Trying to take care of my little piece of the planet

Patti Gets an ‘Assist’

Moments ago, I took the dogs out for their pre-bed walk. Our newest addition, the roadside stray, Patti, surprised an opossum. Apparently unable to react quickly enough to get up a tree, it ‘played possum’.

A good strategy, having worked for a million years or more.

But that was before I lost four hens in the last ten days. And before the invention of firearms.

Evolution can be a bitch.

In basketball parlance, Patti gets an assist.

Posted on July 2nd, 2008 by jack-of-all-thumbs
Filed under: Meat, Eggs, etc., Nature Diary | 1 Comment »

Garden Update

I think we may be the poster child for the gardening maxim: ‘be careful not to over-fertilize or you’ll get lots of greenery with little fruit’. Or something like that. Because we took over the northwest corner of the garden, formerly occupied by the chickens (see the following post) and then added some crab meal-based fertilizer to the beds.

Now, here’s what that corner looked like earlier this year after I pitched out the chickens, removed some tree roots, and tilled the area.

And here’s what it looks like now, from pretty much the same vantage point.

Those are tomatillos in the foreground, in four-foot cages. I figure some of the inherently ‘lush-growing breeds of heirloom tomatoes in the background are easily seven feet tall. And some of them are cranking out some fruit.

The beans, squash and cucumbers are also coming in pretty well as you can see below. However, despite getting them satellite television, (look closely), the chickens are still laying not as much as we’d like.

And I finally managed to finish the grape arbor. It seems seriously over-built for two puny grapevines. But the stainless steel cables were free (former sailboat rigging) and I figure that you only get one shot at building the part that’s underneath the plant, so……

Posted on July 2nd, 2008 by jack-of-all-thumbs
Filed under: Gardening | 2 Comments »

Gardening “With” Chickens

One of the reasons that we have chickens is to have them fertilize the garden and help eat the harmful bugs (especially their larvae, grubs, etc.). However, given that we’re not even great at training dogs, the concept of training chickens not to destroy plants in the garden or the flowerbeds is beyond us. So, we have to rotate the two ‘crops’ through the same space, but at different times. The plan we’ve arrived at is still a work-in-progress, but I’m pretty happy with the outcome. I think you can get the idea from the drawing and photo below.

Garden Plan

The garden is about seventy feet by forty feet, divided into quarters with a 6′x6′ chicken coop in the middle. There is one main entrance to the garden, and three short stretches of permanent fence (each with a gate). Finally, at any given time, there is usually one temporary fence made of 4-foot chicken wire on T-posts. Right now, temporary fence ‘A’ is up and we’re gardening in everywhere but the bottom left quadrant (marked by dashed lines) which now belongs to the chickens. And although the coop has four ‘chicken doors’ (one on each wall), at the moment three of them are screwed closed and they enter and exit via the one indicated by the dashes.

The point is that we have unlimited access to most of the garden, while the chickens have access to the coop and the main exit (for afternoon free-range forage time) without either interfering with the other. We don’t have to worry about chickens in the bean patch, and we don’t have to dodge them with wheelbarrows of mulch, etc. But, when we’re ready to rotate, we simply change which door of the coop we let them out the next morning. (And twice a year we change the indicated ‘temporary fence’.)

It’s designed such that by using one of the two temporary fences, we can garden (or leave fallow) three-quarters of the space, yet regardless of which quarter the birds are in, they can be allowed in and out for foraging. Needless to say. when we turn them back into a section that we’ve been gardening, they ‘attack’ the newspaper and straw mulched beds and paths looking for bugs, worms, grubs, etc.

Here is this morning’s view from outside the main gate. The chickens are sharing their space with the asparagus, which provides shade.

Like I said, it’s a work-in-progress, but seems to be a keeper.

Posted on July 2nd, 2008 by jack-of-all-thumbs
Filed under: Gardening, Meat, Eggs, etc. | No Comments »

Worse Than I Thought

Last night’s post was my way of venting after fumbling my role as ’steward’ of our little poultry flock. I was (and still am) angry at myself for failing to close up the coop sooner after sunset. Hopefully it’s a lesson that I’ll remember. But last night was actually worse than I realized, and my somewhat fitful sleep would have been even less satisfying had I known that I apparently closed in the predator with the remaining chickens when I removed the two dead Jersey Giants and closed them up at 10:30. Yeah, hard to imagine in a six by six coop with a flashlight and nine scared birds. But this morning I opened the coop to find the remaining Jersey dead and one of the Araucanas and another of the Delawares wounded. An inspection revealed a hole the size of a tennis ball, gnawed at the edge of their pop-out door, which had been secured for the night. Yeah, it was crystal clear that the hole had been gnawed from the inside out.

