Regret

Last night N and I went out for dinner with another couple.  Our babysitter showed up 10 minutes early and didn't have to call us once, the dinner was delicious, and afterwards we played a cooperative game at their home, during which I apparently acquitted myself well.  When we came home I actually made the mistake of saying, "Tonight could not have gone more smoothly!" 

And then I went out to close the chicken coop.  For some reason, N decided to come out with me ("I like you!" he said later, when I asked him what had inspired this extremely fortunate decision on his part.)  It was about 9pm, well past dark and much later than I usually close the coop, but I'd been reluctant to shut them all up before we left at 4pm. 

Now, many of you can already imagine what I'm going to write next.  It's not like I didn't know better.  I remember once several years ago, before I wanted chickens, someone telling me "Oh, yeah, we used to have five chickens, but-" and then I interrupted knowingly, "-but there was a hawk, or a racoon, or a dog, or a..."  So yeah, I know better.  When we got outside, we found six chicks huddled in the freezing cold at the far end of the run - very bizarre behavior - and inside the coop we found the rest of the chickens, dead, and a possum, very much alive.

So what did we do?  We killed the possum as quickly as possible, removed the worst part of the mess, and put the remaining chicks back in.  One of them was shaking so badly I was sure we would lose it, either from stress or exposure, but this morning the survivors all seem to be doing okay.  N and I have cancelled our plans for the day and will be building a new, more secure run.  I'm hopeful that killing the possum, building a better run, and being more diligent about closing the coop door will prevent such a tragedy from happening again. 

Regretting the whole thing won't do me, the chickens, or the possum any good at all, but I do anyway.

Finishing Up Some Projects

The other day my community garden friend M asked me where I've been the last two months.  The answer: building a fence!  Thankfully, that very afternoon we finished putting the pickets on this last stretch of fence, and late last week N took most of a day off of work to build the three gates.  Here's what it looks like from the outside:

And from the inside:

We built the fence ourselves, because we are crazy, masochistic, overly picky optimists, and we had no idea how much extra time and suffering it would cause.  The fence is about 250 feet long and encloses our entire backyard.  It is clearly custom-built, with the rails cut into the posts (okay, okay, joined) and many of the pickets cut to length to fit in place with just the right amount of gap beneath them. 

Pros to doing it ourselves:

1. custom features
2. lower cost?
3. no contractors traipsing through our yard and our neighbors' yards
4. met some neighbors
5. hung out with some friends
6. R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Cons to doing it ourselves:

1. hospital bills
2. lost work time
3. too many take-out meals
4. sunburns
5. poison ivy scars (yes! scars!)
6.  visits to the county and city permits offices

 All in all, I'm glad we built it, and I think I'm glad we did it ourselves.  The fence has some unexpected benefits.  It actually makes our yard look a lot bigger.  Also, the ability to access the back 40, the slope behind the back of the yard which I previously had to walk all the way around the block to mow. And the appreciation of some community members who (it turns out) have to drive by the back 40 every day and didn't really appreciate our old see-no-evil attitude of benign neglect.

And of course, there are the expected benefits: letting my kids play in the yard without watching who's watching them, being able to hang up my laundry without the neighbors "people-watching" me, and of course...

These little ladies got to leave my bathtub and see the outside world.  (And now you see why N was willing to take a day off work to get the gates finished!)  I ordered 18 of them and they arrived the day after Columbus Day.  Shortly after I moved them outside I sold 8 to a family in Gaithersburg, and the remaining ten are in the coop/run.  We have quite a variety: Red Stars, Delawares (?), Black Australorps, a Turkens, a Golden Campine, and some other black variety that I can't identify.  I ordered a mixed-breed lot of brown egg-layers.  The Campine is very pretty, but it is also the only one that might be a male, so I'm trying not to get too attached. 

