has for days wandered around looking downtrodden. It makes me sad. Tracy has always been a good chicken; perhaps not the friendliest, but the first and best layer, eager to eat her greens, (Batgirl prefers cracked corn – not the best diet) and very healthy.

What is it with these chickens? They’ve got plenty of room; why can’t they just get along? It seems like the trouble starts between hens of different breeds. Little Jerry always left Tracy alone and went after Amelia and Batgirl, the Barred Rocks. Now Amelia is going after the remaining Red. We had already decided that we’d never mix breeds again, at least not in tiny backyard setting. But what if I get rid of Tracy, and Amelia starts in on Batgirl?

How do these chickens know which is their own kind, anyway? They don’t have any mirrors in there. Do they look down at themselves to figure who is Star-belly Sneetch and who is not? (Old Dr. Suess reference, for those too young to remember. I don’t know whether kids read Dr. Suess anymore.)

The funny thing is, when I told Rick his fave was bullying, he immediately started making excuses for her. Maybe she needed something to do; more greens or corn, he said. “I gave them greens yesterday morning (and the afternoon prior), and the seed ball yesterday afternoon,” I reminded him. “I always put the greens in two suet cages, even if I can’t fill them, just to separate the chickens,” I went on. “I gave them greens this a.m. and am planning to pop them some popcorn today.”

How much more do I have to do to entertain these silly birds? We all have cabin fever in winter. I guess my next step is getting them a treat from the pet store this week-end. I’ve read online of people buying crickets at the pet store for their chickens to chase after and eat. This week-end it will be warm enough (with a high of almost 40F!) that the crickets won’t die right away. Or I might stop by a bait shop and get some worms. Maybe if they’re pecking at some other beast they’ll leave their roomies alone.

Planting to Grow A Community

2010-01-04T16:19:00.003-06:00

Happy New Year!

I can’t believe it’s been more than two weeks since I wrote a post. I had one planned for just before Christmas; I even had a title: Christmas Trees. I wouldn’t be referring to pine or fir trees trimmed with ornaments and lights, but to a gift of fruit trees I fully expected to receive. Just goes to show, you should never count your trees before they sprout. Or something like that.

Here’s what happened. A couple of weeks before Christmas, I heard via a master gardener’s listserv that the Fruit Tree Planting Foundation had invited grant applications from Madison for trees to be planted in community gardens, parks, and other public spaces. Interested parties from around the city were asked to attend a meeting organized by the newly formed Madison Fruits and Nuts (MFN) to determine which neighborhood locations would be selected to apply for the grant. Major requirements included access to water and a committed group of volunteers willing to be trained to, and undertake care of, the trees.

I sent out an email to the neighborhood listserv and was thrilled to get 25 enthusiastic volunteers. I encouraged everyone to attend the meeting to select neighborhoods. It was a frigid night, postponed to that date because of a huge snowstorm the previous week. Only one other couple besides Rick and me showed up to represent our neighborhood. Still, I was sure we had a good chance. I was so excited about the prospect of an urban orchard just blocks from my house, and getting to know more of my neighbors, I was already planning my blog post to brag about it.

The sad ending to this tale is obvious: We were not selected by MFN to apply for the grant. Stunned to receive this lump of coal just days before Christmas, I emailed to ask what were the criteria for selection? I noticed that most of the selectees already had established community gardens. A representative from MFN confirmed my suspicion, pointing out that MFN expected that established community gardens have the best potential of both approval by the city's Parks Division and fulfilling the Fruit Tree Planting Foundation grant requirements.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. I was dimly aware that there were community gardens around the city, and I’ve even been to the largest, Community GroundWorks at Troy Gardens. I originally went to check out their chicken coop. The man we bought coop plans from, Dennis Harrison-Noonan, also designed and built the coop at Troy gardens as a project with his son’s boy scout troop.

Many, if not most, of the people attending the MFN meeting were members of formal organizations that ran existing community gardens. A very loosely knit group of people, formed about five minutes ago, many of whom did not even know each other personally yet, would have to be seen as a weaker candidate for a grant.

I felt defeated - for about a day or so. Then I decided to try organizing a community garden in our neighborhood. Why not expand the notion of a Backyard Nest Egg to include community garden plots, urban orchards in parks, and so on? The largest park in our neighborhood is practically in my back yard – just a block away. Even before the fruit tree opportunity, I often walked through the park, marveling at all the land, and imagining what it might be like to have it planted with gardens.

It’s a huge undertaking. I’ve never organized anything like this before. I’m not at all sure that the people who were willing to be trained to care for a few fruit trees will also commit to what may amount to a long-term effort to get a community garden going. It will involve finding a suitable site, getting approval from the Parks department or schools, if school grounds are selected, seeking funding, and learning how organize and manage the project.

There are multiple stakeholders to contend with. For example, there are two major events that take place annually in the largest park in our neighborhood. If we had a community garden, would these events have to find a new site? I am aware of at least one prominent person in the neighborhood who objected in the past to community gardens in parks because “the parks are for everyone” and “just your group will be gardening.”

He may have a point. On the other hand, wouldn’t a community garden benefit the whole neighborhood in many ways? It could serve as an educational opportunity for children, contribute to food security in the neighborhood, and give us a better chance at the next grant opportunity for trees. Working together to establish and maintain such gardens may also strengthen the sense of community in the neighborhood – a benefit our park board president recognized at the MFN meeting. I hope we can make it happen.

Five Reasons to Never EVER Give Your Chicken to a Shelter for Adoption

2009-12-17T10:16:00.009-06:00

As I wrote in my previous post, a coalition of the following animal shelters and sanctuaries has issued a press release and position paper advising municipalities to disallow chicken-keeping:

Animal Place
Chicken Run Rescue
Eastern Shore Sanctuary and Education Center
Farm Sanctuary
Sunny Skies Bird and Animal Sanctuary
United Poultry Concerns

They cite a host of reasons, most of which I address here. They also urge people who want chickens to adopt a chicken they have rescued, rather than buying one from a hatchery.

There is no doubt that any creature given to these organizations will be well cared for, and that their members are deeply committed to the humane treatment of animals. These organizations have also performed a useful service in raising awareness of cruelty in industrial poultry operations, and in rescuing chickens injured and maimed at these sites. Nevertheless, I still urge my fellow chicken enthusiasts to never, EVER give a chicken they cannot care for to these organizations for adoption. Here are five reasons why:

1. Those who want to adopt your chicken from the shelter will likely be required to surrender a degree of their privacy.
Farm Sanctuary’s adoption application form asks for your birth date, the number of children you have, their ages, your marital status, and your employer. What bearing any of this information has on one’s suitability for keeping a chicken is hard to imagine. The application also asks you to check whether sanctuary adoption officers may visit your home. Similarly, Chicken Run Rescue’s terms for adoption require would-be chicken-adopters to allow their staff to “examine or make inquiries at any time.” That means you agree to allow them to come in at will to check up on your poultry management and ensure it meets their standards.

2. Would-be chicken adopters may be denied if they are not vegans or vegetarians.
Farm Sanctuary’s adoption application asks you to check whether you are vegan or vegetarian, and if neither, to explain why. They also require you to be a member of the Farm Animal Adoption Network (FAAN). Membership requirements for FAAN include “a vegetarian lifestyle.” Chicken Run Rescue’s adoption form asks whether you raise animals for slaughter. Note they do not say simply that you may not slaughter the chicken you are adopting. They ask about raising animals for meat generally.

3. Potential adopters will never truly own a chicken they obtain from these organizations.
Chicken Run Rescue requires that you agree not to show the chicken, breed it, sell its eggs, or give it to anyone else. If you can no longer keep the chicken, you are required to give it back to them. Further, if they determine during one of their “inquiries” that the “health and well-being [of the chicken] is being jeopardized the bird will be returned to Chicken Run Rescue immediately.”

4. Low-income persons who wish to adopt a chicken will likely be denied.
Several of the adoption application questions suggest an expensive standard of care that would exclude many low-income persons. For example, Chicken Run Rescue asks whether there is a heat source in the building where the chicken will be housed and whether the temperature of the building can be maintained at 32F or higher. Farm Sanctuary asks outright what your income range is and whether you can afford veterinary care for the bird.

The heat requirement is not only expensive; it is likely unnecessary and may even be harmful to the chicken. There is some debate among authorities on chicken husbandry about whether chicken coops should be heated at all, except on the very coldest days in northernmost areas. An early 20th century book, Open Air Poultry Houses, which advises keeping chickens in open front coops, even in places like Canada, is now coming back into vogue. One long-time chicken keeper here in Madison advised me against ever heating a coop; she never does, and her chickens are healthy. Some of the older breeds, such as Barred Plymouth Rocks and Rhode Island Reds were developed in New England in the mid-19th century. I doubt anyone was heating their coops in those days.

The problem is that chickens are more susceptible to frostbite and disease at higher temperatures when air in the coop is humid than at lower temperatures when the air is dry. (Warm air holds more moisture.) All authorities agree that proper ventilation in winter is vital to move humid air (chickens emit a lot of water vapor through breathing and pooping) and thus keep chickens healthy. After seeing our set-up, our poultry extension specialist advised me to leave the pop door open during winter, despite the fact that we have ventilation holes in the roof of the roost box.

I can only imagine what it would cost us to keep the coop heated to 32F or higher with the pop door open on days when highs are in the single digits. It’s a waste of energy when it’s not required for the health of the chickens, and during the day, they won’t go in there anyway, except to lay an egg. They prefer to be out in their pen. Further, safely heating a coop to Chicken Run Rescue’s standard would require proper wiring – not simply running an extension cord - another expense that could exclude low-income would-be chicken adopters.

The bias against low-income people is particularly egregious to me. The focus of this blog is “gardening as an investment in food security.” Chickens are an integral part of my garden, providing a protein source, free organic fertilizer, and natural help with pest control. Excluding people who most need to invest in their own food security from having chickens simply because they cannot afford to meet standards that are unnecessary is unconscionable.

Chickens are relatively inexpensive to raise; poor people around the world do it. Chicken rations can be supplemented with kitchen vegetable scraps and discarded produce from grocery stores that is in good condition. If allowed into pasture or yards, chickens can forage for some of their own food. In fact, they prefer it. Coops can also be built rather inexpensively (though maybe not to the standard of some rescue groups). We spent several hundred dollars on ours, but I’m more impressed with people who report they used scrap wood or repurposed an old shed and ended up spending only forty bucks or so.

5. Finally, you should never, EVER give your chicken to one of these shelters because they will use it as a reason to pressure municipalities to restrict, or refuse to allow, chicken-keeping.
In their press release, this coalition of shelters and sanctuaries “urge[s] municipalities throughout the U.S. not to allow backyard flocks and exhort[s] those that are already zoned for this practice to establish and enforce strict regulations for the care of these birds,” and claims that since keeping chickens has become popular, they have been “inundated with calls to take in chickens.” In their position paper, they raise the issue of the expense of “an extra burden, like enforcing chicken licensing laws and related complaints” for municipal shelters.

Every time you give a chicken to one of these agencies, you add to the numbers they will use when urging city officials not to change ordinances to allow chickens, thus making it harder for your fellow chicken aficionados to have chickens, and harder for yourself, should your circumstances change and you are again able to keep chickens.

So, what should you do if you have or find a chicken that you cannot care for? One option should be to give or sell it to someone. I’m lucky here in Madison, because although I live in a city, we are surrounded by farmland and rural communities. Many people from these areas come into Madison to work, and are happy to take a chicken off my hands – they have the space to do it.

I’ve had good luck finding such people on Craigslist. I gave six nearly three-week old chicks to one guy (they are sold in lots of five, and I was only allowed to keep four), and recently sold Little Jerry to another. When I gave away the chicks, the question crossed my mind: How do I know they’re going to a good home? Then I remembered that no one questioned my credentials when I showed up at Farm and Fleet to buy my very first baby chicks. I should extend someone else the same courtesy, unless they give me a reason not to.

As it happened, the guy turned out to be practically a “chicken whisperer.” He knelt down and gently stroked the head and neck of one of the chicks with one finger, and she never moved! It was like she was hypnotized. There are many good people who will care well for a chicken; many more than are bad, I believe.

Roosters present a more difficult problem, as I wrote in my previous post. They’re harder to give away because many cities will not allow them, and outside cities, healthy flocks require fewer roosters than hens. It may be that your beautiful bird will have to be sacrificed to feed someone less fortunate than yourself. For a rooster that has had a good life, it is not a bad way to go.

Who's A Chicken Lover?

2009-12-14T14:02:00.018-06:00

That’s a photo of Little Jerry taken yesterday. She will be leaving us sometime today. Her comb-picking of the other hens has gotten completely out-of-hand. It appears to happen when they go up to their perch at night. We never see this going on during the day (unless, like the bratty kid you grew up with, she waits until the grown-ups aren’t looking to start trouble.)

Certainly the only place we have seen any blood – and that was just a few drops – is on their droppings tray under their perch. The blood isn’t in their droppings, so I know it’s not disease of some kind. Then yesterday morning there was blood on the back wall of the coop, near the perch.

I’ve been dithering for awhile over what to do about Little Jerry, ever since we caught her acting aggressively towards the other hens. Yesterday, after seeing the blood on the back wall, Rick said to me quietly, “She has to go.” It was his way of saying, “The time for dithering is over.”

I decided to try to sell her, and if I couldn’t do that quickly I’d turn her over to our friend who’s experienced in processing meat to dispatch her to freezer camp. I found a buyer with 60 acres outside Madison. He asked whether Little Jerry was mean. I told him what I’ve written above about the comb-picking, but assured him that she’d never feather-picked. Except for the comb scrapes, our hens look perfect.

The buyer was honest with me, as well. “If she behaves,” he told me, “she’ll have a good life here.” But if she starts trouble, he warned, she would become dinner. I accepted those terms.

It never occurred to me to drop her off at a shelter, or even that animal shelters would accept chickens. I’d always understood that if a chicken needed to be culled from our tiny flock that she would have to be slaughtered – efficiently and with as little pain as possible - or given or sold to someone else.

Some shelters claim that the trend in chicken-keeping has resulted in an upsurge in chickens dropped off at their organizations; chickens whose owners can no longer care for them or roosters that they are not allowed to keep in the city.

So a coalition of groups is now advocating banning chicken keeping in backyards citing humane, health, and other reasons. This is what happens when you hand responsibility for some aspect of your life to others; they feel empowered to tell you what to do; to regulate and control the activity in question. Before I go on to respond to this coalition’s objections to chicken-keeping and critique their agenda, I want to beg my fellow chicken enthusiasts to take responsibility for your chickens. Do not hand your responsibility for your chickens over to agencies that will use it as an excuse to advocate bans on backyard poultry keeping.

I understand how tempting it is to avoid making the hard decisions, to want to hand over your problem chicken or rooster to an agency that you believe will treat your chicken kindly and not kill it. I’ve waffled myself for weeks trying to figure out what to do about Little Jerry. But we have to be grown up enough to understand and accept that sometimes the humane thing to do is to cull a chicken, that nature requires far fewer roosters than hens, and that if you lack to the skills to do the job you should learn how (my eventual goal) or turn the job over to someone who does and compensate them accordingly. And if you can’t eat your own chicken, give it to someone who can. There are a lot of hungry and out-of-work people in this country. Healthy meat should not go to waste.

Would it be better to keep Little Jerry and allow her to continue to torment the other birds? Or to give her another chance at a good life in the country? She’s actually not that aggressive. I think if she’s in a place where she has more space, she won’t be a problem. She’s a good layer and very healthy, so I didn’t want to rush her demise. And if she’s still a problem, then she will make a healthy meal for someone. She was raised on organic feed and lots of greens and bugs. She’s had a good life here with us.

That said, let’s take a look at the assertions and agenda of the coalition, which appears to lack a name, but includes these organizations:

Animal Place
Chicken Run Rescue
Eastern Shore Sanctuary and Education Center
Farm Sanctuary
Sunny Skies Bird and Animal Sanctuary
United Poultry Concerns

Specifically, their assertions are these:

*Many backyard chicken enthusiasts don’t know about the conditions in hatcheries and what happens to the unwanted male chicks.

Unbeknownst to many well-meaning hobbyists, the massive hatcheries from which most chicks are purchased by individuals or feed stores are notorious for animal mistreatment . . . Hens are in much higher demand than roosters; therefore, most males [sic] chicks are killed onsite at these hatcheries as soon as they are sexed, adding up to millions of birds every year that are killed shortly after they hatch.

In fact, many of us do know of the conditions in both hatcheries and large confinement operations for layers and meat birds. That is a major reason many of us want to keep our own birds; to treat them humanely, to allow them to scratch, run around outside, eat bugs, and to produce for ourselves eggs from hens that have been raised healthfully and treated decently throughout their lives.

My preference would be to buy from local breeders, and I will when I’m able to do so. Around here, chickens from local breeders are limited in supply, but I fully expect that as the return to chicken keeping grows, there will be more opportunities to buy locally from good breeders.

The issue of what to do with the male chicks is a problem. Municipalities that allow chickens generally ban roosters. Even if we could keep roosters, the fact is that too many roosters in a flock creates problems; the hens suffer from too many attempts to mate with them and the roosters fight amongst themselves. Why does nature produce more roosters than are needed, and how does nature cull the excess males? I’m not an animal specialist, but I suspect that in the wild, the numbers of roosters are reduced through fighting over the hens.

Traditional farms generally kept a few roosters, but raised the rest of the male chicks just to maturity; then slaughtered them for meat. Giving them a good life before processing them for meat is to me preferable to dumping male chicks into a grinder at the hatchery. However, whether in the wild, on traditional farms, or in hatcheries, most males will die at earlier ages than females.

*Shipping day old chicks is cruel.
Day-old chicks are shipped to buyers through the mail, deprived of food and water and exposed to extremes in temperature for up to 72 hours.

Here is another reason it is preferable to obtain chicks from local breeders. This isn’t always possible, with large operations dominating the markets. It should be noted however, that before hatching, chicks absorb the yolk in their egg, allowing them to go the first three days of life without food or water. It’s a survival trait – useful in the wild where the mother hen might not be able to feed all of her chicks right away.

I doubt they’re exposed to extremes of temperature, else they’d die en route and the hatcheries would lose business. Generally, they’re packed to ensure sufficient heat and with detailed instructions for care of the chicks on arrival.

*Chickens attract mice and rats.
Even the cleanest coop is attractive to rats and mice who enjoy the free bedding (straw and shavings) and food.

This is one of the many statements that indicate the idealistic perspective of this coalition. Chickens would be thrilled to find a mouse in their pen or coop. Chickens eat mice, as well as frogs, small snakes, worms, grubs, and bugs. They are omnivores, as we are. I get the distinct impression that at least some members of these groups imagine chickens to be sweet little birds that daintily peck at corn. They’d probably faint dead away if they observed a chicken beating a mouse or frog against a rock before tearing it apart with its beak.

Or maybe they’d try to retrain the chicken, and teach it to be a vegetarian. Eastern Shore Sanctuary & Education Center claims to have “developed an innovative and effective method to deprogram fighting cocks so that they can live normal lives.”
One poster over at the Oil Drum wondered what this deprogramming involved, and reported (tongue in cheek):

I looked it up:

Here at Eastern Sanctuaries, we have proudly innovated the "Un-cocked and Loaded" program, a 12-step practice of Reparative Therapy for Fighting Cocks. A traumatized cock is first plied with "Monster Mash," an avian intoxicant formulated only from the finest non-GMO Indian corns. Then the cock is cooped up with a flock of youthful, organically-raised laying hens that gently croon "Give Peace a Chance" in his ear.
A picture of the treatment is given at
source.

