We had a chicken scare this morning. At dawn, (which was barely dawn because it was so drab grey) a chicken began cackling underneath the bedroom window. Only one lone chicken, cackling in an upset “I’m all alone!” sort of way. It yanked us out of sound sleep, and I lay there for just a moment thinking about it, then realized noone has let them out yet, she shouldn’t be there…

In the world of chickens, this can be a harbinger of disaster. We have a few final details we haven’t finished on the coop, loopholes that a crafty raccoon could manage to navigate looking for a midnight snack. In a chicken armageddon of past years, I lost about 15 chickens in one night of raccoon attack. At that time, it was nearly all of my flock, and I gave the survivors away and gave up chicken raising for a while.

Last night, I was pretty tired. I went to a birth the night before, returned at 3 am, woke at 9 am and was out of the house as quick as possible to go to a building tear-down event. Worked all day pounding and carrying and lifting, and hauling salvaged wood, then finally got home after dark and shut the chickens up quickly for the night without bothering with a flashlight. So this morning, I was certain I had left something open for the raccoons, and the lone chicken under the window was giving the alert call for havoc.

So we leaped out of bed and pulled on overalls and boots and ran out to the coop. Thirty-some sleepy and content chickens eyed us, completely enclosed with no breaches in the armor of the coop. Whew. And of course, the loose chicken was a Delaware. The breed that has proven to be inquisitive lets-see-where-this-dark-passageway-leads curious types. She must have hidden and camped out for the night rather than going into the coop with the others. False alarm! We are thankful for that.

I had to go to A Store today. My vegetable peeler finally gave up the ghost. It is an ancient metal one I got at

Goodnight, sweet prince...

a garage sale or Recycle Reuse or something, years ago. It has been so good, I’ve liked it better than any other peeler ever. But its blade has been going downhill for the last couple years, and finally would no longer cut, but merely drag over vegetable skins. Then I tried to sharpen it, and that finished it for good.

So I went in search of a new vegetable peeler. Out of desperation mostly, with Thanksgiving next week, and apples, pears, rutabegas, and potatoes all cooling their heels and keeping their skins. Keeping my eyes open for another old metal one hasn’t turned up anything; I gave in and got a new one that is mostly made of the p-word. That one word they’ve got for us. Plastic.

I don’t go to the big stores very often. Target and Walmart - once in a blue moon. Literally, about once each in the past year and a half. Meijer every 2 or 3 months maybe, at the most. I just don’t usually need what they have. I prefer to give my dollars to smaller local businesses. Since we grow so much of our own food or get it from nearby individuals, we don’t usually shop for local fruits and vegetables or eggs or meat; we’ve mostly phased out tropical fruits except for treats.

Thus, aside from the beliefs I’ve always held, I’ve grown a sensitivity to the overuse of plastic in stores. It just really bothers me to see it in its wasteful pervasiveness. I tried not to stare at the cart of the person in line in front of me, filled with many plastic layers of bags. Are we nuts? What are we doing? Why are we doing it? I feel the impact of all that unnecessary plastic going into the land, floating in the wind along the side of the highway, washing in the waves on the beach. Plastic, lining our lives, leaching toxins into our cells. Yes, I’m one of those people who believes we should be charged for every plastic bag used in the grocery line.

And then, there’s the plastic directly in contact with our food. I haven’t used canned soup since I was in college. I like making homemade soup. It’s easy and it tastes better. But what’s more… I just have no desire to eat something that was encased at a high temperature in a plastic-lined can. Bisphenol A doesn’t belong in my food or in my body. Here’s an interesting reference to the plastic-in-food debate:

“The FDA insists that bisphenol A (BPA), the chemical found in hard clear plastic and the lining of soda and beer cans is perfectly safe. But its counterpart to the north, Health Canada, has just declared that BPA is hazardous to human health….

