Meemaw

There are lots of little things I remember about my grandmother, especially when I find myself doing them. Peeling and cutting apples this morning for apple sauce and apple butter, I remembered that she peeled the apples around, starting at the top and working her way down. When the apple was peeled, she used the same small paring knife to cut around the apple from stem to base and back up the other side. Because the knife was too short to go all the way through the apple, breaking it in two required a twisting motion. Then she cut it into quarters, cut out the core and cut smaller pieces over the pot. It really is such a small thing, hardly worth remembering. But I remembered her hands performing these motions as I was cutting the apple in half, around from stem to base and back up, splitting it with a twisting motion. It was a moment that I felt close to my long-dead grandmother who taught me to feel comfortable in the kitchen. But not just in the kitchen. She is the reason I want to be a farmer. When I visited her in summers, she put me to work in the garden; weeding, harvesting, whatever needed to be done. Then we took the harvest to the kitchen, and she showed me what to do with it, either cooking supper for that evening or canning and freezing for the future. We picked blackberries from a patch in a cow pasture with June bugs flying all around it. Then we carried our buckets of berries to the kitchen and made pies, jam and jelly. Every year around Thanksgiving my grandfather killed a few pigs, and my family was usually there to help. My brother and I were there for the killing and then helped as we could with the butchering. It was a family farm. Everyone did what they could. When cuts of meat started going to the kitchen I went with them. We canned chunks of pork in canning jars and froze larger cuts of meat wrapped in butcher paper. The most fascinating part of the process to me, though, was watching my grandfather cure the hams. In a tiny, old house that used to be his home when he and my grandmother first married, he laid out boards on saw horses to make tables. Each ham was laid out on the boards with some space between them. He poured seasoned salt in big piles on each ham and then turned them, carefully rubbing the salt into every part of the ham. When he was done, each ham was hung from a board above his head by a rope and left just like that for months at a time. It was winter, so the little house would have been cold enough, I guess. But I didn’t understand at the time that it was the seasoned salt that preserved the meat and gave it the taste and textured that I loved. The thing I have to remind myself is that, as much as I would like to remember otherwise, my grandparents’ farm was not self-sufficient. My grandfather always had a full-time job. Before I was around, he worked for the Tennessee Valley Authority building dams. After I came along he was working as a machinist in a zinc mine, and every day he got up early to do farm chores before he left, and came home from work to do more farm chores before supper. My grandmother worked hard at home all day to keep them fed and clothed, and yes, as difficult as that life was, it’s all I’ve ever wanted for myself.

Yesterday Joan and I went to a farming workshop at a local farm. We each got to milk a goat, and it was easier than I thought it would be. We both caught on right away. The had two Alpines and an Oberhasli. There was also an African Pygmy kid that had been temporarily separated from it's mother. Of course I had to pick it up. It was adorable. We got to taste goat milk, something neither of us had gotten to do yet. Goat's milk cheese, yes, and even kefir, but not just straight up milk. It tasted fine, and we came home with a half gallon. Last night I made vanilla/cinnamon goat milk ice cream. Yum! This morning I'm having goat milk in my coffee and on my cereal. Bring on the goats! I'm ready!

I count to five, final installment

This is the final installment of the beginning of my chicken story. I wrote this a few months ago when it was fresher in my mind. Now I'm just polishing it up to share with you. We begin where installment four left off. It is the story of how chickens came to live inside my house.

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The New Hampshire Red was the tallest of the three new girls. She was actually tall enough that the runt would snuggle under her for warmth, or maybe just security. She would snuggle under a wing to where you could see her beak poking out from under feathers or all the way under so that all you could see was one chicken and four legs. We posted a picture of our “four-legged chicken” on Facebook that was so convincing one friend actually asked me if we really had a four-legged chicken. We toyed with names particularly for the runt. Being small and cute, she naturally attracted us all to her. But I insisted her name was still “don’t-get-attached-she-may-not-make-it” for my own sake more than anyone else’s.