It’s true that rats are attracted to chicken feed. Of course, rats are attracted by many things. If I left my garbage can outside with the lid off, I’d attract rats. The advice generally is to store chicken feed in galvanized steel containers. That’s easy enough.

This coalition focuses much of its statement and position on the practices of large scale commercial operations, but “urg[es] municipalities throughout the U.S. not to allow backyard flocks and exhort[s] those that are already zoned for this practice to establish and enforce strict regulations for the care of these birds.” It defies logic to go after small holders if your major concerns are with the practices of large producers. If backyard chickens are prohibited, the only source of eggs and chicken meat will be the industrial producers. It’s for this reason that some people believe this coalition is a front for large scale producers who want to drive small scale producers out of business.

I don’t believe that to be the case with this particular activist movement. Clearly, this is more about the idealization of animals and nature, and among some members, a desire to deter meat-eating. They seem to believe that no animal should ever be killed. (Sunnyskies Bird and Animal Sanctuary even rescues mice!) They urge would-be chicken owners to “adopt” chickens rather than buy them from hatcheries, to contact sanctuaries to obtain birds, and they emphasize that roosters especially are in need of homes. They refer to us as "hobbyists" and note that chickens can be "wonderful companions."

This perspective sees chickens as pets rather than livestock. We do grow fond of our chickens, and many backyard enthusiasts keep one or two spent hens, beloved chickens who are allowed to live out the rest of their (non-productive) lives. But most of us keep chickens primarily to provide healthy eggs, produced by hens that are treated decently. We seek a degree of self-sufficiency and we want some control over how our food is produced. Urging municipalities to ban backyard chickens forces us to remain dependent on large commercial producers and thus supports their odious practices.

Snowbound Chickens

2009-12-09T21:29:00.018-06:00

Last night we got over a foot of snow. Rick had to dig out a path to the coop.

We brushed the snow off the roof of the coop and the plastic over the side pen. When I opened the door, they were still in their coop. Usually, they’re out at the crack of dawn. Two of the girls poked their beaks out of the pop door. Once I started talking to them, they all ventured out.

They haven’t known what to make of the snow. The day I wrote the post about the first snow of the winter, very little fell that morning, and it melted soon after. Late that afternoon, I let the hens out in their tractor. I’d been trying to make sure they got out as much as possible before the snow trapped them in their pen for the winter.

So I parked their tractor near the laundry room window and went in to fold clothes. I finished that job and puttered around, before glancing out the window and seeing heavy snow falling. I ran outside to find the girls huddled together whimpering. Just a few minutes earlier they’d been energetically digging in the ground. When I started pushing the tractor toward their pen, they at first refused to move, unwilling to walk on the snow. I finally had to nudge their fuzzy butts along and they quickly scampered into their pen when I opened the tractor door.

On the other hand, they do love to eat snow. Whenever I walk into their pen with snow on my boots, they eagerly peck it off. But today was the first day they actually had some snow in their pen. Previously, the plastic over the wire fencing on two sides kept the snow out. Last night, swirling wind blew snow into the back of their pen. So they were a bit wary when they came out of their coop in the morning.

The great thing about them disliking the snow is that I no longer have to struggle to get into the pen when I open the door. Usually, they go crazy when they hear us at the door, and start bawking loudly and banging their beaks on the wire fencing. When I try to open the door to go in, they’re trying to slip out. Today the wind blew the door wide open when I was trying to bring in the waterer and nobody made a move. I guess they’re not so dumb after all!

My big worry is keeping them warm enough tonight. The low is going to be 1F. Right now, at 9:21 p.m., the temp outside is 13F, but it’s 28F in their coop. (We have a remote sensor thermometer – one of the few gadgets I thought we really needed.) Only their body heat and two 2+ gallon plastic gas cans (which never held gas) filled with hot water are keeping the coop this warm. I got that idea from a poster at Backyard Chickens (BYC), who also has a tiny flock and coop about the size of ours. She only used one can, but she closes her pop door all the way, and I try to leave some ventilation. Truthfully, I'm just anxious about them.

Posters at BYC who live in Alaska and Canada claim chickens are more hardy than we think, and that heavy breeds especially, can withstand temps down 0F without harm, if properly housed. That’s what I’m clinging to tonight. I hope our little gals do alright.

Oh, and if you’re wondering, Little Jerry still lives. As it happens, we were in a car accident last Saturday (nobody hurt, but the car is still out-of-commission), so thankfully, the decision about whether to take her to see our friend about freezer camp was made for me!

Update: This morning at 5, it was -1F outside, and 9.7F in the coop. So, a good 10 degree difference. We removed the water bottles (that we placed in the coop at 8 last night) and refilled them with hot water...

Update II: At 1pm it was 6F outside; 18F in their coop. Where do you suppose those little chickies were hanging out??? Certainly not in what Rick calls their "luxury penthouse apartment"! I guess those folks from Alaska and Canada on Backyard Chickens were right!

Dead Chicken Walking

2009-12-03T14:14:00.002-06:00

Yesterday was the first day I thought to myself: Is it really worth it to have chickens?

I’ve surprised myself with how well I adapted to caring for them, cleaning up after them, and generally tackling the work associated with keeping them. But yesterday I really felt weary. I noticed again little black marks on the combs of the Barred Rocks, indicating that somebody, probably Little Jerry again, one of the Rhode Island Reds, was pecking their combs.

We first realized Little Jerry was bullying the BRs when we noticed that the BRs were not going after the greens we put in the suet cage like the reds were. The BRs would content themselves with the other daily treat, the chicken scratch we scattered.

So we observed for awhile, and saw the BRs occasionally head for the suet cage only to get chased off by Little Jerry. (Interestingly, LJ never bothered Tracy, the other RIR. Maybe she is some kind of racist chicken.) She must have done it many times before, because sometimes she’d barely make a move in their direction, and they backed off. Sometimes Little Jerry would even chase them off the chicken scratch, although she herself didn’t want it. After she chased them away, she’d go back to eating the greens.

The BRs have come to be our favorites. They are friendlier and have a sweeter disposition than the Reds. So far as I know, they have never pecked anybody. The combs of the RIRs have never had a mark. Amelia got the worst of Little Jerry’s pecking. Her comb had large black spots at one point, and whenever I’d come into the pen, she’d follow me almost whining. When I learned about the pecking problem, I thought: She’s trying to tell on Little Jerry!

Anyway, Amelia is Rick’s favorite, so Little Jerry definitely picked on the wrong bird. He was so angry when he saw Little Jerry go after Amelia, he picked up LJ, put her in the coop, and shut the door without thinking. She squawked loudly (as she always does, she’s the loudest of our hens and can be really annoying.) Rick left her in “time out” for a few minutes; then let her out. She behaved for a bit; then went after Amelia again. He again put her in time out. I thought this strategy was inspired, so we stayed with them for awhile, attempting a bit of behavioralist training. Rick ended up putting LJ in timeout several times more that evening.

The next morning, I spent some time with the birds doing the same training. I also bought another suet cage, realizing that one wasn’t enough for four large hens. And, I started giving them greens twice daily, thinking sufficient rations would also cut down on the pecking problem.

It seemed to help for awhile, so Little Jerry got a stay of execution. Rick has always said he had no problem sending a chicken to “freezer camp” as they say on Backyard Chickens, if she caused too much trouble. I was told by an older friend of mine, who has a cattle farm now, but grew up raising chickens, that at 6 ½ months, LJ wasn’t too old yet for roasting. (I have yet to find clear information on appropriate ages for harvesting meat birds of different breeds. I do know I’d be reluctant to eat a stewer. I happened to get one from a local farmer once, and it was stanky! I boiled her and boiled her, but she didn’t get any more appetizing and I even threw out the broth, it smelled so bad.)

I also consider myself lucky that the trouble-maker turned out to be Little Jerry, named by our 14-year-old grandson after Kramer’s rooster in the old Seinfeld sitcom. Since Nathan’s quite a bit older than our other two grandchildren, and has about zero interest in the chickens, I don’t think it will bother him if she is, ah, removed. (Note to self: NEVER let the grandkids name chickens again!)

But, as I say, things seemed to settle down and Amelia’s comb mostly healed. Then yesterday I went into the pen and saw small black marks on BOTH Amelia’s and Batgirl’s combs. Now LJ was messing with my girl! I adore Batgirl’s independence (I’ll write more about her in a few days) and secretly admire her every time she escapes. She’s now up to six successful jailbreaks, and I’m at the point where, when I see her get away again, I smile and think to myself: Way to go, Batgirl!

She’s at the point where she doesn’t even try too hard to evade capture. I guess it’s something of a game with us now. She knows she’s a far more proficient player, so she gives me a handicap. Or, maybe she just likes a little attention from me. Once, when I had them out in the yard in 4 ½ foot high temporary netting, Batgirl flew over it, but stayed right next to me while I gardened, scratching around in the earth nearby.

Back to Little Jerry. I’ve turned the problem over and over in my mind, trying to decide what best to do. My biggest concern is winter, when they will be stuck in their pen for weeks at a time. I don’t want to worry about pecking problems on top of worrying about winter care for them. That’s stressful enough on its own. I keep saying, I can’t wait until I’m through the first year with them, when I have gone through all the seasons and stages of growth. The learning curve has been huge, and lately I feel tired.

I also think about how we don’t really need four chickens for just the two of us. I only kept four in case one of the little chicks died. Still, as angry as I get with Little Jerry, it’s hard to go through with it. I ask myself whether I’m being overprotective of the other hens, whether LJ is just being a chicken, whether once she is removed, somebody else will take over the bully role. But somehow, I don’t think so.

We have a friend who’s experienced, and has agreed to do the deed. We have never done it and wouldn’t be skilled enough to quickly dispatch her. I just have to make a decision!

This morning, as I was writing this, I thought, if I could just have some sign! I noticed it was time to go out and give them their morning greens and scratch and looked out the window. A light snow was falling, the first of the season, and I thought, this is it. Little Jerry has really only lasted this long because we have had unseasonably warm weather. Usually, by this time we have plenty of snow on the ground. So up to now, we’ve been able to continue regularly letting them out of their pen, which keeps them busy and Little Jerry occupied with something other than tormenting the Barred Rocks.

So, I guess the decision has been made. Hasn’t it? I’m pretty sure.

Now you know what Rick goes through!

Late Fall Musings

2009-11-29T14:17:00.014-06:00

Rick once asked me, “What will you write about in winter?” It’s true, posting has been light this past month, but not because I had no gardening activities. In fact, I just finished all my planned outdoor work yesterday. The weather has been unseasonably warm here, with frequent highs in the 50sF (our normal highs this time of year are twenty degrees lower). A couple of week-ends ago, it was so warm we worked outside in tee shirts!

It’s a good thing, too, because some of my projects took way longer than I thought they would - especially that 6th raised bed. It’s in a great location with lots of sunshine next to the lower deck. But I had to remove some shrubs and what felt like a ton of gravel before I could start assembling my compost pile or “lasagna garden.”

The prior owners must have had some kind of gravel fetish. It appears that, when in doubt about how to solve a landscaping issue, they’d throw down a pile of gravel. All the shrubs they planted around the deck were mulched with the stuff. Patricia Lanza says not to worry about removing rocks when building lasagna beds, but I think a load of gravel requires removal.

It’s never a matter of just scooping up surface gravel, either. There is gravel embedded in the soil several inches deep. When Rick built our first raised beds on the other side of the deck, we ended up sifting shovelful after shovelful of soil through a piece of hardware cloth to get rid of the stuff. I did the same with this new bed, but luckily over a smaller area. About half the new bed extends into lawn, so there it was just a matter of laying wet newspaper over turf before building my compost pile. We re-purposed the gravel to make a path in front of the chicken coop.

Next, I got carried away in the front yard marking out the area where I will transfer my herb garden in spring. It’s about 11'x19' - so lots of room for herbs and adding flowers to make an attractive garden feature in the front yard. But try collecting and hauling enough materials for a “lasagna” bed in a space that large! The layers ended up being a lot thinner than the beds I built in the back, but hey, it’s a start. Beats renting a tiller and going to all of that work any day.

I just had to smile cheerfully at all the people walking by on the sidewalk, rubber necking as I laid out my layers of wet newspaper, bedding from the chicken pen, chopped discarded produce from the grocer, and shredded leaves and hay, clearly wondering whether I had gone “mental” to use a word one of my neighbors applied to me last week. It was raining that day and I had the hose on filling a waterer for the chickens. He couldn’t see the waterer clearly over the fence and called out, “It’s raining!” “Yeah?” I replied. “So what are you watering?” he asked. I explained, and he responded, “Oh, okay. I thought you’d gone mental or something.” Ah, neighbors.

There are advantages, I’ve found, to being thought “mental.” While I was building the lasagna bed on the front lawn, one couple walking their dog past our house yanked on his leash when he tried to pee on a few flowers I have growing under a birch tree. “C’mon, Jackson,” the man said, protectively hustling his dog away from our property, as if the crazy might somehow rub off or infect his pet.

Numerous dog-owners walk their pets along our block daily, letting their dogs urinate and defecate on all our front lawns. They’re usually pretty good about picking up the droppings, but there are so many of them it becomes tedious. So if it motivates some of them keep their dogs out of the crazy chicken lady’s yard, I’ll gladly wear the “mental” label.

Which brings me to another topic I’ve been thinking about lately. Can one take minimizing purchased inputs too far? Because I think I’m on some kind of slippery slope here. It started innocently enough. I got chickens, in part, to have a source of fertilizer for the garden. So far so good. Then I began looking around for free sources of greens for the birds. They do get out in their tractor or plastic netting daily, but only for an hour or two. Dandelions are nutrition powerhouses – for people and for chickens – and are plentiful around here. The Leaf Lady reports that:

According to the USDA Bulletin #8, "Composition of Foods" (Haytowitz and Matthews 1984), dandelions rank in the top 4 green vegetables in overall nutritional value. Minnich, in "Gardening for Better Nutrition" ranks them, out of all vegetables, including grains, seeds and greens, as tied for 9th best. According to these data, dandelions are nature's richest green vegetable source of beta-carotene, from which Vitamin A is created, and the third richest source of Vitamin A of all foods, after cod-liver oil and beef liver! They also are particularly rich in fiber, potassium, iron, calcium, magnesium, phosphorus and
the B vitamins, thiamine and riboflavin, and are a good source of protein.

So after I picked our yard and bordering areas clean of dandelions, I started looking around for new sources. We have two parks in our neighborhood, the largest one just down the block from our house. I started digging dandelions in those locations, usually wearing my shabby gardening jacket, and tossing them into an old plastic grocery bag. It occurred to me that I might look like a hobo or bag lady, especially in this neighborhood of university professors, lawyers, judges and other professionals. I could holler defensively at passers-by and gawkers, “I have a PhD!” But who cares, really.

Michael Pollan, describing how he learned to forage for mushrooms, writes about how eventually one develops an eye for them. It’s the same with dandelions. I’ve become practiced at spotting them hiding under fallen leaves or tall grass. One day I was walking home from the park lost in thought, swinging my bag of dandelions, when I spotted a lush patch of the greens in my peripheral vision. I bent down to dig, then suddenly stopped myself when I realized where I was, and that the homeowner might not appreciate vagrants digging in his yard, however much he preferred a “weed” free lawn.

After I decided to build compost piles, or “lasagna” beds where I intended to plant new beds the next spring, I needed to find a free source of “greens” to combine with the “browns” I had in abundance – wood shavings from the chicken pen, twigs, and shredded fallen leaves. (We don't generate enough scraps in our kitchen to build these beds.) So I called the produce department of the supermarket where I normally shop and asked whether I might have some of the produce they were discarding.

I found that they do routinely give away “compost” and that on certain days they had regular customers. But they would save me some on the remaining days if I called that morning. The first day I brought home two large bags of garbage we were astonished at the quality of the discarded produce: Bunches of asparagus, with only one or two spears rotting, lettuce with brown edges on just a few outer leaves, a bell pepper apparently intact. Dumpster divers are right! I thought. (You see what I mean about a slippery slope?)

Last year I stumbled on this whole sub-culture of dumpster diving (I've led kind of a sheltered life), with websites, norms of behavior, etiquette – such as don’t leave a mess because the owners will eventually lock their dumpsters, and if you find something good you don’t want or need, leave it near the top for the next person. They claim that loads of edible food is discarded in this country every day. I’m a sociologist at heart (and by training), so I was fascinated.

Not fascinated enough to actually dumpster dive, mind you. (Remember, I’m also fastidious and had to gulp a few times before eating the first eggs our chickens produced.) So if you’re wondering, we didn’t eat anything from those bags. I did save some of the best greens for the chickens, and tossed them some perfectly good fresh corn on the cob which they had a great time pecking clean.

But back to whether there’s anything to post on a gardening blog in winter. The answer is YES. I’m still growing some things indoors. For example, I have two-year-old pea seeds and plan to order fresh for the spring. But I’m using up the old ones sprouting pea shoots for the chickens in a sunny window in the basement. I’m also keeping an eye on my sweet potato vines, from which I’ll cut slips for spring planting. We’re going to build two of Larisa Walk’s solar food dryers – one for us, and one as a volunteer project for the University of Wisconsin West Madison Agricultural Research station. We’re also going to build cold frames, using old windows given to us by a neighbor.

I also think the winter is a good time for reflection and philosophizing about gardening. I’m working on a post in response to a talk Michael Pollan gave here in Madison a couple of months ago, as well as posts on genetically modified (GM) seed and pesticides. And of course, I’ll be worrying about my chickens and trying to get them safely through their first winter in our care. So, posting will pick up and continue. Thanks for stopping by.

Games Chickens Play

2009-11-18T08:01:00.005-06:00

Before I got chickens, I never had a pet or livestock animal, nor had any desire for one. As I wrote in my post explaining why I decided to get chickens, I previously had little enthusiasm for any animal. It’s not that I hated animals; I just wasn’t interested.

So when I brought my baby chicks home, I didn’t know what to expect. I’d done a lot of reading, but the books and articles I found generally focused on care, feeding, illnesses, and problems. I didn’t think to look for, and never stumbled across, information on everyday behaviors that are unproblematic.

In the past, this kind of knowledge was probably passed down orally from generation to generation and observed directly while growing up on a farm. My grandparents (both paternal and maternal) could probably have taught me a lot about chickens, but my own parents never kept them when I was growing up.

Always having been a “good student,” I made all the preparations the books recommended before bringing my baby chicks home. I tested the height of the lamp in the makeshift cardboard box brooder to get the right temperature for baby chicks, spread paper towels on the floor of the brooder and sprinkled chick crumbles (so they can find food the first few days, and not eat bedding materials), and prepared warm water with sugar. I was nervous and fearful about picking up the anxiously peeping chicks who tried desperately to avoid capture. What if I hurt them or, they me?? But I knew I had to dip their beaks in water so they’d know where to find it, and I did.

Once I had them all in the brooder, and they all appeared to be eating and drinking, I started to breathe a little easier. Then I noticed something strange going on with the littlest chick, a tiny Barred Rock. While everyone else was busily running around, checking out the new digs, eating and drinking, she stopped, her legs wobbling, her eyes starting to close. After a few seconds, she’d force her eyes open, start moving again, before becoming unsteady on her feet again.