So, of the six birds I got this spring as replacement layers, I’ve lost four to predators. Other than providing them with food and water, protection is my only responsibility to them.

And I just thought that I sucked as a beekeeper. Fortunately, I missed the parenting bus.

Posted on June 30th, 2008 by jack-of-all-thumbs
Filed under: Meat, Eggs, etc. | 4 Comments »

Win Some, Lose Some

I took two vacation days at the end of last week, so I’ve had four solid days to catch up on things here in the country. The heat slowed me down but I managed to get the last of the peppers mulched, the grape arbor finished, the pole beans and some new perennials planted, and spend a lot of time on maintenance stuff. Using my hundred year-old DR brush mower, I got all the ditches mowed between the fields, waiting for some rain before actually mowing the fields. I finished that about 7:00 this evening and settled in to watch the possibility of the first real rain in a solid month. (We’ve had less than 0.1 inch since late May.) It finally came in about 8:00 and I was just enjoying the sound of the rain, reflecting on the fact that I had a new Araucana chick in the house, hatched from a fertile clutch from a friend’s hens despite my accidentally ‘cooking’ the clutch with an apparently badly tuned incubator. I was also pleased that I had completed the extra strands of electric wire atop the garden fence, in an attempt to thwart a repeat of last weekend’s loss of one of my Buff Orpington hens to a raccoon that scaled the fence while we were away.

Yes, life is good, the rain came down for a couple of hours and the cistern was re-filling! Time for bed, after closing up the coop that I’d opened at 6:00 so the chickens could enjoy a couple of hours in the yard and woods.

Too late. Apparently while I sat on the porch enjoying the rain. An opossum was enjoying two of the three Jersey Giant hens.

I just can’t seem to get all the bases covered.

Posted on June 29th, 2008 by jack-of-all-thumbs
Filed under: Meat, Eggs, etc., Nature Diary, Rainwater Collection | No Comments »

Lucky in So Many Ways

I got home about 11:30 tonight from a visit to mom’s, and a follow-up visit to my brother and sister-in law. Given that we’re four years down the road from the original diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, things could be so much worse. First, the independent/assisted living facility has worked out far beyond my expectations. The staff has been super and their accommodations to mom’s decline have been almost seamless. While it’s too much to expect that someone would be ‘happy’ in such a setting, she is amazingly content under the circumstances. Which leads to item number two, the nature of her decline. Yes, she has lost significant cognitive ability; driving, balancing a checkbook, etc. were dispensed with almost immediately by necessity. Reading, playing solitaire, etc. have followed, and topics from the headlines are generally too complex for her to follow along. More immediately obvious has been the continued loss of short term memory. Tonight we spent ten minutes together solving the final ‘Jumbles’ puzzle in her daily paper. We follow our usual ritual; I have to visualize the cartoon and the anagrams, she has the newspaper before her at the other end of the couch. It works for both of us as we ‘compete’ to solve the puzzle. Tonight after about ten minutes of back and forth discussion, she arrived at the answer that I had settled on, but as is typical, failed to write it down. Following a two minute digression into something else, she re-approached the problem as if brand new and proceeded to struggle for fifteen additional minutes before arriving at the same one word solution. It’s almost hard to imagine, but I see it repeated weekly. The ‘lucky’ part of this has two dimensions. First, she has magically gained a sense of humor regarding her lack of memory. For her first eighty years, my mom could never be mistaken for a patient person, thanks to genes that I inherited completely undiluted. At least that was how I would describe her until recently. In the last year or so, although she does get frustrated, it never builds up and it never seems to last. Magical indeed. Were I to learn how to laugh at my many deficiencies…

Another aspect of her condition that has been surprisingly easy so far, is her retention of enough elements of her past that she still recognizes the key players, can usually manage the names and remember the relationships. She still knows me and unfailingly remembers my wife’s name, even though tonight she asked how long I’d had my mustache, in a tone indicating that it must be new. When pressed, she kept backing up on her guess as to its age, with ‘three years’ her laughingly outside guess at its age. It was tough to figure out how to tell her it was thirty-one years old, but she soon forgot the conversation and any awkwardness. Again, this could be SO much worse, and could become so as early as dawn tomorrow. But so far, I’m feeling that we’re extremely lucky.

Another catch up visit with my brother and sister-in-law, always a pleasure and an essential way to debrief after a mom encounter. As usual, the talk ranged hither and yon, usually because I can’t seem to stop talking, and listen for a change. I did let them give me a brief update on my nieces - lucky there as well.