Then we had what might be the coldest patch of December weather I have experienced in Georgia along with an unusual amount of snow. Temperatures dropped to well below freezing at night and stayed around freezing or just above during the day. After a couple of days I was checking on the chickens in the morning before leaving for work and heard what sounded like a sneeze from one of the Reds. I decided to separate the Reds from the others, leaving them in the small run while I put the other six back in the coop. I was on my way to work, so I called Jan to let her know what was going on and ask her to keep an eye out. That night the Reds came back inside to the porch. We worked on making the porch more wind resistant. I didn’t want the chickens to have the shock of going from cold to warm and back by putting them in the house, but I thought they needed to be as warm as I could make them outside. I was going into the busiest part of my year, working in retail at Christmas, so Joan and Jan took on a large part of the chicken care, Joan doing what she could to keep the new girls as comfortable as possible in the cold weather. No surprise to anyone, the sneezing spread to the runt.

The weather continued to stay unusually cold. The red runt was the first to die. It seemed like she got separated from the other two on the porch and just got too cold. Joan found her while I was at work. The next day the Rhode Island Red made a huge racket on the porch that brought Joan out to see what was wrong. She flapped around, squawking and then just dropped over dead. I was beginning to feel sorry for my wife being the one to have to deal with dead birds so frequently. We finally brought the tall New Hampshire Red in the house. We put her in the front bathroom and put newspaper on the floor. She started roosting on a towel rack next to the door. It was a little unnerving the first couple of times we walked into the bathroom to check on her and found her at eye level just inside the door.

Then we started noticing eye problems in a couple of the bantams. Two of them each had one foamy eye that was staying closed most of the time. One morning Joan found Esmeralda dead in the hen house, and I decided I was not going to lose any more chickens. I brought everyone in the house. We have a small hallway to the front bathroom that can be completely closed off. We put down more newspapers and settled the bantams into the hall and kept the tall Red in the bathroom. One of my co-workers told me I was coming dangerously close to being the “crazy chicken lady”. I suspect that moving the chickens into the house proved I was already the crazy chicken lady in some people’s eyes, but I didn’t think I had a choice at that point if I wanted any chickens to survive. Of course the day I decided to open the door between my study and the hall where the bantams were living, just so they could keep me company, probably put me over the line to crazy.

On a Saturday morning, before I had to be at work at noon, Joan and I made an early run to the feed store for antibiotics. We got instructions and advice from the very nice men who work there and went home to start medicating our flock back to health. For a couple of days we kept the door to the bathroom closed to keep them all separate. As this became a pain in the butt I finally decided to open the door and let all five have the run of both rooms. At first the bantams picked on the red girl, but they all learned to tolerate each other. Before long the surviving chickens all moved back out to the coop. A short break in the extremely cold weather combined with an improvement in the chickens’ health made me feel okay about getting us all back to normal. The tall redhead had stopped sneezing and the two bantams eyes were no longer foamy, though we weren’t sure yet whether they would be partially blind because the eye on each continued to be closed most of the time.

The chickens all seemed happy to be back outside, even when, a week or two later, the temperature plummeted again, and we got more snow early in January. I refused to bring the chickens back in the house. They were all healthy now and shouldn’t have any trouble surviving the weather. They all made it through just fine. February’s weather improved, and we even had some nice days that we were able to sit outside in the afternoon on our days off and watch the chickens roam the yard. We were able to allow most of the dogs in the yard with the chickens.

We finally named the tall redhead. My wife was getting into roller derby and wanted a roller derby name for her. We had also considered names of famous redheads. Finally I decided on Lucille Tall. Mostly we just call her Lucy. Once again, I count to five: four surviving healthy bantam Easter Eggers and one New Hampshire Red. We started looking forward to eggs.