Baby chicks are fragile and I began to fear the worst. I called my friend Marie, who is a nurse and an animal lover, with lots of pet experience. “How’s it going?” she asked. “Well, pretty good,’ I said, trying to be cool. Truthfully, I felt a little shaky and on the verge of tears. I couldn’t let on, however. Marie would get too much of a kick out of me suddenly getting all emotional about an animal. “But I think one is about to die.” I described the little chick’s behavior.

“Is she getting enough to drink?” Marie asked. “Do you have an eyedropper? Try giving her a little water with that. And do you have a hot water bottle?” Marie thought maybe the littlest chick was having trouble getting warm. I was sure I had a hot water bottle and eyedropper upstairs. As I got off the phone with Marie, the chick finally lay down and closed her eyes. This is IT! I thought. For a second or two, I debated staying or running upstairs for the items Marie recommended.

Then I frantically ran upstairs. I couldn’t find a hot water bottle anywhere; must have thrown it away years ago. Back down I went, steeling myself for the removal of a tiny carcass, and hoping nobody else died while I was gone. When I looked in the brooder, I was astonished to see the little chick up and running around like nothing was wrong!

As I sat watching them for the next two hours (I was afraid to leave!), I noticed all the chicks behaving the same way as the littlest one. They’d run around busily, then suddenly get wobbly on their legs, stop, lie down, and close their eyes. After a few minutes, they’d be up again and running around, like they just needed a quick power nap. They reminded me of toddlers who run around till they exhaust themselves and then fall asleep where they lay.

Another behavior that initially worried me, but turned out to be normal started a couple of weeks later. Two chicks would confront each other, wings flapping, chests practically bumping. I’d read so much about “feather picking” I was afraid of that horror and constantly admonished the chicks not to fight and to “be nice.” I finally realized they were just establishing a pecking order. Luckily, they never got vicious, so I quit worrying about chest bumping game.

Competition is a primary feature of chicken social organization. Our chicks compete over any and every thing, but mainly food. They spend most of their time looking for things to eat and if it appears that somebody found something interesting to snack on, the rest of them will chase her around trying to steal it. I’ve seen posters at Backyard Chickens refer to this behavior as “chicken football.” Chickens will even try to grab food out of someone else’s beak while she’s eating it – especially if it is something long like a worm or a blade of grass. They do this even if they originally rejected the item in question.

For example, last summer I found a tomato that something (probably a chipmunk) had taken a bite of, but that was otherwise perfect. I cut it in half and put it in the chicken tractor to see what they’d do, since I’d read that chickens like tomatoes. They’re curious little birds, so naturally they ran up to take a look. Then they backed away, moving their heads back and forth quickly, as if to say, “No. No.”

But then Batgirl, the bravest and most independent of our chickens, decided to investigate further. She pecked at one of the tomato wedges, decided she liked it, picked it up, and ran to a corner of the tractor to enjoy it by herself. The game was on! The others started chasing her. She’d run to a corner, set her tomato wedge down, take a bite, then see they were on her tail, pick it up and run again. After letting them amuse me with this for a few minutes, I got another tomato and cut it up so they could each have their own wedge.

But they will compete even if there are plenty of rations available for everyone. When they were little, we used one of those round feeders with holes at the base for chicks to access the crumbles. Invariably, when one chick started eating from one hole, the others would run over and try to eat out of the same hole, even though there were plenty of empty spaces around the dish. If another chick was in their way when they wanted to leave the feeder, they’d just step on her back to get where they wanted to go!

Chickens are not like dogs in the sense that they don’t care to be picked up or seek petting. Some people handle their chicks a lot when they’re little to get them accustomed to it, but my feeling has always been that if they want to be left alone, we should leave them alone. So we handled them only when necessary. As they got older, they got used to us. They stopped running away from us, but still didn’t want to be touched. If we’d try to pet them, they’d slink away, but didn’t run.

Around the time they started laying, however, they changed. They’d deliberately come close and brush by us. One day Amelia hung around me for so long, seeming to want something, I finally reached down and picked her up. To my surprise, she stood there and let me do it! As I was petting her and marveling over this novel experience, Batgirl, the other Barred Rock, came over and started hopping up, like she wanted me to pick her up, too! I set Amelia down and picked up Batgirl, but being the independent spirit she is, Batgirl quickly decided she’d had enough. Apparently she just wanted to make sure she got everything Amelia was getting.

I was pretty excited about this new development. Like Sally Field accepting an award, I couldn’t help thinking, “They like me! They really like me!” Before long, however, I had the embarrassing realization it wasn’t about “liking” me. These randy girls were looking for a roo and we were the only beings in the yard not-a-hen. As soon as we’d reach out to pet their backs, they’d immediately squat and “assume the position.” They’re now so anxious to get their groove on, they’re very easy to catch. When Batgirl made her fifth escape the other day, she at first darted around trying to evade me. When I reached for her back, this independent girl forgot herself for a moment, abruptly stopped, and squatted. Like taking candy from a baby.

The latest interesting behavior is their insistence on being hand-fed when they first see me. In a way, I can understand how this developed. Because we can’t let them run free in the yard, in the summer Rick would shake Japanese beetles off the cherry trees into a container and then hold that container at the tractor door while the chicks ate the beetles. We’d also feed them blades of grass through the fencing of their tractor from time to time. One reason I did this was to get the chicks to come to me so I could look them over and check for any health problems. Sometimes we just did it to interact with them. Rick especially got a kick out of chickens standing on lush lawn, with lots to eat, all wanting and competing over the single blade of grass he had in his hand. “You’ve got grass all around you!” he’d laugh.

So I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that now when I come to them with treats in the morning, they don’t immediately go after the cracked corn I’m throwing on the ground. They instead crowd around wanting a bite out of the container I’m carrying. They just take a bite or two; then go on their way. But they have to have that first bite directly from my hand. I have a feeling they’d enjoy the game more if I ran to a corner of the pen and pretended to eat it myself. Sorry, girls, that's a game you'll have to play among yourselves!

Nothing New Under the Sun

2009-11-09T08:11:00.026-06:00

Have you ever had an idea for something, maybe a useful device, or, as with me, an idea for a book, then later found that someone else already came up with the same idea? It seems to happen with great regularity; individuals in different parts of the country, or different parts of the world, or even at different points in history, come up with similar ideas and innovations.

It was through Ruth Stout that I first learned about no-till gardening and building up the soil through heavy mulching with organic material. She was an original among her contemporaries, and promoted methods contrary to the mainstream agricultural extension recommendations of her day.

During the 1970s, when Ruth Stout was writing articles and books on her “no-work” method of gardening in the United States, over in Japan, microbiologist and farmer Masanobu Fukuoka, was teaching and writing about his similar method of “do-nothing” farming.

Techniques for what is sometimes called sheet composting or German mounds have been around for centuries, but proponents of new variations of the method continually emerge. The most recent incarnation of the method that I’m aware of is Patricia Lanza’s notion of Lasagna Gardening.

All of these methods involve composting organic materials directly on the site you intend to plant and not tilling the soil. As I wrote in an earlier post about Stout, she advised applying a year-round thick mulch of organic material – primarily hay. Why go to all the trouble of building and turning a compost pile, she reasoned, when one could just throw kitchen vegetable scraps directly into the garden, cover them with a layer of leaves, pine needles, straw, hay – whatever combination of these you had on hand – and allow them to decompose where they lay?

Similarly, Fukuoka advocated on site composting by leaving organic material in the fields following harvest. He wrote:

There is no need to prepare compost. I will not say that you do not need compost – only that there is no need to work hard in making it. If straw is left lying on the surface of the field in the spring or fall and is covered with a thin layer of chicken manure or duck droppings, in six months it will completely decompose . . .

To make compost by the usual methods, the farmer works like crazy in the hot sun, chopping up the straw, adding water
and lime, turning the pile, and hauling it out to the field. He puts himself through all this grief because he thinks it is a “better way.” I would rather see people just scattering straw or hulls or woodchips over their fields (p49).*

Both Stout and Fukuoka were working with previously tilled land. But what if you want to plant garden beds where you currently have turf grass? Lanza recommends beginning with a layer of wet newspaper or cardboard:

You don't have to remove existing sod and weeds. You don't have to double dig. In fact, you don't have to work the soil at all. The first layer of your lasagna garden consists of either brown corrugated cardboard or three layers of newspaper laid directly on top of the grass or weeds in the area you've selected for your garden. Wet this layer down to keep everything in place and start the decomposition process. The grass or weeds will break down fairly quickly because they will be smothered by the newspaper or cardboard, as well as by the materials you're going to layer on top of them. This layer also provides a dark, moist area to attract earthworms that will loosen up the soil as they tunnel through it.

The next step in Lanza's process is layering your organic materials as you would for a typical compost pile:

You'll want to alternate layers of “browns” such as fall leaves, shredded newspaper, peat, and pine needles with layers of “greens” such as vegetable scraps, garden trimmings, and grass clippings. In general, you want your "brown” layers to be about twice as deep as your “green” layers, but there's no need to get finicky about this. Just layer browns and greens, and a lasagna garden will result. What you want at the end of your layering process is a two-foot tall layered bed. You'll be amazed at how much this will shrink down in a few short weeks.

My only criticism of Lanza’s system is that she generally advises using peat moss between the layers of the “lasagna” garden. Peat takes centuries to form and is currently harvested at non-sustainable rates. Coir, made from short fibers of coconut shells, is a viable, sustainable alternative to peat. It does have to be shipped from outside the U.S., however, so there is that “carbon footprint” to consider. Neither are necessary to build a good compost pile.

What I do appreciate about Lanza is her “just get started” approach. In the past, whenever I wanted to start a new garden bed, I’d have to wait until Rick had time to help, and we both had the energy to tackle the job. Then he’d hitch up the trailer to the car, we’d drive to Home Depot, rent a tiller, till the turf, break up the remaining chunks, and laboriously remove all the remaining grass. It’s so freeing to just mark out your new plot, lay down wet newspaper or cardboard, and start building your compost pile.

Already this fall I’ve built two “lasagna” beds where we plan to build our potato towers next spring. I’m planning two more – one where we planned to build a sixth raised bed last summer, but never got around to it, and another in the front yard where I want to move my herb garden. I’ve been coveting the backyard herb bed to use for more veggies, and thought an herb garden could be an attractive feature in a front yard. I’ll have all winter to plan exactly how I want to lay it out, but meanwhile, I’ll be making compost on the area I intend to plant.

To build my “lasagna” layers, as always, I sought to minimize purchased inputs. For my first “brown” layer, I used pine shavings (bedding) from the chicken pen. Next, I laid down a “green” layer of roughly chopped, discarded vegetables I got for free from the produce section of the grocery store. I topped that with a thick layer of shredded fallen leaves. Then I laid down a somewhat thinner layer of partially finished compost. This consists of chicken manure, kitchen vegetable scraps, coffee grounds, eggshells, and some shredded leaves. Finally, I capped the whole thing with an 8” layer of loose hay.

It was so easy! Which, of course, is the point – to reduce and eliminate unnecessary work. Stout and Lanza focus particularly on enabling people to garden, even into old age. For Fukuoka, less work also means more time to be a full human being. He marvels that, in centuries past, farmers in Japan had time to write haikus as offerings in the village shrine. Like Juliet Schor, in The Overworked American, Fukuoka notes that industrialization has left us with less free time than low-tech cultures enjoyed in the past. He writes:

The more the farmer increases the scale of his operation, the more his body and spirit are dissipated and the further he falls away from a spiritually satisfying life. A life of small-scale farming may appear to be primitive, but in living such a life, it becomes possible to contemplate the Great Way . . .

At the end of the year, the one-acre farmer of long ago spent January, February, and March hunting rabbits in the hills. Though he was called a poor peasant, he still had this kind of freedom. The New Year’s holiday lasted about three months. Gradually this vacation came to be shortened to two months, one month, and now the New Year’s has come to be
a three-day holiday . . . There is no time in modern agriculture for a farmer to write a poem or compose a song (p110-1).*

All that free time sounds good to me. Why, then, does this particular wheel have to be re-invented again and again? One reason is that there is little to no profit to be made from these low-work, low tech methods. As Stout pointed out, “Merchants who sell fertilizers and plows and so on aren’t in sympathy with my ideas of gardening (p59).”** Fukuoka noted similarly that, “If crops were to be grown without agricultural chemicals, fertilizer, or machinery, the giant chemical companies would become unnecessary and the [Japanese] government’s Agricultural Co-op Agency would collapse (p81)."*

There seems to be a macho element as well. I don’t believe it’s an accident that non-Westerners and women predominate among proponents of these easier methods. The posting community over at theoildrum.com, where they discuss fossil fuel depletion and the implications for society, is mostly white males (a fact they lament from time to time). When they discuss the problems of food production after “peak oil”, when fossil fuel depletion increases the cost of chemical inputs and makes it prohibitively expensive to operate heavy machinery, the conversation inevitably turns to the difficulty of producing food without the technology or brute strength necessary to enable mastery of the work.

This way of thinking is, of course, a cultural product, not a physical trait – and therefore not limited to white men, nor descriptive of every white man. But it is an organizing feature of Western civilization. It extends to the notion of controlling and subduing nature.

By contrast, Fukuoka speaks of co-existence and cooperation with nature. His notion of “do nothing” farming is not just about eliminating unnecessary work, but about interfering with natural processes as little as possible, because humans cannot fully understand or control them. Like Stout, he relied on observation of natural processes to determine his techniques for helping them along.

It’s intriguing to me that by giving up the notion that we can understand nature and thereby control it, we are more truly empowered to produce our own food, healthfully, and with a degree of self-sufficiency, right into old age. Imagine that! We do not have to be strapping young men, use heavy machinery, or rely on big corporations for seeds, fertilizer, pesticides. We can do it ourselves.

*The One-Straw Revolution, by Masanobu Fukuoka, 1978.

**The Ruth Stout No-Work Garden Book, by Ruth Stout and Richard Clemence, Rodale Press, 1971.

Article describing lasagna gardening by Patricia Lanza: Lasagna Gardening 101.

All the World's Creatures Wanna Be Free

2009-10-21T08:58:00.007-05:00

I mentioned a few posts ago that I was taking a series of trainings in Backyard Food Production for master gardeners. One of our last sessions was on beekeeping, a practice I want to take up at some point in the future. The beekeeper presenting the session concluded by advising, “Enjoy your bees. Observe them; learn from them.”

I thought to myself, that’s been my approach with my chickens. Observing them, seeing what they need, and trying to make it available to them. In my August post, “Home on the UnFree Range,” I wrote about the early part of that journey – the way the baby chicks sought sunlight, even in their artificially lit brooder, how they went crazy over a piece of turf we put in their brooder, and how I eventually decided to take not yet three-week-old babies outside, despite contrary advice in the literature and from conventional farmers.

I never solved the central problem, however, of the chickens wanting and needing space and freedom. “When I decided to raise chickens,” I wrote, “I never really thought through what that would entail; that I would essentially be keeping caged birds.” I had managed to give the baby chicks more space and freedom, but that was fairly easy, given how small they were at the time. We also enlarged the coop and run, beyond what the designer and other sources claim is adequate. However, I am still confronted with the problem of allowing our chickens “a measure of the freedom all creatures need for their health and well-being.”

Clearly, they are communicating their desire and need for more space and freedom. Every time I so much as step out the back door they go crazy running up and down the front of their pen, banging their beaks on the wire fencing, wanting to get out. Our house is built into a slope, with the front entrance at ground level, and the back entrance at the top of the hill. There is a small deck outside the back door, with steps leading down to the yard and a lower deck. My herb garden is just off the upper deck and the chicken coop at the far end of the bottom of the yard. I so hate to disappoint my girls I’ve taken to sneaking around whenever I want to clip a few herbs for something I’m cooking. I carefully open the back door to avoid making any noise, creep to the herb garden, and crouch low to harvest some leaves.

It never works. As soon as I step a foot out the door, they go wild.

I’ve made it a point to let them out in their tractor every day, which they enjoy. But, as I wrote in the earlier post, when they were little, “their tractor was spacious to them and they could run and fly the length of it. Now they just walk around.”

What I’d like to have is some sort of temporary fencing system that I could put up in different parts of the yard to allow them more space, but keep them from destroying the garden and pooping all over the two decks and the steps. We had a roll of four foot high galvanized fencing in the garage, so I decided to try to use that to set up a temporary fenced area. But it was heavy to lug out there and I needed Rick’s help to set it up.

Next, I bought some plastic netting. Folded in half, we were able to set up a 4 ½ foot high fenced area, with some of the netting hanging over the top. The first day we set it up just outside their coop. They loved it. As I suspected, the only reason they just stood around in their tractor now they were bigger, was lack of space. Inside the larger enclosure, they ran and hopped and flapped their wings.

But the extra space didn’t stop them from looking for ways out of the largest enclosure they’d ever enjoyed. Amelia, a Barred Rock who is our first and best flier, attempted to fly out – and would have made it if not for the bit of netting hanging over the top. The netting is hard to see and she momentarily got her wings caught in it. It all happened in a few seconds, as we stood staring, unable to move. As she freed herself, shook out her feathers, and walked away, we breathed a sigh of relief. I threw a chunk of hay in to distract them, and they were pacified for several days.

The following week, I set up the netting in a different place, and let the hens out. Only this time, I was too lazy to put rocks around the bottom edge of the netting. I didn’t notice a place where the netting was pulled tight, leaving a gap at the bottom. But Batgirl, our other Barred Rock, lost no time in finding it. I turned my back for just a few seconds, and the next thing I knew, she was in the nearby strawberry patch, chowing down on some pretty leaves. While I tried to catch her, Tracy, one of the Rhode Island Reds, slipped out.

Belatedly, I blocked the gap, before anybody else could break free, then turned to catch the jailbreakers. By now, Batgirl had moved on to the raspberries, even jumping up now and then to get a bite of an especially attractive leaf. Lots of good things to eat out here!

Eventually, I caught them both, and secured the perimeter of the fence. Now, however, all the chickens realized that escape routes did exist, and they kept poking and prodding the area along the netting where the escapees had broken free, bawking loudly the whole time.

Yesterday, I again set up the netting, this time carefully securing the bottom of the fence. Before long, I heard wings beating loudly and turned to see Batgirl clear the 4 ½ foot fence! The rest of the chickens and I stood frozen in disbelief for a few seconds. If Amelia is our best flier, Batgirl is our best escape artist. This marked the third time she’d broken free. Tracy is the only other chicken to have succeeded in escaping, and she’d only made it once.

I threw some cracked corn into the fenced area, hoping to distract the other birds, who were already looking at the top of the fence, and I’m sure, contemplating an attempt of their own. Usually they go nuts for the cracked corn, but this time they just turned, watched it fall to the ground, then turned their attention back to gauging the height of the fence. Fearing they’d all start flying over while I was occupied with chasing Batgirl, I decided to herd them back into their pen first. They struggled and protested the whole way, and who could blame them?

After I caught Batgirl, I was worn out dealing with them for the day, so I took down the fencing. While I was taking it down, they stood at the door of their pen, pleading with me. It’s hard for me to describe their different sounds. They have a quiet, contented clucking sound when they’re scratching, a loud bawking when we come outside and they want to be let out, a continuous guttural sound when it seems like they’re trying to talk to us. This was sort of a whiney, less noisy, bawking sound. I felt like a meanie.