"A" cannot wait to let them out in the yard, but I still a little nervous about that.  For one thing, there are a lot of them and I worry I will spend all afternoon catching them and putting them away.  And what if I lost one?  Also, I've been feeding a stray cat off of our back steps (Manly, who I originally named Mandy but...well, she has testes!) and I worry that if they were loose he might attack one.  I have heard that cats rarely attack full-grown chickens but will sometimes go after young ones.

Morning gardening

I made it out to the garden this morning in time to catch the morning dew on the asparagus in M's plot. Gorgeous!

The tall, white fronds on the right half of the picture are the mature asparagus plants.  Normally they are green.

Hello Again

Once again it has been a long time since my last post.  I actually can't even remember excuses going that far back, only that lately life been rather full of big projects.

There is a post that should be on here, but I can't make my smart phone (clearly we know who is smarter!) give it up.  It was about the sad, sad loss of my chickens to suburban ideals.  Our county forbids the keeping of farm animals like cows, pigs, sheep, and chickens.  Personally, I tend to think that one of those things is not at all like the others, but I recognize that that's a rather unusual perspective.  In August the city animal control officer dropped by and gave us a notice to get rid of the chickens, or else.  After N's original impulse to move and rent our house out to slobs "Just to show 'em!" blew over, we decided to sell our three beautiful, just-started-laying hens.  And build a privacy fence.

The perfect backyard flock, enjoying some clover

Good news about this: I sold the hens for $25 apiece on craigslist and had my pick of buyers.  It turns out there are many people in our area with privacy fences, and no good sources of backyard chicken flocks.  This is more than enough money to...err...not replace our chickens six months later.

Without the old fences our yard feels really open

Bad news about this: the fence has turned out to be one of those really big projects that we just can't seem to get done.  We are totally enclosing the backyard, with a total of more than 200 feet of fence.  For some reason, I thought we could get most of this done in one weekend, with the help of seven good friends and neighbors who came over to help.  After several hours and several inches of rain, we had managed to tear down two of the three existing fences that needed to come out, trim back the weeds growing at the top of the back 40, distribute the fence lumber all over the backyard, dig four good holes and three bad ones, and all get completely filthy in the drizzly rain and resulting mud.

Also, sometime that day or the next, despite our best efforts to keep him away from it, N got a nasty case of poison ivy that eventually became seriously infected.  However, he is finally on the mend and we are really close to finishing the replacements for the two fences we removed.  Once that is done our yard will be at least as private as it was before.  With less and less daylight each day, we are in quite a hurry to tear down the third (and final) chain-link and finish the job.  In the meantime, the kids think our totally non-OSHA approved yard is fantastic!

The boys climbing on the wood piles

 I'll publish photos of the finished fence when it the second side is finished.  It is going to be quite handsome, if I do say so myself.

Drying Sunflower Seeds

Last year I tried growing some sunflowers in my garden.  They did quite well, and about halfway through the year I started thinking maybe I could get some seeds from them too.  They didn't look ready, so I waited patiently.  More patiently, it turns out, than the birds.  One day I showed up and almost every seed had been eaten.  This year I'm trying to pick them a little earlier and let them dry indoors.  Many sources recommended putting paper bags over the flowers after they turn downward, but that requires replacing the bags after each rain, and I don't have time for that.  Or a limitless supply of paper bags.  So here they are in my guest bedroom, probably picked too early.

Top Three Signs

...you didn't pick enough asparagus.

Probably the thing that most often confuses visitors in my garden is the asparagus. It is an unusual crop, in that we eat the shoot, rather than the fruit, or leaves, or tuber/bulb.  Many people have never even seen an asparagus plant with leaves on it. One recent visitor, after asking what kind of plant it was and being answered, looked at the outrageous tangle of ferny branches skeptically and asked, "Where do they come out?"

