Mother of Chickens!

Posted on April 10, 2014 by Keely

When we came home, I reluctantly hauled my tired self out back to check for eggs. When I peeked under Freckles, to make sure all her eggs were still whole, they weren’t! This is what I saw:

I hollered for Sean, and he came running to see them. The yellow chick is already dry, while the striped chick is still damp. They’re unspeakably precious! Hopefully they are all Cappy’s babies. The last thing we need is some little Spot-spawn, since we’re hoping for a few more layers or at least some edible-sized roosters.
We have to figure out some hen-and-chick-friendly digs for them while they’re small. Some folks recommend moving them indoors for a few weeks, but I’d like to have Freckles do the heavy work of motherhood this time. Right now she’s in a nest box several feet off the floor, so the chicks will need to be moved to somewhere less clifflike and more spacious so that we can fit little containers of food and water. Our chicken house floods when it rains, so a box on the damp floor might be unsuitable for the little birds. Any thoughts? We’ll have to figure something out for them in the morning. Note to self: plan ahead next time.

4-3

Posted on April 3, 2014 by Keely

The little porkers are getting friendlier by the day. I managed to pet one while it was snoozling the other day, and they didn’t scamper away when we went into the pen earlier this evening.

Coming back to school from break has been challenging. Waking up before sunrise every morning doesn’t feel sensible anymore, and spending all day inside feels like madness when the weather is perfect. The mosquitoes aren’t out in force yet, and I spent an hour this evening reading on the lawn in the purple shade, soaking up the bike-riding light, the t-shirt temperatures, the silence of butterflies on the purple flowers in the grass and the smell of yesterday’s rain. The redbuds are blooming like confetti in the understory, and the sassafras tree by our steps has these peculiar firework flowers. Trees are poised to leaf out at a moment’s notice, hazel alder catkins are dripping from branches everywhere, and the quince in the side yard is electric pink. I don’t know how to describe the smell of the wind, but it feels like a warm washcloth on your forehead.

Seeing my kids again has made me happy. I missed their ingenuousness and their contrasting self-consciousness. I missed their jokes and their smiles and the ways they express their frustration. I love teenagers, especially my teenagers. I’m feeling inspired this week, which is a pleasant change from the frustrated apathy I’ve been feeling toward my job recently. Geometry has been awesome and conceptual. I wouldn’t say they’re all grasping the material, but I can confidently say that several of them are grasping it at a high level, and most of them are grasping it adequately. Algebra has been okay. My 7th period is a train wreck right now, but my first and fourth are doing impressive work with quadratics. I have a few students who have made incredible strides this year, and I know that if I hit PEMDAS and writing expressions hard next year (hard = ton of bricks vs. tower of eggs) I’ll see some real magic happen.

When I got home tonight, the piggies had snurfled dirt up over the lowest electric wire of the fence and joined the chickens in the chicken yard. Bad Pork! I chased them back in and collected eggs, noticing the carpenter bees bumbling around the eaves for the first time this year. Freckles is still on her eggs, fluffing up to approximately a cubic foot and gurgling every time someone enters the chicken house. We expect her eggs to hatch within the next ten days.
Look at all those eggs! These birds are out of control!
You can see our automatic chicken door in the background, which has been an absolute life saver and, along with the solar fence charger, one of most useful technological advances in farming since the dibbler.

We had dinner yesterday at Pizza Hut in Helena to help a friend fundraise to bring some of her Spanish students to Costa Rica. You can help her out by making a donation here. On the ride home, Sean and I almost finished listening to Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy. We couldn’t stop, so we finished up while we washed dishes together. The book was beautifully written (another win for Gary D. Schmidt, who has a gift for motifs that astonishes me every time) and told a story about my home state that I had never heard before. Mainer or not, you should check out the book, but if you’re a Mainer, you should make a point to learn about Malaga Island.

Look what was raiding the critter-food bin! The flash scared it off… for now. Dang things have those cute little hands and they always figure out how to get into our feed. Sean is going to put something heavy (like our fat cats?) onto the food bin to thwart the varmints.

Country Living Challenges: Laundry

Posted on March 23, 2014 by Keely

We moved from Waters Road with a washer and dryer. This house didn’t come with laundry machines, and we couldn’t imagine carting our clothes to and from Marianna (which actually seems to have a laundromat) so we purchased ours from our old housemates. There isn’t exactly a laundry closet with a convenient water hookup. In fact, running water is exclusively found at the back of the house and in the tiny kitchen and bathroom. We set up our washer and dryer on the screened in porch, which worked out fine since the washer leaked.
Pros: the laundry area didn’t clutter up our house with dirty laundry and loud noises, and the leaky washer wasn’t a big issue because the back porch floods when it rains anyway. What’s one more flood?
Cons: doing laundry when it’s really cold or windy outside is a real bummer and sometimes the washer freezes so we can’t do laundry at all. Because of constant flooding, our back porch is pretty icky. It isn’t a nice place to be.

This winter, the washer froze solid and then completely crapped out, spilling water constantly. I’ve done laundry at friends’ houses for weeks, once in the middle of a St. Patrick’s day party. Sean and I make a lot of laundry because school is dirty and so is gardening when you get home. It’s been a pain. Sean Pulsfort, that heroic amateur handyman, got the washer fixed up yesterday, and it works better now than it ever has.
It’s a breezy, sunny day, so I put our clothesline to work. Sean and I try to line dry our laundry whenever we can. It’s a free, solar powered alternative to an expensive electrical draw. In the winter, I usually go for the dryer, so I haven’t line dried anything since fall. I had to detangle the clothesline from the fallen limb that had crushed it, along with our chicken fence, during an ice storm, and tie it back up, but it was worth it: we actually have more line space now than we did with the old arrangement.

I love line-drying. It makes me feel righteous, yes, but it’s more than that: I like the fresh smell and stiffness of line-dried clothing; I like folding my laundry into the basket as it comes off the line and dusting off the seeds and spiders that have caught on the seams; I like walking up and down the line, looking for a match for a single sock; I like the colors and the movement in the corner of my eye, and I like feeling the sunshine teasing out a smile while I do a usually tedious job.

Bonus pictures of chickens! Freckles is sitting on eggs right now, so keep your fingers crossed for chick photos in three weeks!

Spring Saturday

Posted on March 15, 2014 by Keely

I’ve been wanting to paint the front door since we moved in. It’s going to be blue for luck.

Sean made bacon, eggs and cornmeal pancakes for breakfast while I worked on the door. The smell of bacon frying made me smile. Spring is really here: I worked all morning with the front door open and a chill breeze blowing dust out of the corners of the ceiling; there are flowers coming up under the tree where we slaughtered Pinkie last fall, and the hennies are laying five eggs a day. We can’t keep up with production, so if you’re an Arkansan, we’re selling homestead eggs for $3 a dozen. All proceeds go to chicken feed.

Smells: bacon frying, rosemary oil snapping out of dry twigs as I cut away the dead, lemongrass and rot, fresh mint lingering on my hands from pulling out dead stalks and discovering new beneath; exhaust from the tiller as it roared and pulled. We planted coneflowers, hollyhocks and bachelor’s buttons. Lettuce and peas are sprouting now, and the quince is flowering.

There are a thousand
things I should do
buttons to button
not frilled with blue
practical things
in a practical queue
things without ruches
in that coneflower hue
but despite all the things
that I really must do
there’s nothing I’d rather
than plant flowers with you