So, what’s the solution? I need to come up with one fast, because yesterday, before all the drama, I noticed dark, reddish, black spots on Amelia’s previously perfect comb. My first thought was that they were from scraps with another chicken. But they usually don’t fight. So my imagination took off and I started worrying about disease.

After consulting with a few people at Backyard Chickens, however, it seems my first hunch was right. (Since they never fought before, I wonder if the problem, at least in part, is linked to their starting to lay, and perhaps not having enough nest box space for that.) The posters at BYC also seemed to think that space is tight in our coop and pen, and, as we know, close quarters contributes to pecking problems.

I don’t disagree; if I had it to do over again, I’d build a coop and pen twice as large as the original plans we purchased. We’ve already enlarged both, but it’s clearly not enough. We could give away one chicken, but I don’t think I’m ready to do that. I’m instead going to face up to a solution I’ve been avoiding: clipping their wings.

I hate to do that, even though it doesn’t physically hurt them. I feel badly about truncating a defining feature of a bird. I think I also resist it because forces the recognition that we are keeping birds in captivity. And I’m still working through my feelings about that.

If their wings are clipped, they can regularly and safely enjoy being out in a larger fenced area, and still have a good life. Can’t they? It’s not really possible to “free” domesticated animals entirely.

Snow Birds

2009-10-15T08:57:00.021-05:00

The weather is turning and we’re heading into a new stage with the chickens – keeping them safe and sufficiently warm in winter. I know they don’t have to be “toasty” warm, and that, in fact, it’s not good for them. They generate a lot of moisture, and keeping them too warm in an enclosed place promotes disease. But it can get pretty cold here in Wisconsin, and we don’t want to freeze the poor birds. So, what do we do?

I thought I had this all worked out when we started the chicken project. We chose Dennis Harrison-Noonan’s playhouse coop design, in part, because we heard that small numbers of chickens can best keep warm in a small coop. My neighbor, Jill, who got her chickens a year before I got mine, said the breeder told her essentially the same thing: that it’s best to keep small numbers of birds in a small coop because they will generate enough body heat to keep a small space sufficiently warm.

With this design, we hoped it wouldn’t be necessary to heat the coop. Heat is problematic because, in addition to disease, chickens are more vulnerable to frostbite in humid air (warm air holds more moisture) than with cold dry air. I talked to an experienced chicken keeper from Mad City Chickens who advised against ever heating a coop in winter. Both she, and our poultry extension specialist, stressed that the birds are a lot hardier than people think.

I also deliberately selected breeds that I thought would be able to handle cold weather. Barred Rocks and Rhode Island Reds are large breeds that were developed in the mid-19th century in New England. If they could tolerate a New England winter in the days before electricity, surely they could tolerate a Wisconsin winter, I reasoned.

However, the more I read and talked to people, the more doubt began to creep in. My neighbor from Oaxaca, Mexico, whose family kept chickens when she was growing up, inquired about my plans for the chickens in winter; would I bring them into the house? She stared at me in horror when I told her they should be fine in their coop. My sister Sandy, who has lived in southern California for nearly three decades, had a similar reaction. I told Sandy that another chicken keeper in Madison told me the most her chickens required was a 60 watt bulb on the very coldest nights. “Those poor chickens!” she exclaimed. “Huddled around just a light bulb for heat!” Clearly this bordered on animal cruelty, in her mind.

My dad’s partner, Wilda, whose mother raised chickens when Wilda was growing up in Arkansas, was also skeptical that chickens could survive a Wisconsin winter outside with little or no heat. I pointed out that 19th century farmers didn’t have electricity to heat their coops and somehow seemed to manage. Wilda claimed that was because the chickens were kept in barns in winter, with other large animals that generated heat. Wilda also observed that a smaller box, like our coop, would freeze faster than a larger building.

I had to admit that Wilda made some good points. Then our friends John and Barb stopped by. They are Wilda’s age, and they, too, grew up in families that raised chickens. However, they grew up in Wisconsin. “Aaah, they’ll be fine!” John said reassuringly, when I fretted about protecting my chickens in winter. The chickens on their parents’ farms managed to survive in unheated coops (not barns with other animals). They don’t recall it ever being a problem.

I started to detect a pattern here. Many people from warmer climates find it hard to imagine themselves tolerating a Wisconsin winter, let alone chickens in outside coops, with little or no heat. The pattern is even more obvious on the Backyard Chickens message board. Some posters from southern climes think they need to heat their coops when temperatures barely get down to freezing, while posters from Canada and Alaska insist that chickens can healthfully tolerate far colder temperatures than one might believe.

These northern posters calmed my fears considerably. My only remaining concern is the size of our coop. A poster from Ontario, “PatAndChickens,” argues persuasively that in colder climates, larger, not smaller coops are preferable. The reason is that chickens will spend more time indoors during winter, and you want to provide them enough space to move around and not get into fights. She advises sectioning off a smaller area within the large coop, where the chickens can warm up.

So, what did we finally decide to do?

* Coop Size. We can’t rebuild the coop now, so instead we’ll treat the fenced area as “coop.” After some research, posting with Pat, and talking to our extension agent, we decided to put plastic over the north and west sides of the pen. This will provide a windbreak and keep most of the snow out of the pen. In addition to protected space in their pen to move around, Rick expanded the roost box one foot into the pen.

* Heat. Rick insulated the coop (with "stupervision" from the chickens - see photo above). The original design didn’t call for insulation but both Pat on BYC and our poultry extension agent advised it. (After we’ve been through a year with the chickens, I’m writing a post on “lessons learned” in coop design!) We’ve also oriented the coop so that the largest window faces south. Hopefully, the coop will gain some heat from the sun in winter. The most electric heat we plan to use is a 60 watt bulb, but we’ll monitor the girls and hope we don’t have to resort to that.

* Ventilation. I’ve learned that ventilation is crucial to protecting poultry in winter. Luckily, our coop design provided for ventilation holes at the top of the roost box. The poultry extension specialist advised leaving the pop door partway open in winter for additional ventilation. (We left it wide open, day and night, during summer, but had recently been closing it.)

It’s been our practice to daily remove droppings beneath the roost bar. In summer, they were right on top of the bedding because the chickens went out into their pen in the morning, and never returned until dark. That made it easy to remove this source of moisture in the air. They’re in and out more often now, kicking the droppings under the bedding, so we’re going to install a droppings board beneath the roost bar.

Tracy inspects the remodeling.

* Roost bar. Some sources advise a 2x4, rounded at the edges, rather than a round bar, for chickens in winter climates. The wide bar allows the chickens to sit on their feet and helps to prevent frostbitten toes.

* Diet. Finally, our poultry extension specialist advises giving the chickens scratch before bedtime in winter. Apparently, it helps to warm them because it gets them moving and scratching to look for it, and provides something substantial for them to digest overnight.

Hopefully, all these strategies will help to keep our birdies healthy in the cold days ahead.

Odds & Ends: Seed-saving, Compost, & Eggs

2009-10-10T08:59:00.013-05:00

Seed saving. There’s a terrific post and comment thread over at the Oil Drum on seed saving. It’s a goldmine of tidbits on hybridization versus open pollination, sources of information on how to save seeds, which seeds you should save (e.g. vegetables or staple crops?), the benefits of slips over seed potatoes for that crop, and experiences and techniques of people who are actually doing it. I was especially intrigued by this method of saving seeds (in a comment sent via email to the original poster):

You can take fruits (like squash, melons, tomatoes, etc.) and bury them in your garden to sprout in the spring. This approach not only saves you the effort of saving seeds (collect, clean, label and store) but also of planting. When the time is right, they will sprout and you will get plants.

What a great labor-saver! Especially given that saving seeds from tomatoes is a bit of an involved process. Ruth Stout would have loved it. The comment from which that quote was taken included a website with more information and videos: http://www.savingourseed.org/

Speaking of Ruth Stout, several comments in the Oil Drum thread mentioned Masanobu Fukuoka’s book One Straw Revolution. I’ve requested it from the library, but haven’t received it yet, so I don’t know first-hand what exactly is his method. But apparently he developed a method similar to Ruth Stout’s (that I wrote about here) – a no-till, no weeding, year-round mulch system that produces high yields. (Stout called her method the “no-work garden;” Fukuoka called his the “do nothing” technique.) One poster included links to YouTube videos of a garden inspired by Fukuoka’s methods that so impressed me I want to include them here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugFd1JdFaE0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa9yMjsSQC0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQmPT6jfttc

I’ve already taken lots of notes from the Oil Drum thread, but there’s more to glean, so I’m planning to go back through it sometime this week-end. It’s really that useful; I highly recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in gardening.

Update on compost tumblers. I’m currently taking some specialized training for master gardeners in backyard food production. It’s a mixed bag – some useful information and some frustrating limitations. Last week’s training on compost is a case in point. The instructor discouraged the use of tumbling composters (that I advocated in an earlier post). He instead advocated building compost piles directly on the ground, so that the multitudes of beneficial micro-organisms and nematodes (including worms) could access it.

Someone in the class pointed out that the reason people liked the tumblers was the ease of turning the compost. Were there no beneficial organisms in the finished product? he asked. There were some, the instructor conceded, but not as much as one would find in compost from a pile built directly on the ground. You need the full diversity of organisms to make great compost, he insisted.

Couldn’t you just include a shovelful of soil in the compost tumbler, to achieve that goal? another master gardener asked.

Well, maybe, the instructor allowed. But you don’t know how good the soil is that you’re putting in there. It would have to be high-quality soil.

Which led me to wonder, how well would we know the quality of the soil upon which we’re to build the compost pile? He’d already told us that he had an advantage, since he could look at samples under the microscope and see whether all the desired micro-organisms were there in sufficient quantity.

The only compost he felt he could ethically recommend, he said, was, coincidentally, I’m sure, made by a company he was affiliated with. He even discouraged us from using free compost from the county because it was improperly made. He correctly pointed out that their piles were built in such a way that they over-heated, and that compost was taken from those piles for use before it was finished.

One woman asked whether she could take free compost from the county and tweak it somehow to improve it? She was in the process of building a large system of raised beds and could not possibly afford to buy the amount of compost she needed from the company he recommended.

No, he said, that could not be done.

He was so rigid in his quest for the scientifically perfect compost that his recommendations were impractical for most people. He then instructed us on the proper construction of a compost pile, although, he said, we could never produce in our yards all that we would need for our gardens. We were to start with a bottom layer of twigs. The next layer would be greens – garden trimmings. Next layer – browns, dried oak leaves were his preference. Next…

At this point I was wishing Ruth Stout was alive and sitting in the class so I could get her reaction. I imagined she’d nearly fall down laughing. Then, she’d dry the tears of laughter from her eyes, and patiently explain in her Quaker way, how to avoid all that senseless work, and still get high yields from your garden.

I think her spirit was in the classroom. Someone asked, if the bottom layer is twigs, how do the beneficial fauna get up into the compost pile?
Well, he explained, they were already on the twigs and branches. Then wouldn’t they already be on twigs and branches thrown into a tumbling composter, I wondered?

Why bother to make all those layers, another master gardener asked, when they’ll all be mixed up the first time you turn it?

Our instructor admitted this was true, but had no good answer to the question.

My take-away from all this? If you’re using a tumbling composter, make sure to add a shovelful of good soil, including worms, to ensure the best product. That’s it.

Eggs! We’re getting eggs regularly now, although I’m pretty sure only two of the four are laying. I do know that the Rhode Island Red our granddaughter Alexis named Tracy, and that we thought would be one of the first layers, is in fact laying eggs. I saw Tracy go into the nest box to do the deed the other day.

We’ve eaten some of the eggs already. We cracked the first one open into a glass dish so I could look it over before we cooked it. The shell was stronger and slightly thicker than those we buy at Whole Foods. The yolk and white were perfectly formed, so Rick scrambled it and we shared it. It was delicious – richer and creamier than eggs from the store.

But here’s the thing: I’m having a little trouble eating those eggs. I have to swallow them down fast and try not to think about it too much. Not because of the flavor or texture – those are just fine; excellent, in fact. I guess it’s just knowing where those eggs came from. I don’t know how to explain it, and I know it’s illogical.

It’s especially surprising, considering I’ve eaten eggs from backyard hens before. Years ago, when we lived in England, a friend of mine kept chickens and gave me eggs from time to time, and I had no problem eating those. But I never took any interest in those chickens or even really came into contact with them. So I guess I could disassociate those eggs from their origin. I think I’ll get past this soon; I sure feel silly about it. But there it is.

We Got Our First Egg!!!

2009-10-04T15:08:00.009-05:00

We got our first egg on Sunday!!! Rick was out at the coop in the afternoon, at about 1:30, preparing to insulate it for the winter when he found the perfect little pullet egg you see in the photo above. (The egg in my left hand – right side of the photo – is a large egg from the supermarket.)

He ran into the kitchen (where I was canning pizza sauce) to show me. “It’s still warm!” he said excitedly. I was so thrilled, I went crazy for a few moments and started running around like, you know, a chicken with its head cut off.

“Let me feel it! It IS warm! Do you know who laid it? Where was it? In the nest box? You gotta take a picture! Go quick! Put it back for the picture. No, wait, come back – I’ll get the camera out of the office! Oh, it’s sooo perfect!”

Later I went out to praise the girls. I’d been telling them every day lately that we need to start seeing some eggs. I never thought I’d be the kind of person who talks to chickens, but apparently I’ve taken a turn. I think they try to talk back, too. Whenever they see us, they start up the noise. Not the quiet clucking they do when they’re scratching in the dirt. It’s a kind of continuous guttural sound. When we talk to them, they try to get up to eye level by jumping up on the roost of their tractor, or on the ladder to the coop if they’re in the pen, and they keep the noise going.

I'm wondering which one did the deed. A few weeks ago, Amelia, one of the Barred Rocks, appeared to have the most developed comb and wattles. Tracy, one of the Rhode Island Reds, was not far behind. But just lately, Tracy suddenly seemed to pass Amelia. I could probably figure it out by checking their vents, but I think I’ll let the girls keep their mystery for now.

Food Preservation: Do or Die

2009-10-04T08:22:00.028-05:00

As part of my Backyard Nest Egg project, I’m back to canning. It’s interesting to me how I’ve come full circle. In the early years of our marriage, three decades ago, I started my first garden and learned water bath canning, in part, to save money. Now, although we’re financially much better off, I’m back to gardening and canning, partly in response to current economic conditions.

I got started canning back in the early 1980s with the help of my friend Pam. Recently divorced from an Army sergeant, Pam was my age, and like me, had a preschool-aged son. Pam refused to get a job before her son was old enough to go to school full-time, so she went on welfare and found other ways to make ends meet. (It probably wouldn’t have made economic sense for her to go out to work anyway. At that time, neither of us had any education beyond high school. Her low wages would have been eaten up by daycare expenses.)

Pam’s dad kept a huge vegetable garden, and in exchange for a share of the produce for herself and her son, Pam did all the canning and preserving. A resourceful woman who grew up in Tacoma, Washington, where we lived at the time, she knew - and taught me - where to pick wild blackberries, apples, and pears from abandoned orchards. We made pies and canned jam and applesauce for our little boys.

From that beginning, I expanded my repertoire to include strawberry jam and tomatoes from my garden. After a few years, however, life got busier; between work and college, I had less time for food production, and besides, we had a little more money. Why go to all the trouble to grow or forage food and preserve it? We had moved up, we thought.

Fast forward to last summer and the start of my Backyard Nest Egg project. I bought a pressure canner and canned pizza sauce made from tomatoes and basil I grew myself. We savored pizza made with that sauce all winter. The aroma when I opened a jar was amazing – nothing like any of the commercially prepared sauces I’d bought over the years. So it was a worthwhile project, even though it was a lot of work.

Moreover, it required saving up enough tomatoes for a batch. This can be a challenge with a backyard plot. Many traditional canning recipes call for large quantities of produce that a home gardener will not have all at one time. I got around that last year by blanching, peeling, and freezing my paste tomatoes whole, as they ripened, until I had enough for a batch of sauce.

So this year I was thrilled to find a book (now added to my “essential reading” list) perfect for the Backyard Nest Egg project – The Complete Book of Small-Batch Preserving by Ellie Topp and Margaret Howard. This book is full of creative and original recipes, including jams and other fruit preserves, salsas, tomato sauces, pickles and relishes – all requiring small quantities of fresh produce and only a water bath canner for processing.

The recipes are less exotic (and more numerous) than those in Eugenia Bone’s book Well-Preserved: Recipes and Techniques for Putting Up Small Batches of Seasonal Foods, but more sophisticated than the traditional Ball Blue Book recipes. For example, their salsa recipes include Papaya Mango salsa, Fresh Tomato and Black Olive salsa, and Roasted Corn and Sweet Pepper salsa. In addition to a recipe for apple butter, they also have recipes for nontraditional fruit butters, like Apricot Honey Butter and Cranberry Maple Butter. (I made the latter last week – it was marvelous; slightly tart, and the hint of maple intensifies the flavor of the cranberries).

The small batch recipes are great not just because I have limited fresh produce at one time, but also because they allow for greater variety. Back when I was making the Ball Blue book jam recipes, I’d end up with 10 half pints of strawberry jam. Unless you’re preserving for a large family, who needs that much of one type of jam? I expect to get raspberries, blueberries, and strawberries from my garden next year. A few small jars of jam from each of these would be perfect for us.

Of course, despite having found such a terrific resource, I had to make things harder for myself. The problem with me and canning is that safe food preservation requires fairly strict adherence to a tested recipe. I love to cook, but I tend to use recipes mostly as "suggestions," or jumping off points for my own creativity. If you get creative in food preservation, you have to keep within certain guidelines.

Some authorities forbid creativity in food preservation altogether, as does the food science professor at our university extension. Last April, I attended a talk she gave via teleconference for master gardeners on food preservation. She stressed that we should use only tested recipes on the university website, or Ball Blue Book recipes, and her mantra (repeated numerous times) throughout the talk was “We don’t want you getting creative!”

More than a few of us were a bit irritated by this. Why go to all the trouble of growing and preserving your own food if you can’t prepare family favorites? Or have the fun of experimenting with your own recipes? The woman sitting next to me frowned, arms crossed, and shifted in her seat. She confided to me that she wanted to try making different fruit preserves with maple syrup, rather than refined sugar.

I commiserated; I was dismayed by the salsa recipes. They hardly contained enough chilies to accurately be labeled “salsa,” in my opinion. For example, one recipe called for 8 quarts of chopped tomatoes and just four jalapeños and four “long green chilies” (huh? Is she referring to Anaheims here, or what?) I use that many chilies with two or three cups of chopped tomatoes in a fresh salsa.

I emailed this professor later to ask for advice on adapting recipes. I wrote that her salsa recipes were “awfully low” on chilies; how might I safely add more? I also asked:

Is there a way of determining the pH of a food product to find out whether the acid content is high enough for safe water bath canning? For example, can pH paper be used? Alternatively, can you give a ratio of acid (vinegar, lemon juice) to low acid vegetables (e.g, ___ cups) that will produce a safe product
for water bath canning?

She replied that she could not give such a “formula” and that:

There isn't a way to test pH that will work. That said, you can always substitute hot chili peppers for green peppers, celery, onion or other low-acid ingredient in salsa (not tomatoes, however).

