Farm Lesson #27: Never Underestimate A Chicken's Curiousity

Broccoli seedling doing well in one of our raised beds.

Unfortunately, the one thing we most desperately need these days is the one thing you can't grow on a farm: time.  I was already behind in the vegetable garden when our free range chickens discovered the tender young lettuce and broccoli seedlings. To preserve the plants we kept the chickens locked in their run this past week while I hustled together a 250 foot permitter fence around our kitchen garden.

Normally we only confine the chickens to the run once a week or so when we know that no one will be home all day to watch them, but it was preferable to loosing all our veggies.
It was my fault for assuming the chickens would have enough space to roam that they wouldn't venture all the way to the other side of our property where the garden is located. So all the time I could have been using to get our peas, cabbage, and rhubarb in the ground was spent on the fence. Not to mention the tidy sum of cash required for all those posts and that much chicken wire.

At least while I was throwing a fence together, Bethany was hard at work planting the 130 trees we received from the Missouri Department of Conservation.  We are in desperate need of a wind break on the hill where our house sits. I think Bethany is getting tired of picking up toppled rocking chairs on the porch.  Bethany also planted a heavy dose of native fruiting trees like choke cherry and service berry around the chicken coop to supplement their food in the summer.

Now that the garden fence is finished I hope to catch up on planting, but there's always things on and off the farm that require our attention. We'll do what we can when we can, and try not to curse time we don't have.

Spring Chicks

This weekend was the stuff of our farmstead fantasies.  After a momentary cold spell early in the week, our early Spring continued with weather warm enough to move 30 chicks out of the brooder boxes in our basement and into the coop with our older laying hens. The chicks spent the first day isolated in the run while we prepared a well-shielded and insulated brooder box in the coop to keep the young birds warm in the cooler nights. There are supposed to be 10 Barred Rock, 10 Buff Orpingtons, and 10 Rhode Island Red pullets, but it is notoriously difficult to sex young chicks and we might have a few cockerels in the mix (which would be fine as we have been without a rooster since our move).

These are the first chicks I have raised since I was a teenager, and I made ample use of Harvey Ussery's excellent poultry book in all decisions. Mr Ussery's book has been invaluable since we began keeping chickens 3 years ago, and we would certainly recommend his "deep bedding" method for the coops of anyone thinking of raising chickens.

Once the chicks were comfortable enough outside to begin pecking and scratching in the grass, we moved on to catching up with the garden. We finally transplanted our broccoli and onion starts into the garden, as well as planted potatoes, lettuce, and carrots. We were also pleased to see that 75% of the blackberry bushes we transplanted from my parent's farm survived the winter.

We still have six younger easter eggers in an indoor brooder box, and several varieties of tomato and pepper seedlings doing well. So far we haven't noticed any problems with the older hens picking on the younger chicks in any extreme way, but the chicks have been giving the older girls a very wide girth. We'll keep you updated on how they progress.

What have you gotten started in the garden yet?

REVIEW: The Third Plate by Dan Barber

I haven't felt compelled to properly review a book in some time, but I had a strong reaction to Dan Barber's The Third Plate. On one hand, Barber has written an entertaining and compelling book about his imitable farm-to-table restaurants and the farmers with whom they partner.  But on the other hand, his book represents a world that is completely foreign to the one in which I live. I found large swaths of his book to be un-relatable at best and off-putting at worst. A lot of books have similar problems, but the problems in this book demonstrate just how far apart the cutting edge of the sustainable food movement is from the diets' of many Americans.

The point Barber makes throughout is that is that eaters and consumers need to look past local, organic, or sustainable.  Those movements are not enough unless we begin to eat everything that grows on farm and completely flip what is expected in a meal.  Risotto made out of traditional cover crops like rye, plankton sauce, and carrot steaks are just a few of the novel ideas Barber employs at his restaurants.  This is all admirable, but he assumes the local and sustainable food battles are already won, but here in the rural midwest, what he takes for granted is seen as naive at best and heretical at worst.