I got home to a quiet house. My new ‘guard dog’ was asleep on the living room dog bed, the two older labs on their beds in our bedroom with my wife. A quick walk and check on the chicken coop, and they were back down in minutes. At that point, I went in search of food and was rewarded with a pre-prepared plate. Now I’ll update garden progress in the days to come, but lucky indeed is the man who sits down to a delicious and nutritious meal that includes chicken, honey, herbs, beans, squash, tomatillos, onions, and dried peppers and tomatoes, all from his own land. While eating as midnight approached, I thought back to a news article from today and a podcast from last winter. The article from today’s New York Times, points out that Type 2 diabetes has increased in this country by fifteen per cent in two years. That’s right. Two years. Eight million diabetic Americans. Thinking about that as I ate my fresh veggies, I went back to the podcast from the winter, from a radio program entitled ‘A World of Possibilities’ another of the podcasts I subscribe to via iTunes. This particular episode addressed urban areas referred to as ‘food deserts’ - where diabetes flourishes by default. Because in these huge areas of inner cities, there are no grocery stores where fresh fruit and vegetables can be purchased. They simply don’t exist in an area of several square miles. And without personal transportation, the inhabitants of these areas have virtually NO access to decent food day in and out. It’s convenience stores and fast food for breakfast, lunch and dinner, assuming that such meals actually exist.

In my blissful state as a rural land owner , that situation is almost unimaginable. And terrifying.
One thirty and way past time for bed.

Posted on June 25th, 2008 by jack-of-all-thumbs
Filed under: Books/Movies/Podcasts, etc., Family Life, Gardening, Rants and Musings | No Comments »

Emerging from the Real World

After spending a fair amount of time writing posts to this little blog during the winter and early spring, I’ve spent the last three months dealing with the realities of gainful employment and weeds. (Someday I’ll do a post that explains the subtle differences between the two.)

Since the seasonal blast of teaching responsibilities isn’t over yet, (and the grass outside is eighteen inches tall), I’ll still have limited time to post over the next two weeks. But I would like to ease back in. I’ve spent the last fifteen minutes realizing that 3500 spammers have ‘visited’ in my absence, and my sitemap has crashed (again). But more importantly, for whatever reason, real people have stopped by my blog. I know. Probably the same reason they slow down at roadside carnage. But, whatever. I’ll try to get back into the habit.

So, tonight, two items. One from the world of politics. The other, a whirlwind summary of March-June here in the country.

After a weekend away, I took a few minutes to check the political wires and came across this item from Pat Buchanan’s sister, a conservative political commentator, who’s generally easier to take than her brother, but who probably has less credentials. However, although I disagree with much of her post, I think that she has a point. John McCain is in large measure irrelevant. This election is all about how people view having Barack Obama as the next President.

As for life in the country. Well, we’re apparently all done with spring. We drove to the coast on Friday, and it was 104 in the shade at 4:00 when my wife ran into a Subway to grab us a late lunch. This evening on the drive home, the van thermometer read 107 at 7:00. At this rate, late July will be unbearable.

The garden is in; with the snow peas and shaded greens just about played out from the heat, but the gourds, okra and beans are coming along. Most of our efforts however, have gone into about fifty tomato plants and fifty pepper plants, most of which looked pretty good this evening. The grapes and blackberries also look pretty good, heading into their second summer, and this spring’s strawberries have held up through the triple digit temps thanks to lots of mulch and water.

Speaking of water, we completely switched over to rainwater for all our water needs. That followed a couple of months where we used the system for garden water, but were still connected to the well for household water. Last weekend I switched over completely, and as a result, all rain has vanished from the forecast for the foreseeable future. No big deal. I figure we’re good for 100 days without any rain…..but I’d just as soon not test that presumption.

As for the chickens, the four new pullets are almost as tall as the older hens and the young cockerel, Reginald (after all, he is a Speckled Sussex…..) is starting to act the part. We’re also letting a broody Australorp set several fertile eggs from a friend’s hens.

Patti has settled in with the family, having earned points for keeping deer from the flowerbeds, and for treeing possums, a coon and a feral cat that routinely causes headaches. She also behaved nicely on her first out-of-town excursion. I credit this to her sterling pedigree (determined thanks to my wife’s insistence that we submit a blood sample from this roadside acquisition in order to determine her parentage), which I’ll detail in a later post - it’ll take a while….

Pictures to come. Time to quit since I do have two lectures to give tomorrow.