” FDA is on the hot seat for its defense of this chemical. The scientist who chairs the expert panel that is analyzing the safety of BPA also heads a research center at the University of Michigan. His organization accepted a $5 million gift from a maker of medical devices who has been outspoken in his views that BPA is “perfectly safe.” Congress is investigating whether there is a conflict of interest.”

Here’s the link for the rest of the article:

http://www.peoplespharmacy.com/archives/editorial/canada_us_disagree_over_plastic_safety.php

And now, I’m off to make a lovely potato-rutabega-leek-celery soup, whose only contact with plastic will have been the new peeler taking off the veggie skins…

Winter is here suddenly. Temperatures haven’t gone above 30’s during the day in a few days, and the ground has a frozen top crust. I had left the hardy vegetables in the ground to keep cool, but the sudden threat of temperatures in the teens in the next few days (and a day when nothing thawed during the day) sent me running to spend my day off work pulling everything remaining that is not under cover.

Several patches of carrots were first. The carrots taste amazing after frosts, and they are so crisp you have to dig carefully, if you bend them slightly, they crack and snap. The harvest was about 6 or 8 pounds of nice carrots. (Edit: P. says I estimate low and it’s 12 pounds or more)

A row of rutabegas had to be pulled, big leaves cut off, dirt dusted off, and packed away. Probably nearly 20 pounds of rutabegas. They are an underrated vegetable. Grown under the right conditions they taste great, and better than a turnip, to me. They are phenomenal cut into french-fry shape and roasted in cast iron in the oven, sprinked with coarse salt, pepper, and a squeeze of lime. And indispensable to pasties and stews. The rutabegas in the stores are waxed - crazy things - not something we’ll be doing here. They will store in cool damp conditions without such treatment, and taste much better for it. I might try sprouting the tops in damp sand indoors for some fresh green chicken food during the winter.

Leeks were fast to harvest. I never seem to have enough of those, and I’ll continue the ongoing quest next year by starting seeds in January. Got about 8 or 10 good leeks. 6 brussels sprouts plants were pulled up by the roots to plant in a bucket of sand to keep better, and 2 more stems were harvested for eating soon.

Parsnips…stay in the ground for now! They are okay with that, and many people believe, taste better for it. I did pull a couple to see what they look like and have as a treat now. If I get to it, I’ll mulch them over a bit to protect them some.

The remaining potatoes took the longest. We grew a lot of potatoes this year. (P. thinks 100 lbs+!) I already had saved a lot of seed, and bought some more of new varieties I wanted to try, and then was gifted with a big pile of sprouting overflow seed potatoes from my sister. Most of them have already been dug, but about 3 5-gallon pails full of potatoes were lined up by the time I finished wrestling with the potato fork and the lost rows. This will be about the third year in a row that I have had no need to buy a potato for anything but planting in the ground as seed. It’s even hard to imagine eating supermarket potatoes, when I see the ridiculous green-tinged things lying around in the light there. The picture shows the newly dug potatoes, and behind those are a few brussels sprouts stems standing up. And behind those are the hoophouse row covers housing the greens and celery that are still in the garden. I pulled back the covers long enough to pick this fabulous salad…

It’s November now, and snowing lightly. I took a few photos with my phone this morning, trying to capture the chickens coming out into their first snow. Well, for the West Flock it truly is their first snow, and they did great, came right out (most of them) and followed me out to where I tossed some scratch grains for them. A few of them huddled under the eaves and just watched, so I threw some grains to them too. The East Flock (our older hens) had seen and foraged in snow last spring, but they were the bigger babies when I opened the door to their coop this morning. They just stood their looking at it, at me, clucking and making their little “I don’t think I like this” clucks. It took a lot of grain tossing before they came out at all, and they were very tentative even then.

But I got no good photos of them in this snow, nothing that showed their emotions.  Just some muddy ground and a dusting of wet snow and a few molty chicken butts (the East Flock is molting and some of them look pretty darn scrawny right now).

So instead, I offer you three photos I took on October 12, before we had resurrected this blog.  It was a fine foggy October morning, and I took these three pictures as I walked over to the East Flock to let them out for the morning.  Hope you enjoy our colors.