Even when Barber is championing a worthy cause like the elevation of lesser cuts of meat in haute cuisine, he seems completely detached from the meals most Americans are eating outside his five-star restaurants.  For all of its faults, the one thing the industrial food system does well is make use of lesser cuts of meats.  It's not like those chicken nuggets and compressed deli slices are the choices cuts.  Barber's aristocratic tone is not helped by the considerable amount of space he allots to foie gras, and his championing of celebrity chefs as the gatekeepers for sustainability in a very top-down model.  Five-star chefs have their place in the food movement along with farmers, writers, filmmakers and other. But anyone who claims that something as complicated as a social movement works in a linear fashion is oversimplifying.

If the reader is able to look past Barber's chef-centric view, The Third Plate is a nice new addition to the sustainable food literature.

The Third Plate: Field Notes On The Future of Food by Dan Barber © Penguin Press 2014

COMIC: Eggs and Turds

Sketchbook: Cooper's Hawk

This weekend the chickens were picking through some freshly tossed kitchen scraps just outside their coop when a cooper's hawk swooped out of the large pecan tree and perched atop a nearby fence post.  The hens scrambled back inside, excited but safe.  The hawk glided down into the grass and briefly inspected the chickens' treats before taking off back into the tree line.
Cooper's Hawks are beautiful birds with slate gray feathers on their head and wings, and a red barred pattern on their breasts and bellies.  Though often confused with the slightly smaller Sharp-shinned Hawk, our visitor was on the larger side.
Our chickens have been truly free range at the new place over a month now, and this was the closest we've come to losing one via predation or otherwise. As egg production begins to pick up after the stress of moving we hope to have eggs for sale again soon.

Sketchbook: Great Blue Heron

I painted this Great Blue Heron several months after we first moved down to the farm. The construction process for our own home was going much slower than planned thanks in large part to several layers of bureaucratic red tape required by the county.  On a particularly aggravating morning I stepped outside to get some fresh air and clear my head.  As I leaned against the pasture fence in the golden morning light I saw the silhouette of a Great Blue Heron still as a statue in the shallow waters of a nearby pond.  Quick as death, the heron's long neck snapped the sharp beak into the water and pulled out a small frog.  The bird shook its head violently as it strode to shore to quickly swallow the frog whole.  I watched the display as quietly as I could for as long as I could, but when it finally took to the sky with several flaps of its great wings, it flew directly overhead low enough that I could see individual feathers on its wings and belly.  It was an important moment for me, and one I revisited often.  It would all be worth it for a lifetime full of moments like that for me and my family.  All that was required was a little patience.

Adjusting to Change

We now live on the farm full time. We've sold our home in the suburbs, and settled nicely in the basement (and several other nooks and crannies) of my parents home. Moving down here wasn't difficult in itself, but life has become challenging since the move. Shortly after moving here my 3 year old son was severely bitten by a dog and had to be carried off the farm in an ambulance before spending the evening having two surgeons put him all back together. It was a terrifying ordeal and has scarred me as a parent. As we were recouping from this incident and watching my son as he almost magically healed, my husband's father experienced what became a fatal stroke. Losing him much too young and so suddenly has shifted our priorities even more. We will never be the same people. Everything seems to mean more.

I helped my father put up hay for the first time in many, many years. As a girl I sometimes drove the tractor for him while my brothers and cousins threw square bales on the wagon I was towing. This seems like eons ago. Now he has a driver follow him in the truck while he lifts round bales with his tractor and dumps them on the wagon. Towing the wagon in an air-conditioned truck as an adult is a very different experience than the heat of my childhood days on the open-air tractor, completely unaware of the real workings of the beast of a machine I was driving. Working with my dad, each of us in our own vehicles, communicating with vague hand signals, felt somehow more intimate than much of our day to day interactions. It was much needed after losing my father-in-law.

We're adapting to our new lives on the farm with more purpose. We've expanded the chicken coop and I watched as my husband pulled multiple snakes out of it over the course of a couple weeks. I've enjoyed watching my eldest daughter gather eggs, and helping my mother pick beans in the garden. We've taken hikes to the far corners of the property and dragged back skulls and interesting rocks, while trying to identify the native grasses and flowers. My baby girl finally has said "mama" and is getting close to walking now that we've celebrated her 1st birthday. We bought her a beautiful red wagon, and now that I can tow her and her brother around in it as I go about working in the garden and checking on the chickens, it at least appears as though we have melted into farmlife.