I count to five, installment four

I started this blog to record my first year as a backyard chicken farmer. I've been alternating between periodic installments from an essay I called "I count to five," that records the earliest months, and more current entries written as I go. It's been a while since I've shared an installment of the essay, possibly because the upcoming part is the hardest to recall. I almost feel like I should apologize to Joan, Jan and Colleen for including the next piece because it will be hard for all of us to remember. But it was a significant part of our first few months and it's behind us now. So here is installment four of "I count to five, four bantam Easter Egger chicks and a New Hampshire Red."
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The smallest and prettiest of our collective dogs is also the craziest and the most dangerous. She is the quickest to bite and the one we have to warn people about. She has bitten me two or three times even though she has lived next door to me for most of her young life. She will bark at me furiously when I come into the yard until her mom tells her to stop, and then, when I sit down, she will jump in my lap wanting to be loved. She was also the most aggressively fascinated with the chickens to the point that we wouldn’t let her out in the yard if the chicks were in the garden. One morning in mid-November, I was getting dressed for my 12 to 8 shift at work. Joan was already gone. I heard Jan yelling frantically “get out of there.” I ran out in the back yard in jeans and a bra, barefoot to see what was happening. The small, beautiful dog had found a way through the fence into the back forty. Colleen got her back in the house while Jan and I began counting. One bantam was missing. We searched the tree branches and the grass until Jan found Xena in the far corner of the chicken run already dead. The chick who had battled a raccoon and recovered from stitches to still be top chicken had not been able to escape this small dog.

We all wanted to cry, but first in all of our minds was what Joan’s reaction would be. This was her favorite chick, the one who’s life she had saved, and her least favorite dog. Jan buried the bird outside the fence where the dogs couldn’t dig it up, and I went to work. I did Joan the favor she had done me and decided to wait to tell her. I planned to leave work early so I could get home before Joan did and before she noticed a chicken missing. We often keep in touch with text messages during the day, with snippets of news or comments about our day, so it wasn’t really unusual that I checked in with her periodically to make sure I knew when she was leaving work. When she let me know she was leaving early I had to call her to tell her the news because I knew I wouldn’t beat her home.

When I got home we had a drink on the front porch. I want to say we sat quietly feeling our first chicken loss. But in reality we talked about the vengeful things Joan wanted to do to the little dog who had killed her favorite chicken. I let her talk, getting her anger out. We all knew that she would be angry for a while, and we all conspired to keep the dog away from her and avoid fanning the flames. Joan distracted herself that weekend by reinforcing the fence around the back forty.

In Georgia we have deceptively warm winter days into November and December. Most winters the weather doesn’t get brutal until late January or February. My good friend Andrea, who also has chickens, had been looking for a new one. She’s kind of a collector of breeds. One breed she didn’t have yet but wanted was a Barred Rock. She found a chicken farmer less than an hour away who had Barred Rock pullets and was considering getting one. Her talk of more chickens got me wanting more. Well, really encouraged a desire I already had. I wanted to get a couple of full size chickens to go with the Bantams. While the Bantams were still young seemed to be the best time to add to the flock.

On Sunday morning I sat down with craig’s list and looked up chickens for sale. I found the farmer Andrea had told me about and a couple more. I called a couple of them and picked out a place that was selling Plymouth Barred Rocks, New Hampshire Reds and Rhode Island Reds. I looked up breeds and decided I wanted Reds. I sent Jan a text to ask her if she wanted to go chicken shopping and got a positive response. It was a beautiful day for a drive in the country. I sent my friend a text to ask if she wanted me to pick up a Barred Rock for her and received a resounding yes. Jan and I dug out a medium-size dog carrier, put a towel in it and headed for Paulding County, about 45 minutes away.

As usual, driving through the country made me wish for a small farm of my own. We followed the directions Jan had gotten on-line and found the house. A man in about his early forties came out to meet us and walked us around behind the house where we saw the biggest chicken coop I had yet experienced in person. My only experience so far had been with small, backyard chicken owners. Even though this man kept his chickens in his back yard, his yard was much larger than yards in the city and he had too many chickens for me to count, all running free around a coop the size of a small warehouse, or so it seemed. I was overwhelmed. How would I pick out three chickens from this crowd.

We talked for a bit about the chickens and how much we all enjoyed them. He offered to help us pick out some good strong, healthy chickens. The chickens he had were adult hens and 3 month old pullets, the same age as our bantams. I saw a couple that were smaller and asked about them. They were runts, probably wouldn’t survive, he explained. I was naturally attracted to small and cute, so I picked up one of the runts and held it while we talked. It became apparent pretty quickly that I was going to want to keep this one. He offered to throw in the runt for free because he thought it would have a better chance of survival in my small flock than in his much larger one. We picked out a New Hampshire and a Rhode Island Red and a Barred Rock, paid the man and left. The chickens settled in quickly in the dog carrier and rode home quietly, making occasional little noises that we had already come to know and love.