She added her usual warning:

If you are a creative cook, this would indeed not be welcome news, however, to do things incorrectly puts the health of you and your family at risk.

This irritated me again, perhaps unreasonably. Obviously, we attended the food preservation talk, and I asked her advice via email, because we wanted to safely preserve food. Repeated warnings about risks to our families had the feel of trying to put the fear of God into children to induce unquestioning obedience.

Moreover, although she stressed science for safety, the measures in her recipes do not seem scientifically reliable to me. How much is a cup of chopped onion, for example? Doesn’t that depend on how finely or coarsely you chop it? (Yesterday, I actually found online a University of Georgia paper with guidelines for safe ratios of tomatoes to low acid vegetables for salsa by weight, which makes more sense to me.) She presents a conversion chart on her website for chilies that equates one medium jalapeño to “about” one quarter cup chopped chili. I don’t know where she gets her jalapeños, or what “medium” means to her, but I’ve never managed to come up with more than about 2 tablespoons of chopped produce from one jalapeño.

I finally selected a recipe from Small Batch Preserving, but even those recipes use fewer chilies than I would prefer. And, they also use variable measurements; for example “2-4 jalapeños,” no size (medium? large?) given. So I set about carefully making substitutions. By our food science professor’s calculation, 4 jalapeños, the max allowed in the Small Batch Preserving recipe, would amount to a cup of chopped chilies. So I measured out a cup of chopped chilies. This required eight chilies; four jalapeños, and four Anaheims. I didn’t chop them finely, either. I made no other changes to the recipe.

I prepared the recipe and canned it. There was some left over, not enough to fill a jar, so we ate it that day. It was terrific, with the right amount of heat and a wonderful sweet aftertaste from the orange juice. I thought the vegetables would be mushy from the pre-cooking and processing, but they were perfect.

However, our food science professor had done her job well. I’m now afraid to serve the canned product, lest I murder my family. I emailed our professor once again to ask:

Can you recommend a company in Wisconsin where I can send home-canned product to test for safety of the recipe? Thanks.

She replied:

It would be helpful if I knew a bit more.... Are you canning food for sale and need a recipe approved?

Or are you canning food for your home use?

I emailed back that it was for home use. Her blunt response:

The approved recipes for homes are either in
the Ball Blue book or from the National Center for Home Food Preservation:
www.uga.edu/nchfp/

We don't recommend anything else for home canning.

That’s it. Nothing more. I can’t tell you how angry this made me. It also clarified for me that this was, at least in part, about control, not just food safety. I can understand not being able to give formulas, and the problems with pH testing, although I had to research that myself to find out why. (Turns out the pH of the finished product is affected not just by the acidity of the ingredients, but also the density, which we cannot measure at home. No explanations were forthcoming from the good professor; just rules that we are expected to blindly follow, else someone might die.) But I can’t understand the refusal to recommend a food testing lab to someone who is trying to ensure safe food preservation.

Surfing the net, I learned I was not the only one with this problem. I found a great thread discussing safe salsa recipes for canning and the difficulty of getting someone to test recipes. One guy reported that a lab he contacted directed him to the local public health department, which, in turn, refused to test anything unless someone had already sickened or died! Others had been able to get their local university extensions to test their recipes. (Lucky them – they’re not dependent on U of WI.)

I’ve found a lab locally, but they haven’t replied to my email. I'll pester them by telephone this week, and, inspired by the experiences of others I’ve read online, not stop until I find someone to test my recipe. Meanwhile, I plan to goose-step on into the kitchen and rigidly follow a recipe from Small Batch Preserving when I can pizza sauce this afternoon.

Backyard Herbal

2009-09-24T08:56:00.027-05:00

In my successes post, I wondered whether it would be “cheating” to include herbs because I've had more experience growing them than any other type of plant, and because they are fairly easy to grow (sure bets, in other words). Later I realized I shouldn’t downplay herbs. They are essential to a Backyard Nest Egg due to their multiple contributions: culinary, nutritive, and medicinal.

As everyone knows, herbs can improve the humblest of fare. Today, for example, we’re having meatloaf and potatoes. Ho-hum. But the meatloaf is a Bobby Flay recipe that incorporates lots of finely chopped, sautéed veggies, as well as fresh thyme and parsley. The potatoes are our own homegrown German butterballs, roasted with olive oil and rosemary. Suddenly, our simple menu sounds like something a waiter in one of the better restaurants could wax eloquent about when taking your order.

Rosemary and thyme are among my favorite herbs for cooking. Thyme improves any beef dish and enhances just about any vegetable dish as well. Rosemary is a marvelous addition to many dishes, especially poultry, lamb, and potatoes. I also love rosemary baked into a hearty bread. These woody perennials are easy to grow and dry, and I’ve never had a problem with rabbits going after them!

However, here in Wisconsin, it’s impossible to overwinter rosemary outdoors, whereas thyme will survive as a perennial. If Thanksgiving doesn’t fall too late in November, and we haven’t had extremely cold weather yet, I still have fresh springs of rosemary, sage, and thyme for stuffing the turkey (together with onion and lemon – I bake the bread stuffing separately.) But that’s the absolute latest in the year I can hope for fresh rosemary from the garden.

Rosemary also takes a bit of time to get going in the spring. So my practice now is to plant one rosemary and one thyme seedling in pots in the spring. At the end of the summer, I bring the pots in. They don’t grow much, so I can only snip limited quantities of the fresh herbs over the winter. But in spring, I have a good-sized rosemary plant with an established root system. I plant it in the garden, together with several small purchased rosemary seedlings. The overwintered plant has a head start, so I get more fresh rosemary earlier. At the same time, I plant another small seedling in a pot, to take inside during the following winter, and provide a larger plant for the garden next spring.

I’ve only recently started thinking about the nutritive value of herbs. I was astonished to learn that parsley contains twice the iron of spinach and three times the vitamin C of oranges (by weight)! Parsley is definitely worth growing for those reasons alone. Parsley also enhances the flavor of many dishes, and complements other herbs as well.

Grown from seed, parsley is an herb that teaches patience and faith. Germination is slow, and no matter how I try to manage the seedlings, they are leggy and limp by the time I plant them out. They (and cilantro) look like the weak sisters of the herb garden, and it seems hard to believe you’ll get much out of them. But soon, parsley seedlings take off and produce lush, abundant foliage.

Before supermarkets shipped in out-of-season produce from distant locales, people in northern climates eagerly sought the first greens of spring for their nutritive properties. Chives are an easy-to-grow and versatile source of early greens in spring for the Backyard Nest Egg. Chives can survive the harsh winters of Wisconsin and are the first herb in my garden to send up green shoots in the spring. Chopped fresh chives are a great finish to many types of dishes – including soups, salads, and cooked vegetables.

Finally, as we all know, herbs have long been valued for their medicinal uses. In fact, it’s likely that some herbs, such as rosemary, thyme, and parsley, became popular culinary herbs because of their medicinal properties. Historically and today, rosemary, thyme, and parsley are considered beneficial as digestives and carminatives (a carminative is something that relieves flatulence). Rodale’s Illustrated Encyclopedia of Herbs identifies rosemary as a liver and gall bladder stimulant, and thyme as a liver tonic, while Michael Tierra (The Way of Herbs) describes thyme as an important parasiticide, useful for treating intestinal worms. (Contemporary research indicates that rosemary and parsley also have antioxidant properties.)

One of my goals for my Backyard Nest Egg is to expand my knowledge and use of homegrown herbs for medicinal purposes. I have used some simple preparations for minor complaints for years. For example, I always dry lots of sage for use in treating congestion in the head or chest in winter. Basically, I throw a handful of dried sage in a bowl of just boiled water and take in the steam with a towel over my head. (Rosemary is also a great expectorant and decongestant, but sage is more abundant in my garden and I find a little goes a long way in cooking. So I use the sage for colds and save the rosemary for cooking.) I find both peppermint and parsley tea refreshing and good digestive aids, and parsley to be a useful diuretic.

Other herbs take more time and effort to process. Echinacea is one of my favorite native flowers and I’ve grown it for years, when I lived in Nebraska and here in Wisconsin. But for medicinal purposes, I always use commercially produced preparations. I want to learn how to dig and process the root myself. Next year I plan to add Black Cohosh, another native plant to my garden. Like Echinacea, the root is the part used for medicinal purposes.

But our first experiment with processing root will be horseradish. (An upcoming post will focus exclusively on this herb.) Rick loves horseradish as a condiment and suggested we add it to the garden last year. The root is harvested the second year, so in a few weeks we’ll be digging it up. It got so big last year, we had to move it out of my backdoor herb garden to it's own place of honor in the larger garden. We must have left a piece of root, because as you can see in the photo above, there is a small horseradish still in the herb garden. Medicinally, as anyone who has eaten it knows, horseradish is great for clearing sinus congestion.

As food and medicine, for pleasure and health, the herb garden is obviously essential for any Backyard Nest Egg.

We're Waiting, Girls...

2009-09-15T18:41:00.006-05:00

Today we are officially on egg watch. Our chickens, two Barred Rocks, and two Rhode Island Reds, are 18 weeks old today. Some sources say they start laying at between 18-20 weeks. Other sources I’ve read say 4-5 months, which works out to 21 weeks maximum. So, technically, it could be any time now.

Rick finished building the nest box a week or so ago, complete with a removable tray for easy cleaning. As I wrote in an earlier post about our coop, the original design included plans for a nest box inside the coop, but we decided to build one that hangs on the outside, to increase floor space inside the coop. I asked Rick to have it ready in early September, because I’d read that a few weeks before they start laying, hens start scoping out good places to lay their eggs.

They have actually started a new behavior. In the past, they only ever went into their coop to sleep. Now, I’ve noticed that they occasionally go back in for awhile, individually, sometimes scratching a depression in the pine shavings and sitting in it for a bit. Is this a “nesting behavior” I should be looking for? Or, are they just bored? I have no idea. I’ve read or leafed through many backyard chicken books and articles, but rarely find the kind of detailed information I’m looking for. Once I learn what I’m doing, I may write a book myself, for people like me who need DETAILS; lots and lots of details and concrete examples.

After Rick installed the nest box, I filled it with straw, and Rick placed a couple of old golf balls in the nest. I felt a little silly about the golf balls. The goal with these, according to my reading, is to encourage the birds to lay their eggs in the nest box and not on the floor of the coop, their pen, or other places where they could get damaged or dirty. Whatever works, I guess.

But it’s hard for me to imagine that traditional farmers back in the day put golf balls or plastic eggs filled with sand (another suggestion I read) in nest boxes. Our city chicks have no older hens to learn from, so maybe this little device is useful. But I can’t help wondering if it’s more of a ritual than a necessity. Kind of like when ancient people drew pictures of animals they hoped to bag in a hunt on the walls of caves; we put golf balls in nest boxes hoping for eggs.

So, all the preparations are made, and now, we wait. I think we’ll be waiting at least a few weeks because, as you can see in the photo above, the girls do not look fully mature yet. Amelia, the Barred Rock in the foreground, appears to be the closest to a mature hen. Red, fully developed combs and wattles are an indication that they are about to start laying. So we expect Amelia to produce the first egg.

As an aside, Amelia is the sweetest and friendliest of our chickens and Rick’s favorite. She’s less aggressive than the other girls, so when Rick gives them Japanese beetles he’s collected, he makes sure she gets her share. He named her Amelia because she was the first and best flier of the group. When she was less than two weeks old, she liked to fly up on top of the waterer to perch. She looked adorable there, but we had to shoo her off, so she wouldn’t poop in the water and sicken everyone. We put small, overturned clay pots in the brooder for them to perch on instead, and they loved those.

Another way to determine whether they are ready to lay that I’ve read about is to check the separation distance of the hen’s pelvic bones (near the vent). When they’re ready to start laying, the bones will separate to 2-3 fingers width. We’re not on such intimate terms with our chickens! I suppose maybe we should be, to check them over from time to time and ensure their health. But they have never liked being picked up, so we don’t force the issue.

I know that some people handle their chicks a lot when they’re little, so they’ll be tame and allow petting and holding when they’re older. We only picked ours up when we needed to. They’re not afraid of us; they run up when they see us and like to hang around near us when we’re in their pen. They tolerate very limited petting. They don’t run off afraid, but they do shrug off our touch and move away. My feeling is that if they want to be left alone, we should leave them alone. Checking the separation of the bones near their vents won’t bring eggs any faster. Might as well be patient.

Food News Round-Up: September 12, 2009

2009-09-13T19:20:00.003-05:00

LOCAL (WISCONSIN; MIDWEST)
Biddy Martin: UW invites you to sift, winnow on food this fall
First-year UW-Madison students received copies of this year's choice, "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto." The author, Michael Pollan, is best known for his perspectives on a safe, healthy food supply and for his criticisms of food production methods in the U.S. and around the world. In his book, Pollan explains what he believes to be problems with the "Western diet" and the "nutritionism" or food science that supports it.
This book was chosen because it raises issues of interest to faculty, staff, students and community members from a variety of backgrounds. The issues are of particular importance in Wisconsin, where the economic impact of agriculture is almost $60 billion a year.

GARDENING
A lot meant by an allotment
It is almost 70 years since the nation was encouraged to use every available piece of land to Dig For Victory. It’s now high time the Government repeated that green-fingered campaign in a bid to ensure there’s enough food on our plates, argues AM Leanne Wood.

FARMING
Regenerative Agriculture: The Transition.
In the face of peak oil and in order to curb carbon emissions, methods of farming that depend less on oil and natural gas, respectively to run machinery and to make synthetic fertilizers, must be sought. Such options are to be found within the framework of regenerative agriculture, but the transition from current industrialised agriculture to these alternative strategies will prove testing.

Plans for White House farmers' market move forward
The quiet revolution spreading steadily across the US in the way Americans produce and consume food is about to acquire a powerful endorsement in the form of a farmers' market planned for one of the better-known corners of the capital. It will be sited a block away on the north side of a large white house and will have the backing of its occupier, one Michelle Obama.

Michael Pollan: People Are Finally Talking About Food, and You Can Thank Wendell Berry for That
Certainly these are heady days for people who have been working to reform the way Americans grow food and feed themselves -- the "food movement," as it is now often called. Markets for alternative kinds of food -- local and organic and pastured -- are thriving, farmers' markets are popping up like mushrooms and for the first time in many years the number of farms tallied in the Department of Agriculture's census has gone up rather than down. The new secretary of agriculture has dedicated his department to "sustainability" and holds meetings with the sorts of farmers and activists who not many years ago stood outside the limestone walls of the USDA holding signs of protest and snarling traffic with their tractors.

ENVIRONMENT/HEALTH
Big Food vs. Big Insurance
The American way of eating has become the elephant in the room in the debate over health care. The president has made a few notable allusions to it, and, by planting her vegetable garden on the South Lawn, Michelle Obama has tried to focus our attention on it. Just last month, Mr. Obama talked about putting a farmers’ market in front of the White House, and building new distribution networks to connect local farmers to public schools so that student lunches might offer more fresh produce and fewer Tater Tots. He’s even floated the idea of taxing soda.
But so far, food system reform has not figured in the national conversation about health care reform. And so the government is poised to go on encouraging America’s fast-food diet with its farm policies even as it takes on added responsibilities for covering the medical costs of that diet.

The way we eat is trashing the fragile conditions that make human life possible
Producing and distributing lots and lots of calories, leveraged by fossil fuel and synthetic fertilizers and poisons, may solve certain short-term problems; but the practice also creates long-term ones that won’t be easily solved.

In June, a study emerged showing that so-called inert ingredients in Roundup, Monsanto’s widely used flagship herbicide, can kill human cells even at low levels—“particularly embryonic, placental and umbilical cord cells,” reports Scientific American. This is an herbicide that’s used on virtually all of our nation’s corn and soy fields, covering tens of millions of acres of cropland. (It’s also widely used by landscapers and on home lawns.)

Feeding the future: Saving agricultural biodiversity
(CNN) -- When the chips are down, the world may one day owe a debt of gratitude to a group of potato farmers high up in the mountains of Peru.

Thanks to a new $116 million global fund established this summer, the Quechua Indians are being paid to maintain their diverse collection of rare potatoes and ensure that they will be available to help the world adapt to future climate change.

Lush Land Dries Up, Withering Kenya's Hopes
A devastating drought is sweeping across Kenya, killing livestock, crops and children. It is stirring up tensions in the ramshackle slums where the water taps have run dry, and spawning ethnic conflict in the hinterland as communities fight over the last remaining pieces of fertile grazing land.

The twin hearts of Kenya’s economy, agriculture and tourism, are especially imperiled. The fabled game animals that safari-goers fly thousands of miles to see are keeling over from hunger and the picturesque savanna is now littered with an unusually large number of sun-bleached bones.

FOOD SECURITY

The Ultimate in Eating Local: My Adventures in Urban Foraging
Rabins is another breed, and an older one -- he doesn't grow food, he finds it, and he does so mostly around the city of San Francisco and its neighboring towns and shores. He's also among a growing band of urban foragers who have been sprouting through sidewalk cracks all across the country as the economy tightens belts and the local-foods movement gains popularity. And thanks to Rabins, I got to spend a day seeing what's it's like to start looking at your neighborhood as a potential meal.

Warming turns global poor's staple into poison
SYDNEY: Cassava - the staple of 750 million impoverished people in Africa, Asia and Latin America - is turning more toxic with much smaller yields, thanks to global warming and carbon levels.

Monash University researcher Ros Gleadow and her team tested cassava and sorghum under a series of climate change scenarios to study the effect on plant nutritional quality and yield.

India food prices surging on poor monsoon
New Delhi: Indian food prices surged nearly 15% in the year ended August as a poor monsoon hit crops, but analysts said moderate price pressures elsewhere in the economy meant an interest rate rise was unlikely for now.

The annual change in the overall wholesale price index was negative on 29 August for a 13th week, although a return to inflation looked imminent in September as the effect of last year’s high fuel and commodity prices fade out of calculations.

GEOPOLITICAL/CORPORATE
The Food Wars
Neither the recent global food shortages nor the impending world energy crisis will be unfamiliar to readers, yet the link between the two has only recently been discussed.

Walden Bello, renowned activist, academic and voice of the global South, situates the origins of the current food crisis within the neo-liberal reforms occurring on a global scale, describing the marginalization of the peasantry by global systems of production and distribution that service mainly the world’s middle class and elite.

When Cocaine and Monsanto's Pesticide Collide, the War on Drugs Becomes a Genetically-Modified War on Science
At the intersection of cocaine and Roundup in rural South America, Monsanto and the U.S. government are struggling to keep up appearances. That's becoming more and more difficult as the unanticipated hazards of genetic modification become clearer.

Back in April, Argentinean embryologist Andrés Carrasco gave an interview with a Buenos Aires newspaper describing his recent findings suggesting the chemical glyphosate, a chemical herbicide widely used in agriculture as well as in U.S. anti-narcotic efforts, could cause defects in fetuses in much smaller doses than those to which peasants and farmers in his country were already being exposed. Loud calls for a ban on the substance were issued by Argentinean environmental lawyers, and the country's Ministry of Defense banned the planting of glyphosate-resistant soya crops in its fields:

Cornucopia Blues
When in 2003 famine pushed 14 million Ethiopians to the brink of starvation, it did so despite the fact that Ethiopian farmers had recently reaped a series of unprecedented bumper harvests . . . Drought was the proximate cause of the 2003 famine, but the true culprit, as Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman make clear in Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty, were the policies known as "structural adjustment" that Western governments--under the auspices of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank--have forced on Africa since the 1980s.