Sumac and grass in the fog

Cobweb dangling from the grass

Sun rays through the trees

My coffee is down to the bottom of the cup here on a Saturday morning sitting next to the woodstove, because it’s cold and rainy threatening snowy outside. The chickens went outside as long as I sprinkled some cracked grains for them, but the seem mostly huddly now, eitther under the porch overhang, the densest lilacs or back in the chicken palace (this is the West Flock I’m talking about; I can’t see the East Flock from here).

I took a couple pictures of the new West Flock chicken palace on my iPhone, and here’s the best of them.

Tis a cute thing, about 7′x17′ inside, dirt floor, nesting boxes on one side, food and water in the middle, 8″ beam roosts on the huddly side. The sides are old barn siding, shingled down like lapstrake sides on an old wooden boat. The windows and door are all recycled too. The ladies and gents all like it now, took a couple days to get used to it, but they all head in there to roost ahead of closing time nowadays and nobody tries to roost for the night in the trees or on the fences anymore. Of course, it’s also colder now, so there’s good reason to want to huddle/cuddle.

We have a chicken coop! We finished the essential parts of it just as it started to really snow for the first time.

Previous to this, forty chickens were housed in a “summerhouse” lean-to shack, with 3 open sides. They roamed the property all day, and merely returned to the shack for nighttime roosting. It was serviceable for this in warm weather, but in no way meant for wind and cold or flying precipitation.

posts up

Last week the weather held marvelously, and we worked in shirt sleeves getting the new chicken house up, with 70 degree weather. The weather turned at the end of the week, when we had 3 & 1/3 walls up. The last wall portion took two days, involving the framing for the small chicken door, and two large windows. Those last two days were cold, wet, gloomy, working between bouts of rain and sleet, and trips indoors to shiver with a cup of tea beside the woodstove, then force ourselves back outside again.

Hammering a cold finger is exquisitely painful. Like when your hands are cold and you bump a finger hard against the counter or tabletop, but about fifty times more intense. For a heartbeat, it’s just kindof numb, and you think it won’t be so bad, then suddenly pain takes over in waves. There’s nothing to do but stand there and hold the finger, and yell or swear for a couple minutes. You figure it’ll be black and blue under the fingernail, for how badly it hurts, but a half hour later it’s mostly fine. It’s just the cold accentuating the whack.

framing rafters and walls, under the golden maple leaves

I had been referring to my copy of “Country Women” by Jeanne Tetrault and Sherry Thomas, for some basic building tips. I love how that book is written for women, and un-condescendingly for the inexperienced. As I was building, I felt such an affinity for the things she said about ego, and men and women, and work. About gender roles and building, about how women hold things, while men cut and nail them. It was a kind of therapy for me to have one day by myself, building alone. I grew up in a rather girls-play-with-dolls, boys-play-with-tools sort of family. So when I taught myself to use a power saw all by myself while working on the coop, it was a revelation.

two walls up

It was totally empowering to frame the door and a window, put them in, and put the wall up around it. It was a combination of the basic human delight in knowing you are able to create shelter where there was nothing, plus the dawning of a realization that perhaps I wasn’t as unskilled as I have thought myself to be for so long.

The coop isn’t perfect… it’s a crazy mishmash of odd angles and cobbled together bits. It doesn’t need to be perfect, we discovered. Much of it is reclaimed barn wood from a disintegrating barn. A lot of the siding looked suspect, like it would just fall apart with hammering on it, but with rotten ends trimmed off, most was surprisingly strong and solid, in its delapidation. A couple old cedar boards gave me a hard time with cutting and hammering, and they gave off the most incredible fresh cedar scent, even though they haven’t been part of a living tree for about 120 years. When I looked at the newly cut edges, I could see the hard crystallized sap that looked like a streak of amber running through the wood. No wonder so many of my nails turned on that one.

salvaged door installed, siding and windows going up

A barn along the drive into Ann Arbor.