At home we put the dog carrier down in the vegetable garden, now just a patch of cleared dirt but with a small fence around it. We thought that might be a good way to introduce these new chickens to our existing flock. We let our girls out of the coop and they wandered the yard paying little attention to the new girls. We thought maybe this could be easy! With glasses of wine in hand, we sat in the yard with the chickens until it got close to sundown. The bantams and Esmeralda started heading for the coop, and we loaded the new girls back in the dog carrier and took them to the screen porch where we had set up a temporary home for them. I decided right away that I was not going to give any of the new girls names right away, especially the runt just in case she didn’t survive.

The next day I loaded up the Barred Rock back in the dog carrier for the pass-off to Andrea at work. As luck would have it, her shift was ending as mine began. I started my shift excited about owning three more chickens. My flock had grown from five to eight.

During the days we carried the Reds, as I was calling them, out to the yard to join Esmeralda and the bantams free-ranging. At night we hauled them back to the porch. After a few days everyone seemed to be getting along pretty well, so we held our breath and let them all spend the night in the coop. The next morning we still had eight chickens and, except for the normal establishment of pecking order, everyone seemed to be doing fine. I had been concerned that the full-size chickens might bully the bantams, but as it turned out, the opposite happened. The bantams were the original flock on site and they were clearly in charge. They made sure the new girls knew this, bigger or not. The bigger chickens accepted the seniority of the bantams without fighting back when one of the smaller girls pecked at them or chased them. It was funny to watch the small chickens chasing the bigger ones around, especially since no one was getting hurt. Esmeralda just lumbered around oblivious and content to stuff herself. Massaging her crop to keep her food flowing through had become a regular periodic part of her maintenance.

new babies

Four weeks ago I went to the feed store to get chicken feed and came home with two new chicks, Golden Laced Wyandottes. On the way home I realized I had not asked if they were sexed. I had to assume they weren’t, so there was a decent chance that at least one of them would be a cockerel. Oh well. We would deal with that when we started hearing crowing.

Two weeks ago the chicks I ordered from mypetchicken.com arrived at the post office, and I drove up to get them. Instead of the three I ordered (two Speckled Sussex and one Barred Rock) my little box contained four babies – two Speckleds and two Barred Rocks. Bonus! These were sexed (I paid extra) and had a 90% chance of being all females. The Goldies went into a larger plastic tub and the four new babies went into the small plastic tub.

As the Goldies got bigger we’ve been taking them out to the garden when we can so they can have a little more room. I thought they would want to practice flying since that’s what they seemed to be trying to do in their big box. But once they came in contact with ground they started scratching and pecking and stayed mostly focused on that. They did fly a little to get on top of the dog carrier we took them out in, but mostly they scratched and seemed to enjoy every minute,and as usual, Dax enjoyed watching them.

When the Goldies got to the point that I felt sorry for them in the box (they were just too big for it), we moved them to the porch. Since we wanted them to bond with the new ones, we took the babies, in the larger tub, out to the screened porch, too. Immediately the Goldies took a strong interest in the babies. First they jumped on top of the wire covering the tub and just looked down at them. Joan put strips of wood across it so they would have something to stand on besides wire. For a while they went from standing on top of the box to roosting on a plant stand next to it, occasionally jumping down to explore the porch and eat and drink.

Finally we decided to put them together. I put one of the Goldies inside the tub with the babies, and she showed no signs of wanting to peck at them so I added the other one. (We have high hopes that they are female at this point.) They ate and drank with the babies, and all six seemed happy to be together. Yesterday I took the babies out of the tub, put some straw in a corner of the porch, and let them all live together. Last night was a little chilly, and all six huddled in a wad to stay warm and sleep. This morning they were up and exploring the straw. A couple of the babies have wandered out onto the rest of the porch, but for the most part, they all six stay on the straw in a small area.