Ruth Stout: Queen of Labor-Saving

2009-09-11T08:34:00.018-05:00

As I wrote in a post in July, I’m gradually developing a set a principles for gardening as a nest egg, or an investment in food security. These include things like minimizing purchased inputs, planting what I call “sure bets,” and finding and developing methods for simplifying the work, or labor-savers, so that even into old age, one can continue to garden.

In the seven weeks since I started this blog, I’ve written about four times as much on minimizing purchased inputs and sure bets as I have on labor-saving. But that’s not because labor-saving is less important to me. In fact, labor-saving emerged as the primary issue for me when my health problems came to a crisis point a couple of years ago. Although I have made steady, if slow, improvement since then, I could not continue with this project if I thought that it would be impossible for me to garden five, or even ten years from now, let alone in old age. What kind of a Backyard Nest Egg would I have if I had to abandon gardening in a few years because it was physically impossible for me to do the work?

Labor-saving strategies enable one to build and maintain a Backyard Nest Egg not only in old age, but also when physically limited by pregnancy or ill health, while working a full-time job, or to simply free up time for other activities. (Truthfully, part of the pleasure of a garden for me is just sitting in it, perhaps in a chaise lounge with a good book, drifting off from time to time, luxuriating in the sounds, beauty and warmth of a summer day.)

So when I happened to stumble on the writings of Ruth Stout and her ideas for “no-work gardening” I felt truly empowered to take on my Backyard Nest Egg project. Well into her 80s, Stout produced in her garden all the vegetables she, her husband, and her sister required. Born in 1884, Stout lived to the age of 96 and wrote many articles for Organic Gardening magazine in the 1950s and 1960s, where she expounded on her labor-saving ideas.

Stout’s key strategy for her “no work” method of gardening was to apply a year-round thick mulch of organic material – primarily hay. Why go to all the trouble of building and turning a compost pile, she reasoned, when one could just throw kitchen vegetable scraps directly into the garden, cover them with a layer of leaves, pine needles, straw, hay – whatever combination of these you had to hand – and allow them to decompose where they lay? Stout especially favored “spoiled hay;” that is, hay no longer suitable for animal feed, usually due to mold, and therefore inexpensive. Whenever the mulch became thin, and/or weeds poked through, Stout advised adding a few more armfuls of hay onto the mulch.

One spring, when she grew impatient waiting for someone to till her garden so she could start planting, she found that the layers of decaying mulch had created soft rich earth into which she could directly plant her seeds. Thereafter, she eliminated tilling from the usual list of garden chores. She even skipped digging trenches for crops like potatoes and asparagus. Instead, she recommended laying seed potatoes on top of the previous year’s mulch, covering them with about a foot of loose hay, and “and later simply pull[ing] back the mulch and pick[ing] up the new potatoes.”[1]

Gardeners are usually advised to dig trenches 8 to 10 inches deep to plant asparagus, but Stout turned that received wisdom on its head as well.

Since I long ago lost faith in so-called experts, I bought two dozen asparagus roots a few years ago and decided to try planting them by just laying them on top of the ground (in a bed of peonies) and tossing hay on them. And I have had a fine crop from these roots every season. You see, I had noticed that in a dozen or more places – in the meadow, by the woodshed, and around – asparagus plants are more luxurious than those in my regular asparagus bed (emphasis in original).[2]

What I most appreciate about Stout is her curious, critical mind. She read many articles and books on gardening, and asked advice of many extension agents, always trying to glean some information that would improve her techniques. Yet she also relied on her own observations and critical analysis. In her No Work Garden Book, Stout has a bit of fun deconstructing a pamphlet entitled “Science Versus Witchcraft” the aim of which is to debunk organic gardening and includes sentences such as “Organic matter is neither essential nor necessary for plant growth.” She also discusses a magazine article in which the author insists that “Plowing IS Important.” The article, she says gives her some satisfaction because, she reasons, they wouldn’t be publishing it if there weren’t a trend to give up plowing. “Merchants who sell fertilizers and plows and so on,” she noted, “aren’t in sympathy with my ideas of gardening.”[3]

Stout reports that early on, she also used manure to fertilize her garden, but later found she didn’t need it. She also claimed that after building her soil for a number of years, she no longer needed to rotate her crops or attend to soil pH for blueberries. She wrote:

My plot has become so rich that I can plant very closely, and I don’t even use manure now. The garden is one-eighth its original size and so luxuriant that in the fall we call it the jungle; one of my carrots, sweet and tender, was large enough to serve five people. My sweet Spanish onions average a pound apiece; some weigh a pound and a quarter.[4]

Finally, in addition to eliminating tilling, hoeing, weeding, building and turning a compost pile, Stout’s heavy mulch method also drastically reduced the need for watering. Since her household relied on water from their well, she was forced to use it wisely, especially during droughts. Before the term “grey water” came into existence, she kept a large watering can by her sink, and saved all the water she used to rinse dishes and vegetables, and any other “waste water” that did not have grease or too much soap in it, for watering what she called her “pet;” her flowers. She claimed never to have watered her peppers and tomatoes and always to have produced good crops of these. She added:

Many people have asked me if mulching adequately protects my flowers and vegetables from a severe drought. The answer is yes; through eleven seasons of year-round, over-all mulching, with several serious droughts, the only crop I have lost has been one late planting of corn. Now I believe I could have saved that, too.[5]

Stout’s advice for when drought is expected:

• Plant seeds further apart than usual, water well, and mulch thickly.
• Don’t plant pole beans, but instead plant successive crops of bush beans, after soaking the seeds overnight.
• Avoid mid-season varieties of corn and plant quick maturing varieties instead. Soak the seeds overnight before planting.

Following Stout, we went out to a farm last week-end and bought ten bales of hay. Because I believe in using what you have, and minimizing purchased inputs, I had originally planned to just use the fall leaves that are so abundant around here for mulching the garden and building the soil. In his Book of Compost, Mike McGrath advocates fall leaves as the best dry material for making compost. He points out that leaves are “filled with trace minerals and nutrients the tree’s roots have extracted from deep in the earth, minerals and trace nutrients essential for plant health” (p6, emphasis in original). He adds, “None of your ‘dry brown’ alternatives are anywhere near as rich in trace minerals and other nutrients as leaves” (p8).

So last fall we shredded and bagged every single leaf that fell in our yard; loads and loads of leaves; ultimately ten large paper yard waste bags of them. (Which is more than it sounds, because the leaves were shredded.) These made a wonderful mulch – but ten bags were not enough. I was forced to spread them a bit too thin, and when they decomposed, I had no more to add.

Also, however much I admire Stout, I don’t plan to throw vegetable scraps and other things I use for compost, like egg shells and coffee grounds, directly into the garden. We have enough varmints around here as it is, and I prefer the garden to look attractive. However, last year, when I grew impatient waiting for compost to finish in the Earth Machine composter (I’ve written about the problems with this composter here), I did put partially finished compost around some ailing peppers and they perked up almost immediately. After that, I decided that as soon as I couldn’t recognize a vegetable peeling or eggshell, the compost was done enough to mulch the garden and finish decomposition there. (Now that I have chickens, I compost their manure as well.)

So my idea for next spring is to put partially composted material on the garden, cover it with hay, and when this settles a bit, top with shredded fall leaves. I tried hay mulch in a few places this summer, but decided that shredded leaves are more aesthetically pleasing. This fall, I’m spreading the hay we just bought in all of our beds. I also plan to place stepping stones in the large landscaped area so that we don’t compact the soil. The raised beds are easy to work in without walking in them. But our largest planting area (previously professionally landscaped with perennials and shrubs by the prior owners) is not a square plot, like Ruth Stout’s, with regular space between rows in which to walk. I keep telling Rick (since he does nearly all the heavy digging for me), that soon, SOON, there will be less work. I’m counting on it, Ruth.

References:

[1] The Ruth Stout No-Work Garden Book. Ruth Stout and Richard Clemence. Rodale Press, 1971:p16.
[2] 1971; p13.
[3] 1971; p59.
[4] 1971; p4.
[5] 1971; p32.

****

More articles on Ruth Stout:

Ruth Stout, The No-Dig Dutchess
Ruth Stout, Gardening Gadfly
Ruth Stout's System

Books by Ruth Stout are out-of-print, but you may be able to find used copies or borrow copies from your library. The titles I know of are:

The Ruth Stout No-Work Garden Book, by Ruth Stout and Richard Clemence.
Rodale Press, 1971.

Gardening Without Work for the Aging, the Busy and the Indolent

How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back.

Food News Round-Up: September 5, 2009

2009-09-05T14:22:00.009-05:00

LOCAL (WISCONSIN; MIDWEST)
Officials want to make Madison a fruit gleaner's paradise
Madison is no Big Apple, but it soon could be filled with little ones, along with pears, plums, cherries and - big surprise - nuts.

Spurred by an interest in sustainable, local agriculture and expanding the city's arboreal variety, City officials are working on a plan to plant apple, pear, cherry and other fruit or nut trees at parks, community gardens and other city-owned properties around town.

Love-of-land connection
RICHLAND, Iowa - He quit his job and drove his wife and their four young daughters across country, a 21st-century pioneer lured to these faraway farm fields by the promise of a life-changing deal with an older stranger.

Isaac Phillips always wanted to be a farmer. But when he revealed his plans to some friends and colleagues at the Utah jail where he supervised inmate work crews, they said: a) don't give up a steady job, b) you're making a big mistake, and even c) you're crazy.

CHICKENS
Chicken-keeping finds its place in our front yards
PORTLAND, Ore. — North Williams Avenue is a street with a soundtrack like most any other in the neighborhoods of Portland. There’s the swishing of bikes, the rustling of leaves, the whirring of motors.

But then there’s something else under those familiar notes: a tiny warble of clucks coming from a chicken coop set in a front yard.

Newspapers across the country have been splashing urban and suburban chicken-keeping across their front pages. It’s the latest thing, they said. But in Portland, it’s old hat. For the past few years, chicken keeping has found its place here.

GARDENING
Gardening 101: How do I become a no impact gardener?
Not all gardeners are no impact gardeners. Organic gardeners do their best to leave a positive impact on the environment. There are many ways of working toward leaving no impact. Here are just a few green gardening suggestions. Try to think of your own ways to leave no impact in the garden as well.

FARMING
U.S. farmers warm to community agriculture model

* More than 12,500 U.S. farms trying new model

* Farmers see more secure revenue stream

* Consumers like quality, connection to seasons

As he finished packing corn, tomatoes and blueberries into shopping bags at a Massachusetts farm, software engineer Alex Lian said his new shopping habits had changed his attitude to food.

"As a city person, I've never had this much connection to the seasons and eating things as they're picked," the 32-year-old said as he looked out over fields at Tangerini's Spring Street Farm where his produce had been grown.

$300 a Night? Yes, but Haying’s Free
This is essentially how we talked ourselves into spending a long weekend at Stony Creek Farm in Delaware County, N.Y., a part of the Catskills so rough that most everyone who grew up there describes it as “two stones to every dirt.”

Sleeping and eating on a farm is a common way to vacation in Europe, where the ties to farming are strong and motels are few. It’s rare but not unheard of in the United States. Stony Creek Farm is part of a new way to get hay in your hair. Call it farm stay 2.0.

The owners are often young, recent converts to farming, with few acres and strongly held beliefs: animals should be raised on pasture, vegetables should be grown without chemicals, and America needs to be re-educated about food.

The promise and limits of local food
EATING LOCAL is all the rage. As someone who dropped out to become a community farmer in the 1970s, and still farms, I am delighted. As someone who later dropped back into academia to become an environmental historian, I have my doubts about how much we can grow in New England. Watching some of my best students head down the same path, I feel I owe their parents an explanation.

Farmers warned to get ready
RALEIGH -- Even if global temperatures rise slowly, climate change could slash the yields of some of the world's most important crops almost in half, according to a new study co-authored by an N.C. State University scientist.

The study, recently published online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, looked at three frequently used scenarios for global warming. It found that the average U.S. yields for corn, soybeans and cotton could plummet 30 percent to 46 percent by the end of the century under the slowest warming scenario, and 63 percent to 82 percent under the quickest.

"There are some caveats, but this is a real cause for concern," said Michael Roberts, an assistant professor of agricultural and resource economics at NCSU.

Organic Farmers Seek Healthier Future
The hills of northeastern Maharashtra are normally green and lush during the annual monsoon season. But this year's spots of brown are a sign of a trouble.In this region known as the suicide belt, the combination of poor rains, high production costs for farming, low crop yields and crippling debt can be fatal. Some 16,000 farmers commit suicide every year in India, according to India's National Crime Records Bureau. About a quarter of them are in Vidarbha. In July alone, 36 people died here.

ENVIRONMENT/HEALTH
How to Grow Democracy
"Food democracy" has become the rallying cry of an emerging grassroots movement. It certainly sounds good--but what exactly does it mean? "Eating local," as more and more people strive to do, is part of it. At the most basic level, though, food democracy requires a transformation of the food industry, so that workers and consumers can exercise control over what they produce and eat. As the Small Planet Institute defines it, "Food democracy means the right of all to an essential of life--safe, nutritious food. It also suggests fair access to land to grow food and a fair return for those who labor to produce it.

Food democracy concerns itself with the future as well: It implies economic rules that encourage communities to safeguard the soil, water, and wildlife on which all our lives and futures depend." The vision is compelling, but how can it be made concrete? What are the obstacles to democratizing the food system, and how can they be overcome? For this forum, we asked five leading figures of this country's food movement to reflect on how food democracy can be achieved, here and now. Their responses follow.

My Introduction to ‘Local Food: how to make it happen in your community’
September 17th sees the release of the first in a series of ‘how to’ books published under the imprint of ‘Transition Books’ (due soon, guides to money, working with local government and cities). Entitled ‘Local Food: how to make it happen in your community’ it is the work mainly of Tamzin Pinkerton (who was recently interviewed here at Transition Culture) with bits from me, and it is really quite brilliant. Rather than being an intellectual exercise, it is really about the nitty gritty of setting up local food projects, drawing largely (but by no means exclusively) from the successes and failures of Transition initiatives around the world. It is packed with examples, tips, links, ideas and inspiration for rebuilding food resilience where you live.

Drought Withers Iraqi Farms, Food Supplies
Iraq has one of the largest oil reserves in the world, but it's running out of another valuable commodity: water.

Iraq's ancient name, Mesopotamia, means the land between two rivers: the Tigris and the Euphrates, which flow into Iraq from Turkey and Syria. But water is now so limited for agriculture that Iraq imports 80 percent of the food Iraqis eat.

During the holy month of Ramadan, traditional foods that typically come from Iraqi farms are getting harder to find.

FOOD SECURITY
Four crucial resources that may run out in your lifetime
We're living in lucky times. Living standards - in the Western world, at least - are the highest in history. It's an era of relative peace and plenty that would amaze our ancestors. But it's not going to continue forever; we're already stretching many of our natural resources to their limits, and the world's population will jump from 6.5 billion to around 9 billion over the next 50 years. Get ready for a painful correction - here are four interconnected resources that are headed for a catastrophic squeeze within our lifetime.

US families turn to food stamps as wages drop
The number of working Americans turning to free government food stamps has surged as their hours and wages erode, in a stark sign that the recession is inflicting pain on the employed as well as the newly jobless.

While the increase in take-up is often attributed to the sharp rise in unemployment – which on Friday hit 9.7 per cent – the Financial Times has learnt that some 40 per cent of the families now on food stamps have “earned income”, up from 25 per cent two years ago.

It's time to get serious about food security in Surrey
The problem here is twofold. First, British Columbians cannot grow nearly enough food within our own borders to feed ourselves. Second, the conversion of agricultural land goes hand-in-hand with the expansion of suburban sprawl.

Our vulnerability to food insecurity becomes a problem if we run into peak oil and food becomes extremely expensive to transport over long distances, or if an international crisis sparks the closure of borders, making it difficult to import food.

Study: 1.6 billion face water, food threat in Asia
KATMANDU, Nepal – Effects of climate change including the melting of Himalayan glaciers threaten water and food security for more than 1.6 billion people living in South Asia, according to a study released Wednesday.

India, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and Nepal will be most vulnerable to falling crop yields caused by glacier retreat, floods, droughts and erratic rainfall, said the study financed by the Asian Development Bank.

GEOPOLITICAL/CORPORATE
Big stores counting the cost of ban on GM food
Britain's food giants have privately warned that they are struggling to maintain their decade-long ban on genetic modification and called for the public to be educated about the increasing cost of avoiding GM, The Independent reveals today.

As major producers such as the US and Brazil switch to GM, supermarkets are now paying 10 to 20 per cent more for the dwindling supplies of conventional soya and maize, according to a report by the Food Standards Agency (FSA) and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).

Neighbors and Pests

2009-09-04T10:44:00.017-05:00

She gives with one hand and takes with the other. One day I’m waxing lyrical about the unexpected gifts gardens give; the next I go out and find the late blight that’s been plaguing much of the country this year on my tomatoes. I could have cried. We’ve had plenty of little Juliet tomatoes already, but the cool summer slowed the ripening of the bigger tomatoes. The Amish paste and Beefsteak were just getting going. I canned a small batch of salsa a couple of weeks ago, and have saved up about what I need for a large batch of pizza sauce.

(I’ve learned, by the way, that the Amish paste are far superior to the Viva Italia I had grown in previous years. Large, rich red, meaty, and aromatic, with the additional advantage of being an heirloom cultivar, Amish paste are now my top choice for canning sauces and salsas.)

So we rescued all the tomatoes that were starting to ripen on still healthy vines (at least six or seven pounds) for further ripening indoors, and bagged up everything else. Pounds and pounds of green tomatoes. Meanwhile, our neighbors across the fence reported that they, too, suspected they had late blight on their tomatoes. But, unsure whether it was late blight, and enjoying a beer while they strolled through their garden, they had little inclination to rip out diseased plant material that evening.

“I hope it doesn’t get on my potatoes,” I said, trying to hint, in my usual unsubtle way. Their tomatoes are just a few feet away from my last potato patch, much closer to my spuds than my own tomatoes. They hadn’t heard of blight on potatoes, and stared at me in disbelief when I mentioned that potatoes and tomatoes were both in the solanaceae, or nightshade family. Patiently, my neighbor pointed out that “one is a fruit and one is a vegetable.”

It occurred to me later that one topic I’ve rarely seen covered in the flurry of articles about backyard food production is the complication of near neighbors and their gardening practices. I’ve seen many that focus on chicken-keeping; I can’t recall any that focus on gardening. We’ve been blessed over the years, in the many places we’ve lived, to have had many, many good neighbors. The type of folks who will, unasked, run out with a shovel to help dig my car out of the pile of snow left by the plow at the end of my driveway when I foolishly forget to look before backing out. Who will offer to haul loads of free bark (as my neighbor with the suspected case of blight did), from the nearby city park when Rick’s out-of-town and my hip’s acting up. Who, in many ways, big and small, generously help out, often unasked, whenever we need it.

It was a neighbor, in fact, who got me started on my first garden. Back in 1981, we lived in base housing at McChord Air Force base in Washington state. Our neighbors and friends down the street dug up a section of their back lawn and planted a large vegetable garden. Inspired by them, Mother Earth News magazine, and the “back to the land” movement of the late 1970s, I decided I wanted to start a garden, too.