Asparagus is a perennial that lives for about 30 years.  Starting in the third or fourth year after planting, the gardener waits for the first spears to pop out of the ground in spring, and cuts them off as soon as they are about six inches tall.  After several weeks of cutting, you stop and let the plants grow, forming a bushy, fern-like plant. (It's really kind of pretty in gardens other than mine.). The plant rests the remainder of the season, storing energy for next spring.

So, what about those three signs?
1. Your asparagus is huge.  Way bigger than the lovely patches you see in adjacent gardens.  Taller than your husband and so tangled and widely branched that you have to remove your hat and put a scarf over your hair and teach your child to dial 9-1-1 before you can weed under it.
2. Halfway through cutting and removing the crazy mass of tangled branches, you discover a bird's nest.  Sorry little birdy.
3.  After dragging the branches, backwards and cursing, down the path and out of the garden, you go back to clear out the weeds underneath it and a giant toad hops right across your foot, running for his life as you destroy what used to be his nice shady home.  Sorry little toad.

If these three signs occur in your garden, you can be 100% certain - you should have picked more asparagus last spring.

I'm hoping my little exercise this week will take some vigor out of the plants and make them a little more reasonable.  I'm also hoping that little birdie will find her nest.

A Week of Firsts

N and the boys and I spent the week of the June 23rd with is family in a rental cottage north of Baltimore.  It was a hard-earned vacation, coming on the heels of N's trip to Pennsylvania for a week-long conference.  By the time we came back I was much more relaxed - enough to spontaneously invite over K and family.  And, while showing off features of my chicken coop to K's husband C, guess what I found?

TWO eggs!  I wasn't letting myself expect eggs until July, and I was so distracted in the vacation haze that I didn't realize how close that was.  We've had one egg every day since then.  They're great!  They're perfect!  They're brown!  They're...really small.  My chickens are supposed to lay large eggs, so I'm assuming that they'll get bigger with time.  I still don't know which of the lovely ladies is laying them, but I'm hoping to figure it out this weekend while I'm home and can keep an eye on them.  On weekdays they lay after I've left for the day.

Another first in the garden this week - wheat!  Last fall I planted wheat, peas, and oats as a cover crop in the side yard.  I pulled out the oats when they started to make seed.  (In retrospect this seems foolish, but it is what they tell you to do for green manures.  Pulling it at the seed-forming stage leaves the most nitrogen in your soil.)  The peas winter-killed on their own, and then in the spring, something came up.  I kind of thought it was the oats coming back, but...dun, da-da-dun!  It was wheat, and it started forming heads.  I had planned to plant some zucchini in that side yard, but at the last minute I decided to make room for it at the community garden.  So I just let the wheat keep growing.

I pulled the plants out by the roots, then snipped off the dirty roots and dropped them in the chicken run (the hens like searching through roots for insects).  Then I snipped off the grain heads and spent -oh- about 6 hours removing the grains from the heads.  Traditionally this is done by banging the stalks against the inside of a barrel, or beating them on the floor with bats/clubs, but it was such a small quantity that I thought surely I could just sit in front of the TV and pretend I was shelling peas.  But...the thing is...I don't plant shelling peas anymore for a reason.  If I had it to do again, I would plant a lot more wheat, and buy/build a threshing machine.  And I have to agree with the lady on the YouTube video - it is ridiculous that this grain is the foundation of western civilizaition.  Ridiculous.  From my six hours of labor I got just under one cup of threshed and winnowed wheat.  But, I will say that it is crazy tasty, like tiny little nuts that you would probably eat all the time if they weren't so hard to get at.

There were also a couple more firsts this week, though less exciting.  My new currant bush has ripe (?) berries on it.  Incredibly tart, ripe (?) berries.)  I'll have to see if they get any sweeter before they fall off.  Also, I had the most unusual harvest Wednesday night.  The long, cool, moist spring that we had is resulting in an unusually long spring harvest, coupled with an unexpectedly early summer harvest.  I picked: lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, broccoli, blackberries, snap peas (the last), onions, and kale.  What a strange year 2014 is shaping up to be.