One of the babies seems to be still and sleep more than they others. I’m a little concerned that she may not make it. But so far they seem to have combined to be one small, happy flock together.

I count to five, third installment

As the chicks got bigger they needed more space than what they had in the coop, but we couldn’t always let them out in the yard. By now we’d given up on keeping them in the garden and let them have the run of the yard when we could. Jan decided to build a chicken run, we call it the back forty, behind the coop. It is bordered on two sides by privacy fence and two sides are palate planks and chicken wire. The area has lots of tree cover so we don’t worry about hawks when they are out in the back forty. We kept a closer eye on them when they are in the yard until we realized they have pretty good instincts. When there’s a hawk nearby we’ve seen them stand completely still so the hawk won’t see them. Sometimes they head for the nearest stand of trees or into the safety of the coop. We used to enjoy watching the hawks fly over the neighborhood. Now it makes us leery.

I decided to take a few days off for myself before the warm weather ended and rented a cottage at the beach. Dax, my dog, and I took off for a few days of quiet. The last day of my trip Dax and I were walking on a peaceful island road when my cell phone rang for the first time in days. Joan and I had exchanged lots of text messages, but no phone calls. The first thing Joan said was “don’t worry, everybody’s okay.” I said “okay, what happened?”

She told me that one of the bantams had been attacked by a raccoon that had gotten inside the coop. It happened the first day I was gone, but she didn’t want to spoil my trip by telling me right away. It was a breezy, warm evening and Jan had her windows open. She heard the chickens start up a loud racket and ran out to the coop. When she opened the door the girls rushed out in all directions and the raccoon took off. Her dogs had followed her out the door so she and Colleen had to get them back in the house quickly to let the chickens settle down. When the dust settled, Jan found Xena on the floor of the coop with a gash in her side. She sent Colleen to get Joan and a flashlight. Jan and Joan took Xena into our kitchen/surgical chamber. Joan used our surgical experience to clean the wound and stitch up the six week old chick. She brought the wounded bird into the house to keep her on the screened porch, which we were now thinking of as the chicken infirmary.

I wasn’t there, but Joan tells me that, sitting in her chair watching TV, she could hear Xena “throwing herself” against the porch door because she didn’t want to be alone. I know my wife, so I know that, whatever Xena might have been doing, my wife was worried about her and wanted her close. So Joan brought the chick inside and held the bird in her lap for a while. That night Xena slept in a cat carrier on the bed with Joan and Tucker, the dog who stayed home. It is becoming increasingly obvious that none of these chickens are farm animals. They are all pets.

When I got home Xena was back in the coop hopping around as if she’d always had only one leg. The other leg was there, but the raccoon had gashed her across the belly and apparently injured a muscle connected to her leg. That weekend stronger security measures were taken in the coop construction. Xena recovered well and hopped around, keeping up with the others easily, and making it clear that she was still at the top of the pecking order. We’ve never clipped their wings and the bantams all fly very well. We’ve worried about them flying over the fence, and indeed, one of them has once, but we haven’t lost any that way yet. She hopped around with the others and after a couple of weeks her leg was starting to look better. I saw it move very slightly as if she were trying to scratch the ground with it. I was beginning to hope she might be able to use it again.

Egg detective

A a couple of weeks ago we stopped getting the regular 3 to 4 a day we'd been pulling out of the nest box. At first I thought, the girls are still young so they may just be laying sporadically. But when this went on for a couple of days, with only one or two eggs in the nest a day, I decided to start looking around to see if they were laying somewhere else. We let them out of their coop and run area almost every day to roam our two yards freely, so they have a lot of options for hiding a nest. I walked around the yards looking in corners and behind grassy areas and finally found a nest well-hidden behind a small stand of monkey grass next to a privacy fence with seven eggs in it.

The next day we got three eggs in the nest box and one in the hiding place. Then after a couple of days we were down to just two eggs a day in the nest box and none in the hidden nest by the fence. I made a cursory search around the yards in the areas we know they spend time and found nothing. Today I got serious and made an intensive search and found this:

I'm thinking, based on the count of eggs and days, that there may be a couple of eggs out there I haven't found yet, but I'm almost looking forward to the continued search. It's like Easter!