Rick was opposed because base regulations required submitting a written plan in advance and signing an agreement to replant grass over the plot before we moved. He didn’t want to replant grass, especially if he got orders to another base on short notice. So, naturally, as soon as he went out-of-town on another of his many TDYs (temporary duty at another base), I had our neighbor (coincidentally, also named Rick) come over and rototill up a section of the lawn.

By the time my Rick returned, we’d been ticketed for an unauthorized garden, but he was able to smooth that over with the authorities fairly easily. (I could write a whole post on the troubles I caused that poor man with the military authorities over the years, but I digress. Suffice to say, I’m lucky he’s still with me!)

In that first garden, I grew tomatoes, broccoli, spinach, peas, and some other things I can’t remember. What really stands out for me are the peas. I’d hated peas when I was growing up. Mom had a rule then that we couldn’t have dessert until the vegetables were finished. So around and around the table that bowl of peas would go, each child (eventually, eight of us) taking just a few and hoping that by the time the bowl returned to him or her, the peas would be gone. Of course, those were canned peas. Until I grew my own, I’d never tasted a fresh pea. And they were delicious. The goal was to freeze some to save on grocery bills, but we ate most of them fresh. Huge mounds of them, lightly steamed, with butter and just a little salt. They were a revelation.

The other thing I remember about that garden was the lack of pests. We had no fences around our yards in base housing, and never put one around our vegetable garden. No rabbits feasted on the fruit of my labor, as in later gardens. I don’t even remember any major insect problems.

I didn’t realize how easy I had it until I lived other places and struggled with various pests. Looking back, I can’t help but wonder whether some chemical or other had killed off any pests. Military installations have been (still are?) notorious environmental polluters, dumping all sorts of industrial waste into the ground. McChord AFB, in particular, contaminated public wells adjacent to the base at the time we lived there. Those “organic” vegetables I thought I was growing were probably a lot less healthy than I realized.

Things were different at the first house we owned in Omaha, Nebraska. Insects weren’t too bad, but we did have a few rabbits. In the beginning, this wasn’t much of a problem. We, or our neighbor Jerry’s dogs, could chase them off fairly easily, and we didn’t lose many vegetables or flowers. Then one summer, we were overrun with rabbits. They razed everything I planted to the ground. They were everywhere and they were bold. When I ran at them yelling and waving my arms, instead of scampering off as in the past, they just sat and stared at me.

Jerry, sympathetic to my plight, and with a little time on his hands (he had no garden to defend; he discouraged his wife from planting anything in the yard because he didn’t want anything to “get in the way” of his mowing), was eager to assist. “Want me to get my gun?” he asked helpfully. “I have it handy. Why don’t I go get it now?”

“Uh, no thanks, Jerry,” I replied. “I don’t think I’m ready for that yet.”

Earlier that year, a family with an eight-year-old girl had moved in next door. She and her dad Craig stopped by my garage sale during the summer of the rabbit scourge and I engaged in what I thought was neighborly commiseration about the varmints. “You know,” I said to the father, after detailing my complaints, “Jerry keeps wanting to take his gun to the rabbits, and I’m about ready to let him!”

Craig fixed me with an icy stare. “My daughter loves the rabbits,” he said coldly. “She feeds them every day.” He put his arm around her protectively. “C’mon, honey, let’s go.”

Great. Now I knew why the rabbits had proliferated and I had a rep as a bloodthirsty bunny killer.

A few days later, I was aghast to see my neighbor Murray, who lived behind us and the rabbit-lovers next door, spraying something from a tank on Craig’s woodpile. Murray spent many a summer evening strolling through his beautiful perennial garden spraying some chemical or other on anything that moved.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“That’s where the rabbits live,” he said matter-of-factly. “Will it kill them?” I asked, wondering what the hell he had in that tank. It seemed unlikely that a bug spray would kill rabbits, unless it was a slow death. “I don’t know, but I’m sick of these rabbits!”

We bitched and moaned for awhile before I raised my biggest concern. “Well, I wonder whether that wood will be safe to burn? Whether there will be some kind of toxic fumes from that spray?” Murray didn’t know, and didn’t seem too worried about it.

Eventually, we got the rabbit menace under control by attaching chicken wire to the lower foot or so of the chain link fence that surrounded the yard. Would that pest control could be as easily achieved in Madison, Wisconsin. I’ve said over and over to anyone who will listen (and many who were trying not to) that I thought I was a pretty good gardener until I moved to Wisconsin.

We figured we knew how to deal with the rabbits. Rick put up a picket fence and attached two feet of chicken wire to the bottom. But as we stood admiring his handiwork, we were astonished to see a rabbit leap gracefully over the chicken wire and through the pickets. So he went back and stapled-gunned two more feet of chicken wire to the fence.

But fences will not keep out chipmunks and squirrels. We had squirrels in Nebraska, but none ever came on my deck and dug fresh plantings out of pots as they do here. We start all our container plantings now with domes of chicken wire to protect the seedlings.

Last year was the year of the earwigs in the bed alongside the garage. I’m sure those bugs must exist in Nebraska, too, but, they weren’t a problem for me there. Apparently, they are impervious to insecticidal soap. They devastated my Savoy cabbages and bell peppers until I learned to set out traps made of tuna cans with a little oil in them. We must have emptied hundreds and hundreds earwigs from tuna cans last year.

The worst scourge of all is the Japanese beetles. I never even heard of a Japanese beetle until I moved to Wisconsin. Nothing kills them except heavy duty chemicals, which we are loathe to use. (Where is Murray when I need him???) We tried Neem oil spray, but that just deters some of them for a day or two. Insecticidal soap is useless. Rick spread milky spores on the ground, but that just kills the grubs. The bugs can fly in from miles away. Only neighborhood cooperation can get them under control.

Last night, while talking to the neighbors behind us about late blight on tomatoes and potatoes, we noticed Japanese beetles on their roses – just a few feet from our cherry trees. We engaged in a little friendly finger-pointing about whose shrub they originated from. Maybe they’re right, and the beetles did originate from our trees. And maybe when I’m not looking, they are diligently removing beetles. What I do know is that Rick is the only one who uses milky spores, and the only one I ever see collecting beetles every evening.

Our neighbors, who are generous and decent people, appear to have given up doing anything about their beetles. Usually I see them look at the beetles, sigh, and look away. They’ve told us we’re welcome to come over and shake beetles from their roses to feed our chickens. We’ve got plenty of beetles for our chickens in our own yard, but maybe we should go pick theirs, if only to diminish the numbers in our vicinity.

In a way, I don’t blame them. It’s a never-ending and seemingly impossible task to get Japanese beetles under control. Plus, neighbors on either side of our house have two birch trees each, which are also Japanese beetle magnets. Even if we and the ones behind us attack the beetle problem, we’ll make little headway without our other neighbors, who are wonderful people, but mostly disinterested in gardening.

So, in addition to the challenges of growing sufficient food in small spaces, and coping with local ordinances and homeowner association rules, we urban farmers will also have to learn how to enlist the cooperation of near neighbors, whose gardening practices directly impact our own efforts. Larisa, if you’re reading this, that lone homestead looks mighty tempting at the moment!

On the other hand, if I were a lone homesteader, who would dig my ass out of the snow the next time I need it? And who would I help, to make my life useful? Who would I talk to and laugh with? Maybe I ought to end this ramble, and go out to help my neighbor pick the beetles off her roses after all.

Garden Gifts

2009-09-02T08:07:00.009-05:00

Lately, I’ve been feeling a little blue. In part, it’s because summer is ending, and that warm September I heard we would get does not feel like it will materialize. I do love autumn; in fact, it’s my favorite season. I love the crisp mornings, the leaves turning. Especially beautiful are the trees whose leaves turn shades of yellow, so the sun shining through them as they fall gives the appearance of a gentle shower of gold. However, there is that moment, as the season turns, that I feel a little sadness at the death of summer.

Writing the post about this year’s gardening failures was necessary but also a little disheartening. Wouldn’t you know, the year I decide to write a blog about my grand project, we have an unusually cool summer, even setting a record low high in July. That’s Mother Nature for you; always letting you know who’s boss, whenever you get a little cocky.

But she can also reward you with unexpected gifts that lift your spirits just when you need it. Two summers ago, I lost my job at about the same time that two health issues came to a crisis point; one I knew had been brewing for a long time, the other a surprise. I hadn’t yet started my food production project, but I did have a few favorite perennials I was nursing along. After my surgery, I was unable to work in my garden. I could only limp outside from time to time to survey the ongoing deterioration of it - the insect damage, the dying leaves, the weeds rapidly reclaiming the bed - before retreating in defeat.

The following June, on the anniversary of the day I lost my job, I was working out in the garden and pondering the significance of the day. I weeded around the bleeding heart that then hid the compost bin. It had grown large and was crowding everything around it. I pruned all around the plant, and found underneath the front, a delphinium I thought had died the previous summer. Two large stems were coiled on the ground. The heavy rain had splashed soil all over the leaves, but otherwise it looked in good shape. I drove a couple of stakes into the ground, tied it up, and mulched it. I felt kind of like Charlie Brown, rescuing that sad little Christmas tree.

A few minutes later, while weeding further along the bed, I found my liatris, about eight inches tall, healthy and perfectly formed. It was another plant I thought had been lost. The summer of my surgery, rabbits chomped much of it down, after which the bugs had their fill. Yet here it was the following spring, back healthy and sound; a native plant I’d always wanted to grow.

Since I’m given to seeing meaning and symbolism in just about everything, and gardens especially, I “took heart,” as they say in the old novels. On the surface, it might seem like everything had sickened and died, but the roots were strong and healthy, and the plant regenerated beautifully. It seemed like a good portent for my own life. Be patient. Growing conditions were poor last year, but this year you’ll come back strong and blossom.

Yesterday, as I was still feeling a bit disheartened about this summer’s unsuccessful plantings, I went to take another look at my, so far, virtually fruitless squash. I was amazed to find a perfectly formed scaloppini ready to harvest and another one growing! How I could have missed seeing the now full-grown one before, I do not know. I’ve checked and checked under those leaves for weeks, months even. Further, the lone, tiny spaghetti squash had grown to six inches! I realized I may yet get one full-size squash from that plant.

Another great gift, just when I needed it, among many I have received from various gardens over the years. Garden gifts are the best kind of gifts - unexpected, life-affirming, and joyous.

Food News Round-Up: August 30, 2009

2009-08-30T15:11:00.004-05:00

LOCAL (WISCONSIN; MIDWEST)
Dane County Potato Blight Confirmed
Potato blight was confirmed this week in a Dane County home garden, the third place the disease was found in potatoes in Wisconsin, a state official said Tuesday.

Cases of the fungus-like plant disease were also found on tomatoes in Waukesha, Waupaca and Racine counties, bringing the number of counties experiencing an outbreak to 13.

The Dane County case was found near Oregon in a garden that also had diseased tomatoes. The home is near an organic tomato operation that had been infected, UW-Madison plant pathologist Amanda Gevens said.

The disease, also known as late blight, caused the 19th century Irish potato famine and hasn't been reported in Wisconsin since 2002. The state is cautioning farmers to be on the lookout for the blight and maintain their fungicide spraying programs.

GARDENING
Gardening from the couch: Michael Pollan
Uber food writer Michael Pollan, the New York Times reporter who has written such in-depth and unsettling books about agribusiness and our food chain, was asked in an interview with NPR's Fresh Air what he thought of Michelle Obama's vegetable garden and President Obama's food policies in general.

In this interview with host Dave Davies, Pollan says Obama hasn't done much to take on the toxic health and environment effects of agribusiness, but he expressed surprise at the magnitude of the impact of Michelle Obama's garden.

FARMING
The vegetable gardeners of Havana
With no petrol for tractors, oxen had to plough the land. With no oil-based fertilizers or pesticides, farmers had to turn to natural and organic replacements.

Today, about 300,000 oxen work on farms across the country and there are now more than 200 biological control centres which produce a whole host of biological agents in fungi, bacteria and beneficial insects.

Havana has almost 200 urban allotments - known as organiponicos - providing four million tons of vegetables every year - helping the country to become 90% self-sufficient in fruit and vegetables.

ENVIRONMENT/HEALTH
Debating How Much Weed Killer Is Safe in Your Water Glass
The E.P.A. has not cautioned pregnant women about the potential risks of atrazine so that they can consider using inexpensive home filtration systems. And though the agency is aware of new research suggesting risks, it will not formally review those studies until next year at the earliest. Federal scientists who have worked on atrazine say the agency has largely shifted its focus to other compounds.

Dying on the Vine
A century ago, much of the San Joaquin Valley was an undeveloped dust bowl, its few small farming communities clustered around natural water sources. Today, it is a green expanse of agricultural empires. Most of the water that has irrigated these seemingly endless fields comes from northern California, diverted by an epic system of dams and canals born from New Deal funds. It was one of the most ambitious water systems ever built, and the San Joaquin Valley became, in the words of historian Kevin Starr, "the most productive unnatural environment on Earth."

The valley is home to a $20 billion crop industry; the San Joaquin region alone produces more in farm sales than any other individual state in the country.

U.S. Crop Yields Could Wilt in Heat
Yields of three of the most important crops produced in the United States – corn, soybeans and cotton – are predicted to fall off a cliff if temperatures rise due to climate change.

Mexico water body warns of risk of 'critical' shortage
MEXICO CITY (AFP) – Mexico's water commission warned Monday of the risk of a "critical" water shortage at the start of 2010 and called on state governments to act now to save water.

"El Nino (seasonal warming), climate change and low rainfall could increase drought in the country, and cause a critical situation in the first quarter of 2010," a Conagua statement said.

Farming and some water supplies across the country have already been hard hit by this year's drought.

Driving new changes in Asian irrigation
Without major reforms and innovations in the way water is used in agriculture, many developing countries will face severe food shortages in future, warns a new report Revitalizing Asia’s Irrigation: To Sustainably Meet Tomorrow’s Food Needs. It suggests the shift to a more economically viable approach.

FOOD SECURITY
Lots of Food, but for How Long?
In the city where I live, Vancouver, British Columbia, it has never been so easy to get food, any kind of food. You want a watermelon in January? Walk into the nearest supermarket. Complain about the prices if you must, but North Americans typically pay less than 15 per cent of their income to eat. That's half the percentage of some European nations. In poorer places, food often takes up more than 50 per cent of the family income.

But this glut of cheap food won't last if it's based on a false economy. Industrial agriculture doesn't pay the bills for the subsidized transportation network, to clean up its toxic runoff from fertilizers and chemicals, to bring life back into the topsoil it's stripping away, or to treat people for ill health from a dubious diet of "food products."

India to import food amid drought
India will import food to make up for shortages caused by a drought thought to be affecting 700 million people, the finance minister has said.
...The farm minister, Sharad Pawar, said the government would take action to ensure prices remained stable.

He added: "[The] situation is grim, not just for the crop sowing and the crop health but also for sustaining animal health, providing drinking water, livelihood and food, particularly for the small and marginal farmers and landless labourers."

Extended drought threatens China farmland
The extended drought in China's north and northeast regions now threatens over 8 million hectares of farmland. Heeding requests from the country's drought-fighting authority that more be done to alleviate the situation, the oil and power industries have joined the campaign to bring some relief to parched villagers.

Zhangjiakou city, in Hebei Province, is experiencing its worst drought in half a century.

Over half of the arable land will not produce a harvest this year. Hundreds of thousand of people and livestock face a desperate shortage of drinking water.

River that supports Australia's bread basket replaced with desert and toxic algae
Farmer Mazzareno Bisogni fights back tears as he stands among the remains of trees he planted 35 years ago, victims of a drought hitting "Australia's Mississippi".

Bisogni's orchard lies in the heart of the once-mighty Murray-Darling river system which irrigates Australia's food bowl, the vast southeastern corner responsible for 40 percent of agricultural output.

The eight-year 'big dry', the worst drought in a century, has devastated the region, an area covering 1.06 million square kilometres (410,000 square miles) -- the size of France and Spain combined.

Lack of water this year meant the fruit on Bisogni's apple and pear trees in Victoria state literally cooked on their branches under the furious Australian sun, making them suitable only for jam.

GEOPOLITICAL/CORPORATE
Desperate Food Industry Tries to Tar Michael Pollan and Organic Produce
With growing numbers of food-conscious consumers, big corporations are trying to sully the reputation of alternatives to their style of agriculture.

You may have noticed an uptick this year in news reporting that organic food isn’t really better for you, opinion pieces by conventional farmers saying that they are tired of being demonized by “agri-intellectuals”, and guilt-inducing ads by Monsanto in highbrow publications like the New Yorker touting the company’s ability to feed the world through technology.

Though all of this could be disturbing to those of us committed to sustainable agriculture and food that is fair to eaters, animals, workers and farmers, I’m choosing to see this as a good sign. I think it means we might be winning.

The turning point was when First Lady Michelle Obama planted an organic garden on the White House lawn only to receive a letter from The American CropLife Association telling her that they hoped she recognized the value of conventional agriculture in American life. The letter can be read here. Then, there were false allegations that the garden was contaminated with lead. In the face of all this, the first lady stuck with her commitment to keeping the garden organic.

The U.S. versus Monsanto?
On Aug. 7, Philip Weiser, a newly appointed deputy assistant attorney general in the antitrust division, gave an important speech in St. Louis, which just happens to be where Monsanto is based. The title of the speech: "Toward a Competition Policy Agenda for Agriculture Markets . . ."

I have written before about how Monsanto's growing control of the seed business is ripe for trust-busting treatment. Either by direct ownership or through licensing of its genetically modified traits, Monsanto may dominate as much as 90 percent of the U.S. corn and soybean seed market, to the point that farmers are complaining about the difficulties involved in simply locating non-GMO seed.

A storm brews over food, water & power
But it is not Ukrainian money and know-how which is driving this agricultural revolution. It is foreign governments and companies.

The Libyans are negotiating for land here, as are the Russians and others.

Many governments are looking to secure land overseas as a way to ensure the food supply to their country does not fail.

In this part of Ukraine it is the British, in the form of the company Landkom, who are making moves which are transforming the landscape, investing millions in machinery and infrastructure.

South Asia hit by sugar shortages
Global sugar prices have been pushed up by growing demand in Brazil for sugar to be turned into ethanol for vehicle fuel, and a sharp fall in production in India, the world's largest sugar consumer.

Successes & Failures: Part II

2009-08-28T14:27:00.011-05:00

There are two good reasons for always including “sure bet” cultivars in your Backyard Nest Egg. One, obviously, is to ensure that you actually produce something to eat, even if the weather doesn’t cooperate or the stars don’t align properly that year. The other is the psychological boost you get from successfully producing food for the table.

That’s why I advise people who are starting their first garden to plant at least a few cultivars that are easy to grow. Otherwise, I’m afraid they might give up. There’s nothing like success, or even a partial success, to hook a person into trying again next year. I can’t be the only gardener, who at the end of every summer thinks, next year, this garden will be FANTASTIC. I can’t wait to show it off!

I have a neighbor with a gorgeous garden, all ornamentals, but beautifully laid out and cared for, with a huge koi pond he built himself. It looks like something you’d see at a professional botanical garden. But, according to him, it’s not “finished.” He still has a long list of projects to work on. His wife said she finally grew exasperated, and told him, “It’ll never be done! Let’s just invite people over already!” I relate this as a cautionary tale – it may happen to you, once you start gardening and get a few successes under your belt!