Posted on June 8th, 2008 by jack-of-all-thumbs
Filed under: Gardening, Meat, Eggs, etc., Rainwater Collection, Rants and Musings | 1 Comment »

Getting Back on Track

Apologies for some self-analysis here, but I’m not sure why this little blog got pushed so far onto the back burner in recent weeks. I did enjoy writing posts, and based on the hits it was recording, the readership (or at least the drive-bys) had increased far beyond what I expected when I started in the fall. But the reality of the day job, the frustration of the politics of March and April, and the realization that I really should be doing stuff rather than writing about doing stuff took their toll.

I mean, it’s silly to be rattling on about self-sufficiency, when there’s grass to mow and weeds to pull. But anyway, I’ll try to get back into it, if for no other reason than it’s therapeutic.

This past weekend was chicken processing time, and I did my usual ‘we’ll be done by 1:00 PM’ prediction early on Saturday. Hardly. Try 7:30 PM. Now somewhere I read that the world’s record for plucking a chicken is under five seconds. Five seconds. At five seconds per chicken, we’d have been done in less than one minute instead of nine hours. Yeah, the two of us averaged about forty minutes to kill, pluck and clean a chicken. When you add that to the cost of the chicks, the cost of four hundred pounds of chicken feed and the fifty-plus days of feeding and watering, I hardly qualify as the sharpest knife in the drawer for raising chickens for meat.

Yeah, after last Saturday, when my thumbs were cramping from plucking out pin feathers that had apparently been soldered in place, and I was on my second set of clothes, since the first were covered in blood and chicken poop*, I’d have been hard pressed not to just shoot a five-second chicken plucker.

Anyway, they’re in the freezer now and I’m off to visit mom.

* That would have made a great YouTube segment, an upside down chicken, at my eye-level and completely hidden by the killing cone he was secured in, managed to catapult a load over the top and all over his executioner. His final act probably put him in the poultry hall of fame or something.

Posted on May 14th, 2008 by jack-of-all-thumbs
Filed under: Meat, Eggs, etc. | 4 Comments »

An Interesting Opinion from the Right; Another from the UK

Well, the sun is metaphorically shining again, work is beginning to ease up and I’m hoping to get seriously back into life on the ‘farm’. Tomorrow is chicken processing day and I still need to get into the hive. I’ll try to take some pictures before sunset today.

But I mainly want to pass along an interesting pair of comments. The first is from Charles Krauthammer, certainly one of the more thoughtful columnists on the right, though I rarely agree with him. However this capsule explanation of the Hillary strategy and why it was always a day late and a dollar short is worth the read. (Thanks to Sheria, who passed it to me.) The only part I have a problem with is the last paragraph. It makes the whole piece reminiscent of a detective novel that has great plot twists until the last twenty pages, when the author just appears to run out of creative steam and ends on some really lame premise. I just can’t make myself believe his last paragraph, even though history is replete with politicians doing exactly as he writes.

The other article was one on the BBC website, and the article was nothing special, though many of the comments were on a higher plane than those on your average American political article. In particular, the following comment made me think about how Hillary actually COULD serve the interests of her Party by NOT withdrawing. At least not just yet.

People presume that her quitting is the only way to begin unifying the party. I don’t think thats the case.

If she gave up now there would be a swath of hillary supporters that would have a bitter taste in their mouth that barack and the democratic party would have to tend to.

If she stays in the race, she could use the media attention to prime the democratic base for the general election. Stop going negative on barack. Play up the importance of democrats taking white house. Talk about how there are two great candidates. Frame the discussion on contrasting McCain’s plans with hers and barack’s plans (because they are relatively similar).

Barack will be the nominee and nobody can reach disgruntled Clinton supporters better than her. The best time for her to do that is now, not after she officially loses.

It doesn’t make sense for them to share the same ticket. But it makes lots of sense for both them to be promoting the democratic party right now.

Unfortunately, her comments since Tuesday don’t seem to be taking this tack.

Posted on May 9th, 2008 by jack-of-all-thumbs
Filed under: Rants and Musings | 1 Comment »

Thanks and Apologies

I have enjoyed venting, musing, etc. in this blog and a handful of friends have followed along. Thank you.

Though spring is my favorite time to be reporting on life in the country, it is also my busiest time work-wise by orders of magnitude. At the moment, I’m 200 miles from home at a conference, in the midst of my busiest work of the year. I’m watching the Indiana returns, while missing my dogs, cats, etc. and a quiet life in the country. (Hopefully, no apologies necessary to my wife of almost three decades since she’s asleep in the room nearby.)

I’ll try to be better.

Posted on May 6th, 2008 by jack-of-all-thumbs
Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

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