SUCCESSES
Carrots
I planted carrots in a large planter box on the deck. Because I’m still trying to find a cultivar I really like, and they take awhile to grow, I didn’t want to commit too much space to them just yet. My first planting was ruined by squirrels and chipmunks rampaging through the planter box. These varmints are a serious problem around here. We got the rabbits under control by building a fence and staple-gunning chicken wire to it. But the squirrels and chipmunks party on! They appear to especially love digging through soft, freshly turned soil. However, once the plants are established, they usually leave them alone. I covered my second planting with chicken wire, and now have a very healthy crop of carrots that should be ready to harvest soon.

Chiles
In an earlier post, I wrote about my success with chiles, so I won’t continue bragging here, lest I bore my readers. I’ll just note again, that the key, in this cooler-than-usual-summer, was that I grew them in clay pots. I harvested enough for many batches of fresh salsa over the summer, and even canned a small batch last week-end. (Oooops! Guess I couldn’t help myself with the bragging!) It was my first year growing poblanos, and I found them less productive than the Anaheims and jalapeños. The poblanos started strong, but then growth slowed and the size of the peppers declined. My solution for next year is to grow a few additional poblanos, and put them in larger pots.

Eggplant
In my earlier post about chiles, I also reported success with eggplant in a clay pot.
However, as with the poblanos, production and fruit size declined as the summer wore on. These, too, will get a larger pot next year.

Lettuce
I tried Butterking lettuce this year, and it grew beautifully. We had more lettuce than we knew what to do with, even though I planted two groups of seeds two weeks apart. I decided that next year I would grow individual lettuces in small pots. I’ll plant them at different times to spread out the harvest, and plant more varieties of lettuce. Using small pots will also allow me to move them to cooler spots once the weather warms up. The goal here is to delay bolting and extend the lettuce season.

Potatoes
I’ve also written about our potato success in an earlier post. (Isn’t it interesting how many posts about successes manage to get written?) I feel really blessed with the potatoes, given the late blight that has plagued potato crops in many parts of the country this year, including Wisconsin. I grew Red Norlands and German butterballs. I have one more patch of Red Norlands yet to be harvested, and so far, no sign of blight. We were so thrilled with our success in growing potatoes in large pots, we’re going to try growing even more in potato towers next year.

Tomatoes
A few weeks ago, I wrote about our success with the Juliet tomatoes. The Amish paste and Beefsteak tomatoes have finally started ripening. I have many fruits on all these cultivars, but the Beefsteak are nowhere near Beefsteak size. I’m guessing the cool weather was the problem here. Given the cool summer, and the late blight afflicting tomatoes this year, I consider our tomato crop a raging success. I canned a small batch of salsa with our tomatoes last week-end and expect to can at least one more batch, as well as a large batch of pizza sauce.

Herbs
I debated whether to list herbs as a success. They’re fairly easy to grow, and I have more experience growing them than any other type of plant. Even in years when I lived in an apartment, I always grew herbs. So is it cheating to count them as a success? I don’t know. What I can say is that my herb garden is full and lush. I have rosemary, thyme, sage, lemon verbena, oregano, chives, parsley, cilantro, and mint.

WORK IN PROGRESS
Here I include a few words about plants that appear to be doing well, but are too early in their development to be called “successes.”

· Asparagus. I planted my first ever asparagus crop this year. They got off to a slow start, but are looking healthy now.

· Apples. We planted two columnar apple trees this year that are leafing out beautifully and have doubled in size.

· Blueberries. We planted dwarf blueberry bushes in raised beds last year. They started off well, but later looked anemic. Eventually I learned that I needed to correct the pH and add iron. The bushes perked up right away, but I’m going to have my soil tested again. Blueberries require acid soil – it’s a little tricky to get it right when your soil is not naturally acidic. (Hence, the raised beds, to better control soil pH.)

The books recommend removing all the blossoms the first couple of years to promote root and foliar development. There were loads of blossoms on them this year, but I pulled them off, especially because the shrubs didn’t look as healthy as I’d like. However, I must have missed a few blossoms, because we found four ripe berries later. We ate them – they were sweet and delicious! I have high hopes for next year’s crop.

· Raspberries. We planted summer-bearing raspberry canes last year and were rewarded with some fruit this year. Summer-bearing raspberries fruit on the previous year’s canes. Since we just had a few small canes from the initial planting, we got a small crop of berries. This year, lots of healthy new canes developed. With any luck, we’ll have more berries than we know what to do with next summer.

· Strawberries. I planted strawberries last year, and although they were moderately successful, I wasn’t satisfied. The cultivar I planted was second choice – they were out of what I wanted at the garden center – and I planted them in a large planter box. Strawberries are often depicted as a great plant for a container, but my experience last year indicated otherwise. This year, I planted the cultivar I wanted, in a special bed in the ground. They look amazing. If all goes well, we should have a great crop in the spring.

· Sweet potatoes. These require a long growing season, so most cultivars probably cannot be successfully grown in Wisconsin. However, I heard about a cultivar called Porto Rico that is supposed to do well in northern climates. I couldn’t find it locally, so ordered some slips from a seed catalog. When they arrived they were limp, light green, partially brown pieces of plant tissue. I couldn’t believe they’d actually grow, but I planted some in a large container.

Only one survived, and for a long time I felt like I was watering a dead plant. Eventually, improbably, it started to grow leaves. It’s now a lush, beautiful plant, but it got going too late. I doubt there are any sweet potatoes of any significant size in the pot. However, I now have healthy plant material to save for next year. I’ll follow Denckla’s advice in The Gardener’s A-Z guide to Growing Organic Food for harvesting and rooting plant material for the next crop.

Successes & Failures: Part I

2009-08-26T09:49:00.005-05:00

During the last couple of years there has been a proliferation of news articles on gardening for food production. Some focus on producing healthier food locally, but others on the bad economy and the money-saving potential of raising some of your own fruits and vegetables. One news story from last year that stayed with me featured a woman who reported that she spent just $50 on seeds and supplies to start a garden and expected the value of her harvest to far exceed that.

I always wonder how many of those people are still at it a year later. Because the truth is that gardening to produce a substantial return on your investment of money and labor takes time. Time to build up your soil. Time to learn where in the microclimate that is your particular garden to best grow which vegetables and fruits. Time to learn which cultivars are most successful for you – and which you prefer to eat. Time to learn how to deal with the pests that plague your part of the country. Time to figure out the best strategies for succession planting and maximizing production in small spaces.

I planted my first garden in 1981 when I was living in Washington state and have gardened off and on since then. I raised vegetables in my first garden; in some years I just grew flowers and herbs. Some years I lived in an apartment and had only a few pots on the deck or patio. But I always grew something. I began the project of learning to grow a substantial proportion of our fruits and vegetables last year. I realized then that despite all those years of hobby gardening, I still have a lot to learn – including patience – which is the hardest for me to master!

So, as I did last year, it’s time this year to sit down and assess what worked, and what didn’t, what I learned, what different strategies I want to try next year, where I will plant which vegetable, and so on. I’ll do it in two posts, starting with failures, so I can end this exercise on a positive note!

Failures
Squash
I’m chagrined to report that I failed spectacularly with a usually easy-to-grow family of vegetables. I planted buttercup, spaghetti squash, and scaloppini squash and pie pumpkin. I have ONE buttercup squash, ZERO scaloppini, TWO tiny spaghetti squash (of which one got brown spots and had to be removed and laid to rest last week) and just ONE small pie pumpkin. What happened?

To begin with, I only planted one each of these squash. Big mistake – if you only plant one, and it doesn’t produce, you get zip. Another factor contributing to low production is that I squeezed these in where I could. The original plan was to build one or two more raised beds, but building the chicken coop took all our available time, money, and energy. So I tucked these vegetables in where I could. Last year I had more zucchini than I knew what to do with, dozens of perfect yellow crookneck squash, and large, gorgeous pie pumpkins. The pumpkins were so big I got a pie, a batch of muffins, and a bit left over for a small pot of soup from each one!

But last year’s squash were planted in raised beds Rick built that year and that we filled with good quality, purchased garden soil. This year’s scallopini and spaghetti squash were planted in the bed with the poorest soil. It’s next to the garage, and the previous owners had for years covered it with heavy landscape fabric and gravel. It was practically like busting concrete to even turn the soil the first year. Then last year it was heavily infested with earwigs. We got that under control, but it still is the least productive of all our beds. (I’ll write more about what we’re doing to build up the soil in a future post.)

The buttercup squash and pumpkin were also planted in less than ideal soil. The prior owners had a large portion of the backyard professionally landscaped, mostly with ornamental shrubs, but including some perennial flowers. Gradually we’ve been taking most of them out to make room for fruits and vegetables. For years, this area had been heavily mulched with free bark produced by the city from shredded tree branches. In some places it’s difficult to even turn a spade in the soil because of the deep layers of decaying bark. I planted the pumpkin and buttercup squash in some of the most improved parts of this previously bark-mulched area, but clearly this soil still needs some building.

Finally, I think the cool weather also stunted the productivity of these warm-weather vegetables. If I had it to do over, I’d have kept them under hot caps longer. My plan this winter is to build some cold frames using old windows given to us by a neighbor.

Sweet peppers
Like the squash, these were a victim of cool weather and my planting them out too soon. I grew beautiful, sturdy, healthy plants from seeds under grow lights in the house. But I put them out too soon, without protection. (Note to self: Even if it’s after the official last frost date, WAIT until the weather truly warms, OR use a cold frame.) After awhile, they looked sickly, and insects attacked them. At this point, I have two of the original eight left. The banana peppers are really starting to be productive – we’ve had a half dozen of them already and more are developing. We have ONE green pepper near ready to harvest on the other plant.

I’m seriously considering growing them in clay pots next year. I’ve had a lot of success doing that with the chiles. The sweet peppers appear to be more vulnerable to cool weather than even tomatoes.

Beans
Another easy-to-grow vegetable that I have been successful with in the past (good grief, who can’t grow beans???) but managed to bungle this year. My excuse here? During an unusually cool summer, I tried some new (to me) cultivars, that appear to be more tender than the beans I’ve grown in the past.

We had loads and loads of beans last year and ended up freezing at least a dozen bags. However, it seemed that no matter how early we tried picking them, they were always a bit stringy. So this year I tried some Green Snap Tenderpod and some Stringless French Filet. The Snap Tenderpod packet advised planting extra beans because this cultivar has a lower germination rate than other beans. They weren’t kidding! I thought I planted enough to account for this, but apparently not. I got a somewhat better germination rate from the Stringless French Filet.

Another difference is that these beans are bush beans and so require continuous plantings. (The nice thing about pole beans is that you plant them once, train them up a trellis or teepee of poles, and they keep producing). I failed to keep up with the continuous planting.

The beans we did get are wonderful – exactly what I wanted. Slender pods, very tender and delicious. I will plant the Stringless French Filet again next year, but this time, sow plenty of extra seeds, mark the calendar to remember successive plantings, and use cold frames.

Onions
Until last year, I had never planted onions, and assumed they would be easy to grow. But last year’s crop was a dismal failure. This year was somewhat more successful. I managed to actually harvest some onions, but they are just medium to small in size. I had, what is in retrospect, the really bone-headed idea to plant onions around the perimeter of a raised bed. Why I didn’t realize that the tops would constantly get bumped and knocked about when tending the raised bed, I do not know. I think if I just plant them where they aren’t in the way next year, I should finally be successful with this vegetable.

Food News Round-Up: August 22, 2009

2009-08-24T11:53:00.016-05:00

A little late - here are some interesting food news stories from the past week. Especially encouraging - the story in Time magazine about the true cost of cheap food. Critique of CAFOs goes mainstream!

LOCAL (Midwest; Wisconsin)
The Fight Against Factory Farms in Wisconsin
John Peck, only half-joking, suggests Wisconsin's longtime slogan, "America's Dairyland," may need to be updated. The new slogan: "The Land of 10,000 Animal-Waste Lagoons". . .

Peck says Dane County, which leads the state in agricultural production, with more than $70 million in sales annually and about 400 farms and 50,000 cattle, faces the specter of an increasingly corporatized and globally based food system.

The emerging food system is based increasingly on factory farms or "confined animal feeding operations" (CAFOs). These often entail the heavy use of antibiotics to ward off the diseases that proliferate when thousands of animals are penned up in confined spaces.

Critics say the system produces vast lagoons of animal waste and sometimes toxic gases. It displaces small family farms with food produced under industrial conditions. And it relies on legions of low-wage laborers.

In 2003, the state of Wisconsin passed a bill that limited the ability of local communities to oppose large farms. But since then, local fights against CAFO siting or expansion have become considerably larger as family farmers, neighbors of CAFO operations and environmental groups have formed sizable coalitions around the state . . .

Got Pus?
Despite over two decades of farmer, consumer, and student protest, UW-Madison’s Babcock Hall continues to serve rBGH-induced dairy products to those on campus without their knowledge or consent. (See page 16 of the PDF file.)

GARDENING
Why Urban Farming is the Future
The first odd thing about Cam Macdonald's Mt. Pleasant lawn is that it isn't a lawn. It's a farm.

Standing out amid the typical suburban sea of grass patches are his potatoes, carrots, beats, peas, shallots, squash, parsnips and more -- enough to have given food to 70 people by the beginning of July.

The second odd thing is that it isn't even Cam's yard. It belongs to Heidi Gigler and Jug Sidhu, a non-gardening couple who heard about Cam's soul search for right livelihood last year and agreed to let him pursue it by turning their turf into food.

Empty car parks to sprout vegetable plots
A London council is converting its disused spaces into areas for local people to grow produce in an attempt to make its food supply sustainable by 2050.

Hundreds of unused and abandoned spaces in Enfield are to be converted into fruit and vegetable plots in the hope of the area becoming "London's breadbasket". . .

Informal growing spaces around the borough, such as car parks, disused garages and empty spaces around blocks of flats, are to be converted into vegetable plots, while two of its rundown parks will become community orchards. The scheme is part of a borough-wide strategy announced today with the aim of reinvigorating food networks and improving sustainability.

Paris rooftops swarm with bees as urban honey industry takes off
Tourists are not the only species swarming on the Champs Élysées this August. Also enjoying the sunshine are squadrons of bees, part of a fast-multiplying population that is making honey a new Parisian industry.

FARMING
Two Acres of Hope for Recovering Addicts
The farm is run by recovering addicts and alcoholics from New York City, men whose various addictions, and repeated relapses, have left them sickened and homeless. Called Renewal Farm, the patch of land boasts neat rows of vegetables and bright flowers, as well as two greenhouses fashioned out of thick sheets of plastic.

The men’s days are split into two very different parts. They tend the farm, lacing the air with locker-room banter and gentle ribbing. And then they exorcise their worries and voice their hopes at St. Christopher’s Inn, a hilltop rehabilitation center nearby where they sleep.

Bolivians look to ancient farming
Poor farmers in the heart of Bolivia's Amazon are being encouraged to embrace the annual floods - by using a centuries-old irrigation system for their crops.

They are experimenting with a sustainable way of growing food crops that their ancestors used.

It could provide them with better protection against the extremes of climate change, reduce deforestation, improve food security and even promise a better diet.

ENVIRONMENT/HEALTH
Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food
Somewhere in Iowa, a pig is being raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won't bite one another. To prevent him from getting sick in such close quarters, he is dosed with antibiotics. The waste produced by the pig and his thousands of pen mates on the factory farm where they live goes into manure lagoons that blanket neighboring communities with air pollution and a stomach-churning stench. He's fed on American corn that was grown with the help of government subsidies and millions of tons of chemical fertilizer. When the pig is slaughtered, at about 5 months of age, he'll become sausage or bacon that will sell cheap, feeding an American addiction to meat that has contributed to an obesity epidemic currently afflicting more than two-thirds of the population. And when the rains come, the excess fertilizer that coaxed so much corn from the ground will be washed into the Mississippi River and down into the Gulf of Mexico, where it will help kill fish for miles and miles around. That's the state of your bacon — circa 2009.

Pesticides in your peaches: Tribune and USDA studies find pesticides, some in excess of EPA rules, in the fragrant fruit
Preliminary 2008 U.S. Department of Agriculture tests obtained by the Chicago Tribune show that more than 50 pesticide compounds showed up on domestic and imported peaches headed for U.S. stores. Five of the compounds exceeded the limits set by the Environmental Protection Agency, and six of the pesticide compounds present are not approved for use on peaches in the United States.These are the types of findings that have landed peaches on one environmental group's "Dirty Dozen" list -- 12 fruits and vegetables that retain the highest levels of pesticide residues -- and give many consumers pause as they shop grocery aisles. It seems that peaches' delicate constitutions, fuzzy skins and susceptibility to mold and pests cause them to both need and retain pesticides at impressive rates.

The obvious advantage of organic food over conventional
In a recent chat with readers, Washington Post food politics columnist (and general policy writer) Ezra Klein engaged in the following exchange:

Santa Fe, N.M.: I saw a report today on a study finding that organic food isn’t any healthier than conventional food. Is buying organic a waste of money, in your opinion?

Ezra Klein: Honestly? Yes. It’s definitely not healthier, at least not according to any study I’ve seen. There’s some argument that it’s more environmentally friendly. But it’s not something that I’m convinced is worth a premium. I’d rather buy from a local farm that uses some pesticides than a major producers who has gone organic.

Whoa—lots going on there. Let’s stick to the “definitely not healthier” bit for now. (As for the idea that there’s just “some argument” for the environmental benefits of not dousing fields of food with synthetic poisons and greenhouse-gas-spewing fertilizer, I’m not sure what to say.) Well, Ezra, here is a study, released last year by the U.S.-based Organic Center, that comes to a conclusion quite different from the U.K. agency’s findings. It’s called “New Evidence Confirms the Nutritional Superiority of Plant-Based Organic Foods.” The Organic Center recently released a cogent rebuttal to the U.K. findings as well.

FOOD SECURITY
Urban agriculture key to alleviating world hunger
The urban poor have been hit the hardest by the global hunger epidemic, which has been fueled by the ongoing food, economic, financial, and environmental crises.

Getting healthy food into cities in sufficient quantities is an extremely difficult task. For the first time in the history of mankind, over half the world's population lives in cities. Reached in 2007, that portion is projected to increase dramatically in the next few decades. About a third of all city dwellers, about one billion people worldwide, live in slums. The cost of importing food from rural areas is too much for many of the urban poor to bear.

For much of this population, growing food is the only way to survive and make a living. The practice of growing plants and raising livestock in empty lots, in pots in homes and on stairways and rooftops, on community land in parks or near water sources, or on small plots of land owned by families makes up a half or more of the food required in some cities in the developing world, particularly in Africa and Asia.

Drought stalks India
The first reports of drought-related suicides have begun filtering in from the district press. Farmers in the eastern coastal state of Andhra Pradesh are taking their own lives - the toll is said to be 20 farmers over the last 40 days. The state is one amongst many which has so far been forsaken by the South-West monsoon in 2009. Its parched districts have received only 153 mm of rain as against a monsoon normal, till mid-August, of 624 mm. An official with the state agriculture department has called the conditions the worst in 50 years.

GEOPOLITICAL/CORPORATE
Monsanto to Charge as Much as 42% More for New Seeds
Monsanto Co., the world’s largest seed maker, plans to charge as much as 42 percent more for new genetically modified seeds next year than older offerings because they increase farmers’ output.